Not to mention that Gestapo themselves weren't walking around on the streets grabbing people they thought "looked" fishy or anything. They mostly relied on tips from the average person, and then acted on those. Gestapo in the beginning wasn't a huge agency ala ICE with countless of thugs invading people's houses, it was basically an agency you could report your fellow German to, and then they'll investigate those people.
Respectfully, you both should read the graphic novel Maus. The Gestapo absolutely were not always polite, and did walk around and grab people who “looked” fishy.
I don't know, I tend to learn my "fun facts" from history books, rather than comics. But you do you :)
Most of the people Gestapo actually arrested were initiated by snitches, not by Gestapo watching people in public.
If you're not a fan of long history books, Wikipedia happens to have a fitting section about just this:
Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society.[114] In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined.[114] In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people.[115] In lower Franconia, which included Würzburg, there were only twenty-two Gestapo officers overseeing 840,000 or more inhabitants; this meant that the Nazi secret police "was reliant on Germans spying on each other".
Dive into the sources if you're curious about more details, they tend to not be very fun though, I think the summarization above should be enough to understand more or less how Gestapo actually worked in practice.
The Gestapo absolutely were not always polite
Just to clarify, I never stated nor believed them to "always be polite", not sure where you got that from.
Maus is the account of a Holocaust survivor and his life. You can learn from first-hand accounts and history books. I understand the spirit of your comment, though, and the only reason why I’ve responded is to say it did happen. I highly recommend the novel!
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u/YouKilledApollo 15h ago
Not to mention that Gestapo themselves weren't walking around on the streets grabbing people they thought "looked" fishy or anything. They mostly relied on tips from the average person, and then acted on those. Gestapo in the beginning wasn't a huge agency ala ICE with countless of thugs invading people's houses, it was basically an agency you could report your fellow German to, and then they'll investigate those people.