Secret police
A secret police is a special executive state organ in authoritarian or totalitarian states, in which the activities of the police and the secret service are connected and the purpose of which is to protect the political power of a dictator or a military government by carrying out opposition and “ political crimes ” they pursued (see also police state ). Most secret police are de facto or even de jure outside of the rule of law . The religious police perform similar tasks in theocracies .
Their repressive methods range from intimidation on confiscation of property, censorship , arbitrary arrest or deportation , disappearances of persons disinformation to operation its own secret detention and interrogation centers for political prisoners , torture and killing of opponents (see. State terror ). Secret police can also be embedded as a special unit in organizations that are otherwise active as intelligence services and thus not easily recognizable to outsiders. Usually they are only responsible to a single executive body. Under certain circumstances, even without the knowledge of their actual management, they can develop a life of their own with regard to goals and the delimitation of the areas of activity to other government agencies.
Well-known secret police organizations were or are
- the Prussian secret police (see for example: Cologne Communist Trials )
- the Ochrana of Tsar Alexander III. ,
- the Secret State Police ("Gestapo") in National Socialist Germany ,
- the Ministry for State Security ("Stasi") of the GDR ,
- the political police of the German People's Police ("Working Area I") in the GDR,
- the Office for Combating Communist Activities (Buró de Represión de Actividades Comunistas / BRAC) in Cuba under Fulgencio Batista ,
- the Seguridad del Estado (State Security) of the Cuban Interior Ministry,
- the Ministry of State Security in the People's Republic of China ,
- the State Security of Czechoslovakia ( Státní bezpečnost , StB),
- the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) in the People's Republic of Poland ,
- the Uprava državne bezbednosti (UDBA) in SFR Yugoslavia
- the Securitate in the People's Republic of Romania ,
- the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado ( PIDE , International State Security Police) in Portugal before 1974,
- the Gossudarstvennoje polititscheskoje uprawlenije (GPU / OGPU) and parts of the KGB in the Soviet Union
- the KGB in Belarus .
See also
Web links
- Klaus Schubert / Martina Klein: Political Police . In: Das Politiklexikon, BpB -online version of the 5th edition, 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ What was the Stasi? Retrieved April 23, 2018 .
- ^ Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung: Police and State Security , July 30, 2009 (accessed October 17, 2012).