Totalitarianism describes a political system in which the state holds all authority over society and controls all aspects of public and private life. So to do this they would need an organization to enforce everything they want. This is where the secret police come in, whose role is to do the dirty that the public doesn't need to know about. The secret police is an intelligence agency that operates in secret. The secret police was known in ancient Greece and Rome and in pre-modern monarchies and continues to function in modern republics. Secret police have been used in many types of governments. Secret police forces in a totalitarian state usually resort to violence and acts of error to suppress political opposition and may also use death squads to carry out assassinations and “disappearances.” In times of emergency, a democracy can legitimately grant its police and security agencies additional or broad powers. The secret police have often been used as a tool of political repression. States in which secrecy holds significant power are known as police states or counterintelligence states. In some cases some police agencies are accused of being secret police. For example, political groups and civil liberties organizations in the United States have repeatedly accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of being secret police. The secret police not only have traditional police authority to arrest anyone they want, but in some cases they are granted unlimited control, assigned to implement punishments independently of public authority, and authorized to administer such punishments without external review. The investigative tactics used by the secret police get to the point where they have so much power that they are... middle of paper... iques. They were also taught some of the practices that the Dachau doctors would use to experiment on prisoners. Although the camps were run by the SS, they were under the control of the Gestapo. After the war the Gestapo was disbanded and declared a criminal organization. At the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Gestapo was named as one of the main institutional perpetrators of the Holocaust, but not many officers were prosecuted ("Nazi perpetrators"). During the Cold War the Soviet Union had a secret police called Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopanosit or KGB for short. The KGB was founded in March 1954. It was designed to be a state security committee and was assigned to the Council of Ministers. The KGB was the largest state security and espionage machine in the world. They were involved in all aspects of everyone's life in the Soviet Union.