From 1933 onward, after the Nazi seizure of power, the Gaue increasingly replaced the German states as administrative subdivisions in Germany.

[1] At the head of each Gau stood a Gauleiter, a position which became increasingly more powerful, especially after the outbreak of the Second World War, with little interference from above.

Local Gauleiters often held government positions as well as party ones and were in charge of, among other things, propaganda and surveillance and, from September 1944 onward, the Volkssturm and the defense of the Gau.

[3][4] Mutschmann, a powerful figure in Nazi Germany and well connected to Adolf Hitler, was arrested by German police shortly after the war and handed over to the Soviet Union.

[6] During the German invasion of Poland at the start of World War II, in September 1939, the Gestapo carried out mass arrests of Polish activists in Dresden and Leipzig,[7] and seized the Polish Consulate in Leipzig and its library, which was a violation of international law.