An Illustrated History of the Gestapo
Journalist Butler has written a trivia-rich volume on what was possibly the most terrifying secret police bureaucracy the world has ever known: Nazi Germany's Secret State Police, or Gestapo. Butler bases his research on German archives and Gestapo documents. The bibliography, incorporating both primary and secondary sources, is sparse, though well chosen. Butler outlines the history of the Gestapo and its function throughout the war, and he concludes with 11 accounts of the lives of individuals who survived Gestapo interrogation and torture. Detailed portraits of the Gestapo leadership, e.g., Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Reinhard Heydrich, are accurately, if somewhat sensationally, treated. The book is not scholarly in nature (there are no footnotes), and, true to its title, it is suffused with ample photographs of varying quality. This work will appeal to armchair historians and enthusiastic lay readers with an interest in Nazi Germany. Serious scholars seeking more analytical material would do well to consult Heinz Hohne's The Order of the Death's Head (Secker & Warburg, 1969), Robert L. Koehl's The Black Korps (Wisconsin, 1983), and Gerald Reitlinger's The SS: Alibi of a Nation (Viking, 1957).- Thomas G. Anton, Field Museum of Natural History, ChicagoCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.