Collaboration between British MI5 and Hitler’s Gestapo

This video says about itself:

Gestapo, Hitler’s Secret Police

3 November 2013

The Geheime Staatspolizei (German for Secret State Police, abbreviated “Gestapo”) was the secret police of Nazi Germany, and its main tool of oppression and destruction, which persecuted Germans, opponents of the regime, and Jews. It later played a central role in helping carry out the Nazi’s “Final Solution.”

The Gestapo was formally organized after the Nazis seized power in 1933. Hermann Göring, the Prussian minister of the interior, detached the espionage and political units of the Prussian police and proceeded to staff them with thousands of Nazis. On April 26, 1933, Göring became the commander of this new force that was given power to shadow, arrest, interrogate, and intern any “enemies” of the state. At the same time that Goring was organzing the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler was directing the SS (Schutzstaffel, German for “Protective Echelon“), Hitler’s elite paramilitary corps. In April 1936, he was given command of the Gestapo as well, integrating all of Germany’s police units under Himmler.

By Conrad Landin in Britain:

Did MI5 join Gestapo to hunt reds?

Monday 30th March 2015

COLLABORATION between MI5 and the Gestapo was crucial to surveillance of Communist Party members in Britain including historian Eric Hobsbawm, an explosive new analysis reveals.

This 2012 video from Britain says about itself:

Professor Eric Hobsbawm is interviewed on the so called ‘Responsible capitalism.’

Eric Hobsbawm fled nazi Germany in the 1930s. Being a Jew, that very probably saved him from Hitler’s Holocaust.

The Conrad Landin aricle continues:

Historians yesterday blasted British governments for double standards as they attacked Eastern bloc states over surveillance while using similar tactics on an industrial scale.

The first sections of Mr Hobsbawm’s MI5 file were opened to public access at the National Archives last autumn, and reveal that British security services first took an interest after he corresponded with journalist and International Brigades member Hans Kahle.

Investigating the late Mr Hobsbawm’s file for the London Review of Books, historian Frances Stonor Saunders concludes it is “likely” some of Mr Kahle’s file “came from MI5’s liaison with the Gestapo” as it included “close knowledge” on his activity in the German Communist Party.

Ms Stonor Saunders argues that a “crucial liaison” was established between MI5 deputy counter-espionage chief Guy Liddell and Rudolf Diels, head of nazi spying bureau Abteilung 1A, which soon became the Gestapo, in 1933.

“MI5’s prewar liaison with Hitler’s political police was built on the promise of reciprocity, so it is reasonable to fear that there was two-way traffic in blacklists between Berlin and London,” she wrote in an article to be published next month.

“How long this arrangement lasted is a matter of speculation.

“What is known is that both MI5 and MI6 had information that must have come from a German source concerning the political activities of the left-wing refugees who sought sanctuary in Britain from 1933 onwards.

“If they didn’t already have a personal file, most of them acquired one within days of arriving at a British port.”

In the months immediately following the end of the war in 1945, “fresh traces on suspected communists were being received daily from British intelligence outposts in the defeated territories of the Third Reich,” Ms Stonor Saunders notes.

There is no evidence that Mr Hobsbawm’s own file included direct imports from Germany, but it is possible that files handed over included information on the Sozialistischer Schuelerbund, the communist-affiliated organisation of school students of which Hobsbawm was a member.

Communist Party of Britain history group convenor Graham Stevenson said the confirmation came as “no surprise.

“Anyone reading the Daily Worker in the 1930s would see it was going to efforts every day to highlight how Britain was working with Germany to undermine the Soviet Union,” he told the Star.

Mr Stevenson said the same criticisms made of socialist governments in Eastern Europe could be made of Britain’s surveillance tactics.

“You see the hypocrisy, the comparison with the Stasi, when you see the level of intrusion in these files.”

It come days after it was revealed the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch hold files on 10 serving Labour MPs.

Labour MP Mike Gapes labelled Special Branch “the Stasi’s British equivalent” in a debate about their surveillance in Parliament on Thursday.