So, there is some difficulty with this questions but the overarching answer is yes, sometimes.

The difficult that arises regarding this question is one of sources. The Gestapo was one of the state organizations that was most thorough when it came to the destruction of their files towards the end of the war. This means that we only have extensive documentation on some Gestapo organizations, among them Düsseldorf, Würzburg and Frankfurt. In the occupied territories, the situation is even more complicated since some files from some stations in some territories still survive but for the "on the ground" operations – including financial compensation of informants – we often have to rely on what collaborationist police forces tell us about the subject. A lot of the stuff we know about the Gestapo in occupied territories comes from their reports to Berlin and those are not too extensive when it comes to networks of informants, denunciations and so forth.

From the existing material we do have studies of how the Gestapo operated and what they collectively show is that denunciation and informers were highly important for the Gestapo. Far from being an all knowing, wide-reaching and well-informed machine of terror as it is often portrayed, the Gestapo was while an important instrument of terror a comparatively small police force with limited resources and thus highly reliant on information delivered by denunciation and informers.

Both Walter Weyrauch and Klaus Mallmann have researched the latter group, the informers, and while they show big differences in their conclusions – Mallmann is very critical of Weyrauch's approach to the few sources available – one factor they share in their analysis is that for the recruitment of informants, financial incentives played a comparatively minor role. Most of the informers recruited came directly from groups that were directly threatened by the Nazi regime – communists, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and so forth – and their motivations for turning informant remain in a veritable grey zone between forced and voluntary collaboration.

Take f.ex. the case of Eugen Wickert. Wickert was one of the most prolific Gestapo informants – codename "Emil" – who reported on the illegal KPD and SPD activities in German throughout the 1930s. Wickert was not an infiltrator, he was from the core of the KPD. A trained metalworker he became a member of the party at age 17, had been a functionary since 1922 and had been schooled by the party as a core activist in 1930. In 1933 he was arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp. In 1934 emerged as a Gestapo informant from the camp. What happened in the camp, we do not know. It is possible he volunteered as an informant in order to save himself from being sentenced to death, it is possible he was tortured into becoming an informant. And this is the key factor here: Most of the recruited informants didn't need to be offered financial compensation. People like Wickert, Felix Meides, another KPD functionary, or August Laas turned informant because they were directly and immediately threatened with losing their lives or being imprisoned for the foreseeable future in a concentration camp or being tortured. And this is rather representative across the board for Gestapo informants from threatened groups. There were certain exceptions to this – priests who were payed to spy on their diocese, Maria Reese, KPD member of parliament who turned glowing Nazi propagandist after having spied on her former associates – but these represent an exception rather than the rule.

But it was not the informers who played the most crucial role for the Gestapo, it was those who denounced their fellow citizens and others. During the war years, the files of the various Gestapo offices that still exist show that about 75% of all cases they Gestapo dealt with involved foreign forced laborers in Germany who had been reported to the Gestapo for "crimes" such as eating in a restaurant, using public transport, sleeping with Germans or being out after curfew. Towards the end of the war, starting in 1944, defeatism and "Wehrkraftzersetzung" (erosion of the will to fight) were on the rise as offenses the Gestapo dealt with. And while it is impossible to state just how many, by all indications the overwhelming majority of these cases resulted from voluntary, no-reward denunciations and reports made by everyday citizens of the German Reich against fellow citizens and forced laborers.

Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann in her article Denunziantentum und Gestapo writes:

The willingness to denounce people can only be described as frightening. [...] The Gestapo was in many a case no active but only reactive to reports made by the populace. Colleagues from work, neighbors, acquaintances, former friends and even family members informed the Gestapo and other agencies about potential and real enemies of the Nazi regime. They delivered illegal leaflets, brochures and stickers, pointed out hiding places of illegal KPD members and Jews. The most reported crimes were deviant behavior such as being critical towards the regime, prohibited contact with Jews and foreign forced laborers, refusal to perform the Hitler salute and listening to foreign radio stations.

Their motives varied widely and will most likely remain never fully illuminated but from what can be told, money was not a major or even minor factor motivating those who denounced their friends, neighbors, and family members. Many used the Gestapo to settle scores, get even with people who had wronged them somehow, even if it was just that annoying neighbor or out of other base motives such as jealousy. From Düsseldorf we know of a woman who falsely reported her neighbor for organizing communist gatherings in his flat. When the Gestapo investigated, they found no evidence of this. Questioned by the Gestapo again, the woman who had initially reported her neighbor admitted to having done so because she was annoyed by him having his friends over until late at night and because he was "dressed too well".

Of course, there were those who reported people because of political motivations but the vast, vast majority of reports were most likely motivated similarly to the above mentioned woman. Denunciation was a social weapon that could be wielded against people who did not perform their daily lives in a manner you approved off and it also gave an outlet to various feelings of callousness. Consider how as of recent, reports and videos of people threatening to call the ICE or actually calling the police on sleeping people in their dorm have surfaced, simply because the people in question did not perform to their expectations or their mere existence annoyed them at the moment – the same phenomenon was true for Nazi Germany and the Gestapo, only that the latter was a much, much more potent weapon to be wielded against fellow humans for the investigative care mentioned in the case above was not always taken and people would disappear into prison, the camps, or death as a result of these reports.

So, in summary, money as such played a minor role in motivating people to report others to the Gestapo or become informants. For the latter, there was a strong moment of sel-preservation involved while for the former, denunciations served as a social weapon.

Sources:

• Gerhard Paul, Klaus Michael Mallmann: Die Gestapo. Mythos und Realität.

• Walter Otto Weyrauch: Gestapo Informants: Facts and Theory of Undercover Operations.

• Robert Gellately: The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945