Regional Gestapo, Security Police and SD offices

The German occupation did not operate through a single police headquarters. Mobile Einsatzgruppen entered Poland behind the army in 1939; permanent offices of the Security Police and SD then built regional systems of surveillance, arrest, interrogation and execution. Field offices reported upward while working with civil administrators, prisons, railways and local German authorities.

A commander’s responsibility must be reconstructed at the correct level. The chief of a regional office could approve priorities, allocate personnel and supervise subordinate posts without personally taking part in each arrest. Department heads converted those priorities into lists, transports and field operations. Individual officers and guards carried out violence on the ground. The archive preserves these distinctions while showing that the levels formed one apparatus.

The profiles below reveal different transitions: from an Einsatzkommando to the Poznań Gestapo; from office leadership in Łódź to a specialist section responsible for Jewish affairs; and from regional police authority in Kraków to the destruction of the city’s ghetto. Postwar cases are equally important because they show how courts attempted—often inadequately—to assign individual responsibility inside a large bureaucracy.