The second instalment of our ‘Gestapo’ series looks at the role played by Germany’s brutal secret police force in executing the ‘final solution’, and in extending Nazi rule to new territories. We explain that the Gestapo’s remit was twofold: it existed to quell opposition to the state and enable Hitler’s expansionist policies.

To begin with, we outline Hitler’s fervent belief that the racially superior Germanic people needed to violently enlarge their ‘living space’. The idea of Lebensraum, which is explored in Mein Kampf, was originally coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897; it was used as a rallying cry for the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies. This policy of creating a vast empire including German-speaking territories found its practical application in the March 1938 Anschluss with Austria.

Although the Sudetanland of Czechoslovakia had been conceded to Germany at the September 1938 Munich Conference, British and French politicians were fatally mistaken in believing that the settlement would satiate Hitler’s ferocious land hunger. Germany would forcibly annex the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, going on to invade Poland in September.

We examine the brutal tactics used by Heinrich Müller’s Gestapo to silence dissenters in these occupied territories. We also outline the organisation’s part in engineering the staged ‘Polish attack’ which provided German forces with their excuse to flood across the primitively defended country’s border.

As the Reich greedily stuffed more and more territory into its ever-expanding paunch, the Gestapo pursued its ‘enemies’, such as resistance members and spies working for the Allies, with increasing self-confidence. In every occupied country, the organisation derived its authority from terror inspired by a system of 'protective custody'. If a supposed dissenter was denounced by an informant, the unfortunate person could be removed from society forever.

The fallout from the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich is thoroughly examined. The Reich security chief and governor of Bohemia and Moravia was mortally wounded in Prague by an assassin’s bullet in May 1942; he died several days later. The Gestapo led reprisal was swift and brutal. Around 13,000 people were arrested and the Czech town of Lidice was completely destroyed.

It was also after Heydrich's death that the first three ‘trial’ death camps were constructed at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Named Operation Reinhard in the dead Nazi’s honour, responsibility for the ‘final solution’, still in its embryonic state, was place firmly in the Gestapo’s hands. We look at the Einsatzgruppen, the vicious death squads that operated across the eastern lands, which were recruited largely from the ranks of the police. The methods of the Final Solution were ultimately based on police procedures, while the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was Heinrich Müller's special protégé.