Their operations included clandestine operations, counterpropaganda, counterinsurgency, counterintelligence, creation of a counterinsurgency intelligence network, detection of treasonable activities, infiltration of resistance movements, gathering intelligence and destroying targets, protecting military installations, assisting the German Army (Heer) in courts-martial investigations, tracking and raiding targets to capture or kill, and setting-up security checkpoints in high-risk areas.
GFP personnel, who were also classed as Abwehrpolizei, operated as an executive branch of the Abwehr (German armed forces military intelligence), detecting resistance activity in Germany and in occupied France.
After studying data collected in Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel, commander in chief of the OKW, issued the "Dienstvorschrift für die Geheime Feldpolizei" ("Regulations for the secret field police"), and the GFP was formed on 21 July 1939.
They were assigned the legal status of Wehrmachtsbeamte auf Kriegsdauer ("military officials for the duration of the war") and retained the authority of other police agencies as well as of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence organisation of the Nazi Party.
In occupied areas the GFP provided personal escort to military VIPs, assistance to state-security agencies in counter-espionage, interrogation of suspects, prevention of sabotage and the detection of enemy agents.
[3] Each GFP Gruppe consisted of a fifty-man unit until May 1942 when the entire command was restructured by SS-Brigadeführer Karl Oberg, the Higher SS and Police Leader (Höhere SS-und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) "Frankreich" (France).
Logistical support for these police units was frequently supplied by the local military commanders, which helped the GFP facilitate the process of transporting civilian prisoners "to places where they could be murdered.
"[4] Original jurisdiction between the GFP and the Einsatzgruppen death squads in the Eastern theater was supposed to be clearly delineated and mutually reciprocal, but when the final negotiations about identified areas of responsibility took place in May 1941 between Generalquartiermeister Eduard Wagner and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, there was serious disagreement.
[6] At the end of May 1941, Wagner and Reinhard Heydrich signed the agreement between the SS and the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, "Army High Command"), sealing the cooperative arrangement between the two organizations.
[8] Near Kiev lies the town of Belaya Tserkov; it was here between 20 and 22 August 1941 that Groscurth learned from two chaplains that the GFP had turned over ninety children to Sonderkommando 4a, who were then placed under guard outside the city awaiting execution.
Participating in this campaign were Geheime Feldpolizei units 708, 721, and 730; their mission included pacification of areas behind the front, and protecting military installations and transportation routes.
[12] Due in part to the expediencies of German war policy, the GFP operated outside the constraints of legal norms: their dealings with Bolsheviks and Commissars were not brought before military courts but were handled instead by the troops, with OKW approval.
[13] As a Nazi security warfare group, the GFP collaborated with the SD to execute and torture captured fighters and civilians suspected of helping the Soviet resistance.
[14] One of the more innocuous sounding bureaucratic expressions used to describe the "security" enterprise of the GFP was that they were given the task of "general supervision of the population" but this understatement cannot conceal the murderous operations in which they engaged.
[15] Persons simply found wandering in the occupied regions of Russia were turned over to the Geheime Feldpolizei or the SD since even the elderly, as well as women and children were suspected of conducting enemy reconnaissance.
"[17] Eliminating so-called "security" threats entailed the murder of captured Jews; 10,000 of whom GFP unit 721 killed from October 1941 through January 1942 in the Ukrainian areas around Khmil’nyk, Lityn, and Brailov.
By 1944, desertion rates rapidly rose following the major retreats after the Soviet Operation Bagration offensive and the destruction of German forces in the Falaise pocket in France.
But many troops were victims of increasingly confused rear areas where competing, often overlapping responsibilities of many military departments meant soldiers did not have the correct papers or were in the wrong locations.