Pat Harrison's Slumlord Uprising of 2008, 1/6: "Realtor Pat Harrison name drops 'Gestapo,' seeks monopoly on disingenuousness.

Eight years later, and it's déjà vu all over again as Pat Harrison prepares to defend our downtrodden slumlords against the Gestapo.

The following was originally published here on March 4, 2008.

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Realtor Pat Harrison name drops "Gestapo," seeks monopoly on disingenuousness.

Following is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s definition of Gestapo, an acronym for Geheime Staatspolizei, the “secret state police” in Nazi Germany. Any reader who can locate any conceivable correlation between the Gestapo as defined and a program of mandatory rental property inspections in the city of New Albany, as suggested twice last evening by local realtor Pat Harrison during blatantly disingenuous and self-serving remarks before the Building Commission, is encouraged to report these to us.

The video is here: Patience is a version.

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The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat “all tendencies dangerous to the state.”

It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany.

Laws passed in 1935 effectively gave the Gestapo carte blanche to operate without judicial oversight. Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best stated that “[a]s long as the Gestapo ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.” The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws.

A further law passed later in the year gave the Gestapo responsibility for setting up and administering concentration camps. Also in 1935, Reinhard Heydrich became head of the Gestapo and Heinrich Müller, chief of operations; Müller would later assume overall command of the Gestapo after Heydrich's assassination in 1942 and Ernst Kaltenbrunner would take over as overall head of the RSHA and SD. Adolf Eichmann was Müller's direct subordinate and head of department IV, section B5, which dealt with Jews.

The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was called Schutzhaft—“protective custody,” a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in concentration camps. The person imprisoned even had to sign his or her own Schutzhaftbefehl, an order declaring that the person had requested imprisonment (ostensibly out of fear of personal harm). Normally this signature was forced by beatings and torture.

During World War II, the Gestapo was expanded to around 46,000 members.