During world war ii, Allied intelligence services gathered considerable information about the Gestapo, but they lacked enough unimpeachable documentary evidence to give a clear overview of the organization and the functions of individual Gestapo offices. At the end of the war they sought to extract from captured documents useful information about how the Gestapo had worked. A small collection of Gestapo intelligence and counterintelligence files remained classified until the IWG opened it in 2000. This “Himmler Collection” is described below.

Although the Gestapo was quickly indicted—and soon convicted—as a criminal organization at Nuremberg, Allied intelligence officials made at least temporary arrangements with some surviving Gestapo officials who could supply useful information. Those Gestapo men who had specific information about important decisions or policies of the Nazi regime and those who had specialized in counteracting Communist espionage had particular intelligence value in the immediate postwar years. While some Gestapo men were tried and convicted, others who cooperated with Allied intelligence were overlooked—or had their sentences commuted. Still others escaped or were never definitively identified as having died by the end of the war. Public, media, and Western government perceptions of a job left undone—locating important Gestapo officials and bringing them to justice—began to gel in the 1960s and intensify in the early 1980s.