Quoting Frank McDonough’s The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, pages 44–5:
The leadership of the Gestapo at the Berlin HQ consisted of three types. First: experienced former criminal policemen, who had mostly never been members of the Nazi Party before 1933. Second: young, university‐educated career‐minded administrators. Third: members of the SD, who came to the Gestapo via the [NSDAP’s] SS machinery.
The director of the Gestapo between 1936 and 1945 was Heinrich Müller. Born in Munich in 1900, he was the son of a policeman from a traditional Catholic working‐class family. […] He served an apprenticeship as a metal fitter in the Bavarian Aircraft Company, but he decided not to continue working in this growing industry.
In 1918, he joined the police force and was assigned to its small political police department. It was the generous occupational police pension scheme that appealed to him. He was only thirty‐six years old when he became the head of the Gestapo for the whole of [Fascist] Germany. Muller was an adaptable streetwise individual. He worked for the Bavarian monarchy, the democratic Weimar government and the [Fascist] régime.
[…]
All the other section heads of the Gestapo at the Berlin HQ also began their careers in the ordinary criminal police during the [pseudo]democratic Weimar Republic. In Section IVA, which concentrated on communist opposition, the backgrounds of all the leading figures were very similar.
They were all born between 1894 and 1903. They joined the police before 1933. Most were university‐educated graduates from a middle‐class background. These young men employed methods of investigation that were identical to practices of the criminal detective police. Only one of them, Horst Kopkow, had ever been an active member of the [NSDAP] before 1933.
(Emphasis added.)
Click here if you want to know about these section heads.
Pages 45–6:
The head of Section IVA between 1940 and 1942 was Josef Vogt, who was born in 1897. He studied economics at university. In 1925, he joined the police force. Between 1929 and 1933, he worked in the homicide department of the criminal detective police department. In May 1933, he joined the [NSDAP]. He personally volunteered to join the Gestapo. It was his energetic rôle in countering communist resistance that caught the eye of his superiors and marked him out for fast‐track promotion.
His deputy, Kurt Lindow, born in 1903, replaced him in 1942. He studied law and economics at university. In 1928 he joined the criminal detective police. In 1933, he joined the Gestapo and worked on several high‐profile cases involving high treason. He was essentially an effective organiser and a reliable administrator.
Another key figure in Section IVA was Rudolf Braschwitz, born in 1900. He studied dentistry at the University of Breslau, but decided not to pursue a career as a dentist and joined the police force instead.
By 1928, he was working for the Prussian political police, leading a protection squad guarding world‐famous German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, who had received several bomb threats from right‐wing groups. In 1933, Braschwitz became the leader of a group dedicated to combating communism. He only joined the [NSDAP] on 1 May 1933.
Another expert on communism in section IVA was Reinhold Heller, born in 1885. He went to university to study law, but he failed his degree. In 1919, he joined the political police. By 1931, he was heading a department dedicated to fighting the communist threat. He joined the [NSDAP] on 1 May 1933. He played a key rôle in the investigation of the Reichstag fire, at the age of forty‐eight.
Men of Heller’s age were viewed by Himmler and Heydrich as steeped in the democratic Weimar tradition of policing. It was Heller’s invaluable administrative experience, his adaptability and his expertise in dealing with communist resistance that allowed him to retain a leading rôle within the Gestapo.
(Emphasis added.)
I feel like this is only kicking at an open door, but in case somebody doesn’t understand the significance of this, I’ll spell it out for you:
If the Fascists were as antithetical to the liberal status quo as both they and their liberal critics would suggest, I think that it would be very reasonable to assume that these officials would have been prevented from joining the Gestapo, or at least replaced at the earliest available opportunity, yet they were not. In fact, Heinrich Müller in particular was almost certainly never a diehard Fascist, and some knew it. Page 45:
Rudolf Hess claimed at the Nuremberg war trials that Müller was ‘politically uncommitted’ and most probably remained a ‘conservative nationalist’ all his life. A confidential personnel report from 1937 observed: ‘His sphere of activity [in the Weimar period] was to supervise and deal with the left wing movement. It must be admitted he fought against it hard. But it is equally clear that, if it had been his task to do so, Müller would have acted against the right in the same way.’
He was not a member of the [NSDAP] until 1939, and only joined for career reasons. Müller rose to the top of the Gestapo not because of any ideological affinity to Nazism, but due to his administrative skills; particularly, his ability to track down communist resistance groups.
It is another reconfirmation that there was never any “Fascist revolution”; Fascism served to reinforce capitalist rule.
Events that happened today (July 27):
1854: Takahashi Korekiyo, one of the Empire of Japan’s Finance Ministers, was born.
1915: Josef Priller, an Axis fighter ace, flew out of the womb.
1929: Fascist Italy (along with fifty‐two other countries) signed the Geneva Convention, dealing with the treatment of prisoners‐of‐war. This means that many of its actions in Libya and elsewhere were objectively criminal (but they went unpunished anyway).
1942: The Allies successfully halted the final Axis advance into Egypt.
1970: António de Oliveira Salazar, the Fascist sympathizer and parafascist Prime Minister of Portugal, dropped dead. Angolans, Guineans, Mozambicans, Indians, East Timorese, and others could sleep easier that night.