Originally Posted by NoCarrier

Documents showed that the Gestapo was not as big as they thought. It was actually the citizens that helped and reported everything to the Gestapo.

In the documentary I saw, I remember seeing a report from someone reporting that "her neighbor was always alone and that she was strange". Gestapo officers arrested the neighbor and she was sent to a camp and killed.

"Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not an omnipotent agency that had its agents in every nook and cranny of German society. So-called ?V-men? as undercover Gestapo agents were known were used only to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but these cases were the exception, not the rule.

As the analysis of the Gestapostellen done by the historian Robert Gellately has established, for the most part the Gestapo was made of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by ordinary Germans for their information. Indeed, the Gestapo was overwhelmed with denunciations and spent most of its time sorting out the credible denunciations from less credible ones. Far from being an all-powerful agency that knew everything about what was happening in German society, the local Gestapostellen were under-staffed, over-worked offices that struggled with the paper-load caused by so many denunciations. The ratio of Gestapo officers to the general public was extremely lop-sided; for a example, in the region of Lower Franconia, which had about one million people in the 1930s, there was only one Gestapo office for the entire region, which had 28 people attached to it, of whom half were clerical workers.

Furthermore, for information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapostellen were most part dependent upon these denunciations. Thus, it was ordinary Germans by their willingness to denounce one another who supplied the Gestapo with the information that determined who the Gestapo arrested. The popular picture of the Gestapo with its spies everywhere terrorizing German society has been firmly rejected by most historians.