"Gestapo tactics"?

I read the comments of Sarah Helm with some amazement over the weekend. "The wife of Downing Street's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, has lifted the lid on the private fury felt by Tony Blair's inner circle over the cash-for-peerages inquiry, accusing the police of 'Gestapo tactics'." Good grief, what did the police do? All quotations from here on are from Wikipedia. Were they "investigate(ing) treason, espionage and sabotage cases", some would say they were. Were the police investigating "cases of criminal attacks on the ... Party and " country? I am sure that some in New Labour believe that any criticism of them is an attack on party and state. "Laws passed in 1936 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." I don't think that anyone could claim that the police were acting against the Labour Government in this way, although some might claim it was heading towards acting in this way for the Government. As time moved on in Nazi Germany, the Gestapo were responsible for the setting up and the administration of the Concentration Camps where over 9 years around 7 million people were murdered. The Gestapo also murdered many thousands of anti-Nazi protesters having first arrested them.

Helm, a journalist and author, writes in the Observer: 'I know one shouldn't make these comparisons, but I was writing about Nazi Germany right then and I couldn't help think: Gestapo tactics! Pick on the vulnerable, preferably a single woman, living alone. No matter that you may have nothing on her that will ultimately stand up in court - give her a scare.' To compare the arrest of a woman with the presence of camera crews before 8am to the tactics of the Gestapo is a hideous comparison. Also the comment "Pick on the vulnerable, preferably a single woman, living alone" irritates me, women fought long and hard for equality with men, but here Sarah Helm seems to be calling for special treatment of women.