Here in Poland the Gestapo is a meme. People like to shout "Gestapo" at the cops if they're brutal (much more so in the past). But by far most of the killing and torture was done by the Orpo ("order police", not even really police at all but basically soldiers in garrison and mobile units), and perhaps even more so the SD security service and its local auxiliary units (pitting various ethnic groups against one another in also very paramilitary formations, for example the Ukrainians against the Poles and vice versa as with the 2 Polish battalions used to fight the Ukrainian nationalists), and yet they're almost forgotten. All of them are little known unless you actually study it. The Kripo (criminal police) was the cleanest as they dealt with regular crime. The actual gendarmes (the Orpo were habitually misnamed as "gendarmes") of the military police also largely dealt with just things like hunting German deserters instead of terrorizing or exterminating the occupied populations.
Here in Poland the Gestapo is a meme. People like to shout "Gestapo" at the cops if they're brutal (much more so in the past). But by far most of the killing and torture was done by the Orpo ("order police", not even really police at all but basically soldiers in garrison and mobile units), and perhaps even more so the SD security service and its local auxiliary units (pitting various ethnic groups against one another in also very paramilitary formations, for example the Ukrainians against the Poles and vice versa as with the 2 Polish battalions used to fight the Ukrainian nationalists), and yet they're almost forgotten. All of them are little known unless you actually study it. The Kripo (criminal police) was the cleanest as they dealt with regular crime. The actual gendarmes (the Orpo were habitually misnamed as "gendarmes") of the military police also largely dealt with just things like hunting German deserters instead of terrorizing or exterminating the occupied populations.