> they were basically army doing a lot of actual combat

This was mainly the Waffen-SS which was only built up during the war, the SS as a whole was responsible for the worst atrocities in the occupied areas and within Germany (for instance running the extermination camps).

(also, Himmler was both head of the SS and Gestapo by 1934, I guess there wasn't much of a distinction between the two organizations)

SS was responsible for camps and extermination, but they were also elite combat body. They were given responsibility for camps because they were supposed to be better soldiers then army itself. SS were also willing to take more risk and more losses then army would normally do. Mostly because they were eager to prove themselves uber soldiers they believed themselves to be.

The army itself had ethnic cleansing as one of the goals too. I mention this mostly because after war there was tendency to blame everything on SSand create myth of "clean" Wehrmacht. Because that felt better to Germans.

Gestapo was literally professional police. They were people who did criminal inveatigations prior and repurposed many of the same tactic. That is massive difference.

Gestapo did run camps (and had the power to put people in camps without courts being involved), oversaw forced labor, hunted resistance in occupied territories and tortured and murdered prisoners, sometimes in cooperation or under shared orders with the SS, sometimes as parallel structures with different primary victim groups. "Professional police" alright...

None of it makes it not professional police tho. Police does not mean "hollywood movie good guys". It just mean police and in authoritarion setups it means more violence then in liberal setups. Police tortures people all around the world, both now and in the past.

You never seen them at battlefield. It was organized, effective, produced bureaucracy. They were police force.

They did not run camps, tho they could send people there.

> They did not run camps

They did, keyword "AEL". Plenty Gestapo were SS-members too. Yes, there were some differences, but in many areas they did plenty of the same things, and were different parts of overall the same system.

Well the "clean Wehrmacht" was a convenient post-war myth in Western Germany when the Bundeswehr was created, but I think in the last 20..30 years that myth has been thoroughly debunked.

If you're interested in more strategic myth making by former Wehrmacht/Nazi officials, check out the debunking of Albert Speer's "Good Nazi" persona. Very interesting how long he got away with essentially lying through his teeth about being involved in Jewish deportations.

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer#The_Speer_myth

If you remove the Waffen SS I think the comparison holds, both Allgemeine SS and NKVD were overarching internal security / police type organizations. Like a lot of Nazi organizations the SS had somewhat nebulous duty boundaries that overlapped some other groups and evolved over time.

There were also NKVD combat units, most famously one which did a lot of heavy fighting in Stalingrad. (Actual desperate fighting against Germans, not the scene from the awful "Enemy at the Gates" where they fire on retreating Soviet troops -- that's mostly made up for the movie).