Gestapo insignia

[Franco]

Hi,
What color of insignia did the Gestapo wear on their uniforms.Was it gold or silver? And did they at any time use a reddish brown cloth?
Cheers

[Tommaso]

Gestapo were actually wearing most of the time civilian clothes: anyway they used the SS/SD uniform usually with blank tabs and a silver piped SD sleeve cloth insigna.

[Franco]

Hi.
That is the type of answere to my question that I expected to recieve.The reason I asked it was due to a radio program I heard a few years ago.
A Parisian woman who was there during the occupation said ----" The Gestapo wore GOLD insignia on their uniforms,like a Naval Officer "
Very strange I thought,and something that has stayed with me over the years.
Cheers

[Bobwirtz]

Here's an example of some SD collar tabs and shoulder boards:



Bob

[Franco]

SD sergeants collar and sleeve tresse would therefore be in silver not " Gestapo "gold acording to this woman.
There is such a tunic on display in Pawiak prison Poland,but Ive only seen pics in black and white.
Cheers

[TonyS]

Maybe she saw old Sepp Dietrich with his gold insignia and thought he was a Gestapo guy.

[Ian Hulley]

Perhaps she was thinking of Eastern Territories Officials, they had gold insignia. Maybe they thought there were normal German soldiers,SS and everyone else was 'Gestapo' ?

Ian.

[peter u]

Hello,

In Belgium it is a common that people that have lived during the occupation call/qualify all German and/or collaborators that acted as police specially if they were in civilian dress as "gestapo" nevermind if they were sipo-sd, kripo, zivilfahnder, gfp,...etc.
Perhaps the only exception was that they recognized "feldgendarme" because of the shield on their chest.
But even those have been called gestapo!
Even collaborating Belgian federal police were called gestapo : popular myth stories.
Eyewitness testimony isn't always a good source for information.
A lot of popular myths stay a live this way.

Cheers,
Peter

[Franco]

Hi,
This is a confusing subject made worse by the fact that the Gestapo burnt their uniforms at the end of the war ( with good reason ).
However Im soon to take delivery of an OR tunic without insignia which might be Gestapo.
Cheers

[Jens]

Hello,

In Belgium it is a common that people that have lived during the occupation call/qualify all German and/or collaborators that acted as police specially if they were in civilian dress as "gestapo" nevermind if they were sipo-sd, kripo, zivilfahnder, gfp,...etc.
Perhaps the only exception was that they recognized "feldgendarme" because of the shield on their chest.
But even those have been called gestapo!
Even collaborating Belgian federal police were called gestapo : popular myth stories.
Eyewitness testimony isn't always a good source for information.
A lot of popular myths stay a live this way.

Cheers,
Peter

This is certainly a fact here in Denmark, where most couldnt distinguish the different branches. To this very day, even high rate museums makes a clusterfxck!

[Bobwirtz]

Considering that there were SO MANY police organizations within Germany and then within the occupied countries themselves, who can blame them. No doubt the Gestapo was trying to infiltrate and undermine these resistance groups, but so were local police organizations. I guess these folks just sweep all of these organizations conveniently under one rug and call it GESTAPO!

Bob

[peter u]

Hello Bob,

You are right that it was confusing it even is today?

It is a fact that the majority of the population in occupied Europe didn't join a side, they just tried to survive.
So the majority of the people in occupied Western Europe had nothing to do with the resistance, also the deportation of the Jews was not a case for the gestapo.
But the majority of the people had to do with blackmarket food supply (smugling) & avoiding compulsory labor in Germany.
Their adversary were the native customs & police, the feldgendarmerie with the help of local collaborators,...etc but never the gestapo.
A lot of the deportations (jews & young guys that refused to work in Gemanies war industry) were done by collaborators and local (collaborating) police forces almost never the gestapo was involved.
- How that popular "gestapo" myth got started is puzzle for me.
In occupied Belgium there was almost no gestapo activity, even that part of the population that was actif in the resistance would almost never had contact with the gestapo.
In Belgium the infiltration of the restitance groups (escape-lines, illegalpress,...) was done by the Geheime Felgendarmerie; the action against the armed resistance and the organisation of the holocaust was more a job for the sipo-sd, but both agency were actif on each others terrain.
So difficult to explain in a short text message.

Cheers,
Peter

[peter u]

It seems to me that every police officer German or native that did his job in civilian dress was called "gestapo" by the general public it didn't matter if they controled you for smugling spuds or for assisting allied pilots escaping to Spain.
And after a while every uniformed person that did a police job was called "gestapo".
ofcours after the war it sounded better if you could tell your neighbours that you were arrested by the gestapo for smuggling spuds then the truth: that it was a (collaborating) policeman (in civiliandress) incharge for the fight against smuggling of food for the black market.

P

[Bobwirtz]

Peter,

You are correct in everything you've said. The Germans put the local police forces to work policing their own populations. The French police for example started rounding up Jews for transport with such efficiency it made the German's heads spin. Their enthusiasm slowed a little though when it came to a French Jew, but foreign Jews were tossed on the trains with zeal. I've also heard that if the Allies hadn't landed in Northern France when they did, many of the French resistance groups would probably have collapsed because they were heavily infiltrated and it was just a matter of time before they would have been completely neutralized. So the Allied landings helped the French underground as much as the underground helped the Allies. And it was post-war when everybody stood up and claimed to be in one resistance or another. The large majority of people just lived their daily lives as before. Only a small percentage joined the resistance or became collaborators... in fact, many people were killed after the liberation because their enemies (old scores) claimed they were collaborators and that justified killing them, when in fact they had nothing to do with collaborating. There's an old saying that more Frenchmen were killed after the liberation by Frenchmen than by the Germans in 1940. Happened in the Philippines too.

Bob

[Dennis S]

Franco, where not plainclothes policemen in Spain referred to as Policia Secreto(Secret Police) , where here in the States they are just referred to as Detectives. Just drawing a reference to different nomenclatures used .