In the final part of the series, we look at the end of the Second World War and the activities of the Gestapo during the desperate final months of the Nazi regime. By mid 1944, the tide had turned against Germany. The success of the D-Day landings in June was followed swiftly by the liberation of Paris. Italy had surrendered in September 1943; Allied forces had now fought their way through southern Italy as far as Rome. In the east, the Red Army stood poised to drive German forces back through Poland.

As the territory occupied by the Reich rapidly withered, the Gestapo assumed an enlarged, and even more frightening, role. In spite of the limited resources possessed by the doomed Nazi regime, the Secret State Police remained a key facet of Hitler’s policy of ‘total war’. In the chaotic imbroglio of the final stages of World War Two, the decline in military fortunes gave way to a resurgence in internal opposition. Correspondingly, the Gestapo’s activities became increasingly arbitrary and sadistic.

The violence of the organisation spiralled out of all control, even as it was in its own death throes. Among their enemies, its officers counted resistance members, innocent civilians, 'decadent' jazz musicians and mixed race couples. We examine the Gestapo’s bloody activities in the wake of the Stauffenberg plot. The July 1944 plan to assassinate Hitler and bring the war to an end failed; the briefcase bomb intended to kill the Fuhrer exploded against a heavy table leg.

After this bungled murder attempt, Himmler’s Gestapo was given a free hand to round up and punish everyone with any connection to the plot. Driven by a paranoid, incandescent and bloodthirsty Hitler, Himmler seized the right to arrest, torture and execute indiscriminately, with no recourse to the German judicial system. Under Himmler’s newly enacted Sippenhaft (blood guilt) laws, all relatives of the principal plotters were also arrested.

Amidst this indiscriminate bloodshed, many Gestapo officers prepared themselves for a future in a defeated Germany. We explain how a significant number of these brutal men managed to integrate back into German society when the war ended. Denying any association with the regime, they joined the de-nazified police force before retiring comfortably.

However, many war criminals were brought to justice. Adolf Eichmann’s trial occurred in Israel in 1961. Other prominent members were tried in Germany, France and Czechoslovakia; some were pursued well into the 1970s, when they were shaken form the anonymous suburban existences they had forged for themselves in European and American cities.

The Nuremburg Trials sounded a welcome death knell for this savage symbol of Nazi barbarity, but this documentary series ensures that the Gestapo’s crimes, and its victims, will be not be forgotten.