Boeckl-Klamper, Elisabeth, Thomas Mang, and Wolfgang Neugebauer. The Vienna Gestapo, 1938–1945: Crimes, Perpetrators, Victims Translated by John Nicholson and Nick Somers. New York: Berghahn, 2022. Pp. 407. Wolf Gruner Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA E-mail: gruner@usc.edu The coauthors of this work call the Gestapo the “most important instrument of terror on Austrian soil”; it was “responsible for combating all forms of resistance, organized and non-organized, and played a leading part in the persecution of the Jewish population” (1). Established after the annexation by Nazi Germany in March 1938, with 900 employees the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna was the largest regional office after the Berlin headquarters in Greater Germany. Despite the importance of this institution, it has hitherto been the subject of only one (voluminous) unpublished dissertation and a few biographies. As in almost all of Germany, the Vienna Gestapo systematically destroyed their files in 1945; only their daily reports survived. This survey seeks to provide as comprehensive an account as possible, focusing on the structure, personnel, and activities of the Vienna Gestapo (3). The authors outline the history of the Gestapo since 1933, including the introduction of “protective custody.” The Gestapo increasingly utilized this main tool of repression in the newly established con- centration camps to quell potential or actual opposition. Despite the authors’ assertion that the Gestapo operated free of any control (16), as part of the police they fell under the authority of the Reich Ministry of Interior, which limited its autonomy. Only in 1943 did the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, take over the ministry, which still did not pass the state monopoly of force to the SS. Instead of on facts from Vienna, the authors base their claim that the Gestapo had more authority than the judiciary solely on Ernst Fraenkel’s 1941 work The Dual State (154). The volume discusses the establishment and administrative structure of the regional headquarters in Vienna at the Hotel Metropole (today Regina) headed by Franz Josef Huber after the March 1938 annexation. The rapid takeover of the police, facilitated by many Austrian criminal police officers who were illegal Nazi party members, enabled the massive Gestapo assault. The authors emphasize the important and often overlooked fact that the Gestapo employed many women—in Vienna between 17 and 30 percent of the staff—mostly as desk workers and secretaries. The large Vienna office saw a low turnover due to its geopolitical importance in an annexed territory with several important borders. During the first weeks, Vienna Gestapo officers arrested tens of thousands of people; many of them were tortured and sent to concentration camps. Before the Germans invaded Austria, the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst of the SS (SD) had already prepared arrest lists of “dangerous Jewish lawyers” and Jewish leaders. The Jewish community was shut down on 18 March 1938 and functionaries were arrested, only to be reopened on 2 May under the complete control of the Gestapo and SD. However, Austrian Nazi Party and Sturmabteilung (SA) members undertook many of the early arrests of individual Jews, which included beatings, humiliation, and looting. The Gestapo section II B 4, responsible for Jews, organized the first major actions under the twenty-eight-year-old Rudolf Lange and deported 1,202 so-called undesirable Jews to the Dachau concentration camp on 31 May and 3 June 1938. The next big action took place in November, when Heinrich Müller ordered all Gestapo offices to arrest as many Jews as possible during the pogrom. In Vienna, they detained 6,547 Jews, of which 3,989 ended up in Dachau. Although the Gestapo was supposed to prevent loot- ing, it was widespread. For seized cash and precious items, the Vienna Gestapo set up a special subunit, which sent later one million Reichsmarks worth of jewelry to Berlin, where it was auctioned off for cheap. Book Reviews 261 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237823000358 Published online by Cambridge University Press