RSHA

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RSHA. Created by a decree of Heinrich Himmler on 27 September 1939 (with effect from 1 October), the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Security Main Office, brought policing in the Third Reich under a single organizational umbrella and played a key part in the campaigns of mass murder in Nazi-occupied Europe. The establishment of the RSHA brought together within a single framework the state security formations—the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and the Criminal Police (Kripo)—and the Nazi Party security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). It was a central office both of the SS and of the Reich Interior Ministry.

The RSHA was essentially the creation of Reinhard Heydrich, who assumed the title of Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (CSSD) and who headed the organization until he died on 4 June 1942 from an attack by the Czech resistance on 27 May. After his death, the day-to-day functions of the CSSD were performed by Bruno Streckenbach, until Himmler appointed Ernst Kaltenbrunner as Heydrich's successor in January 1943. Kaltenbrunner remained at the head of the RSHA until the end of the war.

The creation of the RSHA did not really signify a major departure. Before it was established Heydrich had already become chief of the security police, heading both the Gestapo and the Kripo, and had already been head of the party's ‘Security Main Office’ (Sicherheitshauptamt). Essentially the RSHA gave an institutional framework to what in effect was happening already: the centralization of German policing and the placing of parallel state and party security organizations under a single leadership. Furthermore, the security services had, in effect, been freed already from the restraints imposed by an ordered state legal system.

When the RSHA was established in the autumn of 1939, it initially comprised six departments (Ämter), but this was soon increased to seven (see Table). With the expansion of Nazi power across Europe, the scope for the activities of the RSHA grew tremendously, and by the beginning of 1944 it employed roughly 50,000 people (more than 31,000 in the Gestapo, more than 12,000 in the Kripo, and more than 6,000 in the SD). It also played a central role in carrying out Nazi policies of genocide, in particular through the Jewish Affairs Section (B4) of Amt IV headed by Adolf Eichmann, and the Einsatzgruppen which, with the co-operation of the German armed forces, murdered hundreds of thousands of people (most of them Jews) following the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA).

The RSHA had three main areas of activity: intelligence gathering at home and abroad; policing, including the suppression of the Nazis' political opponents, both within the Reich and in the occupied territories; and the extermination of the Nazis' racial victims.

RSHA: Structure and areas of responsibility ofthe Reichssicherheitshauptamt

Department	Head
Source: Contributor.
I Personnel	Bruno Streckenbach
II Organization,	Werner Best (later
Administration, and Law	Hans Nockemann)
III SD Domestic Intelligence	Otto Ohlendorf
IV Political Police (Gestapo)	Heinrich Müller
V Criminal Police (Kripo)	Arthur Nebe
VI SD Foreign Intelligence	Heinz Jost (later
	Walter Schellenberg)
VII Ideological Research and Evaluation	Alfred Franz Six

The intelligence-gathering activities of the RSHA were conducted by Amter III and VI of the SD. Within Germany the SD used an extensive network of informers (see V-man) systematically to collect material about popular opinion and morale; this information was gathered in the SD's ‘Reports from the Reich’ (Meldungen aus dem Reich) for distribution to leading officials, until they were suspended in 1944 when it was decided that their content was too ‘defeatist’. The intelligence-gathering arm of the RSHA competed with the military's counter-intelligence service, the Abwehr, headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. In 1944, after it was discovered that a group of resistance conspirators against Hitler had gathered within the Abwehr (see Schwarze Kapelle), it was incorporated into the RSHA.

The policing activities of the RSHA encompassed both the political police and the criminal police (Amter IV and V respectively). The political police—the Gestapo—were able to operate in large measure independently of the legal system. By applying an ‘order for protective custody’ (Schutzhaftbefehl) the Gestapo were able to bypass the court system and imprison people in concentration camps for indeterminate periods. People thus imprisoned effectively had no legal redress and, during the war and especially after the invasion of the USSR, orders of protective custody were increasingly applied to people simply classified as opponents of the regime without their having been guilty of any specific crime. With the agreement of Himmler and the new, radical Nazi justice minister Dr Otto Thierack in September 1942 (see also People's Court), the Gestapo was also given an increasingly free hand with so-called ‘asocial elements’ including alleged habitual criminals as well as members of allegedly ‘inferior’ racial groups.

Although the numbers employed by the Gestapo may appear large, considering that they came to operate across Europe their numbers were actually rather small. Consequently, they were dependent for success upon the active collaboration of members of the public who were prepared to denounce their neighbours, colleagues, and relatives.

Like the Gestapo, the Kripo also applied racial criteria in its work, viewing criminal behaviour as biologically inherited. Accordingly, justification was provided for the protection of society from alleged potential criminals through the use of protective custody—which usually meant confinement in a concentration camp—and, finally, the destruction of allegedly ‘unworthy’ lives under the euthanasia programme.

As the German armed forces conquered much of Europe, the sphere of activity of the RSHA increased accordingly. The RSHA installed a CSSD in each occupied country under whom were a number of regional police commanders. These were responsible for combating all forms of resistance to German rule; they were unfettered by restrictions on the methods they could employ and were able to count on the co-operation of the army in carrying out their tasks. It was in policing the occupied territories that the RSHA made its most terrifying contribution to the Nazi policies of genocide. Its special detachments, the Einsatzgruppen, of the Security Police, had already been established for the campaign against Poland, in order to ‘combat all elements hostile to the Reich and to Germans behind the fighting forces’. They were charged with, among other things, preventing espionage and arresting ‘politically unreliable persons’. However, it was with the campaign against the USSR that the Einsatzgruppen really came into their own, when they were charged with eliminating actual and potential opponents of German rule behind the front lines (see commissars). Four such Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht into the USSR in 1941, and by the spring of 1942, with the co-operation of the army in whose rear operational areas they conducted their grisly business, they had succeeded in murdering half a million people.

Richard Bessel

Bibliography

Buchheim, H. , et al., Anatomy of the SS State (London, 1968).
Gellately, R. , The Gestapo in German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990).