RSHA, or the Reichssicherheitshauptamt ("Reich Security Head Office"), was a subsidiary organization of the S.S. created by Heinrich Himmler on September 22, 1939, through the merger of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei. The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" within and outside Germany's borders, and included within the rubric of "enemies" were communists, freemasons, Jews, Gypsies and other "racial undesirables."The first head of RSHA was Reinhard Heydrich, who led the organization until his assassination in 1942, at which point Ernst Kaltenbrunner took over the running of RSHA on till the end of the war. The head of the RSHA was the direct head of the Einsatzgruppen. For the rest, the RSHA was organized into seven departments (or Ämter):
- Amt I, Personnel, headed by SS Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach
- Amt II, Organization, Administration, and Law, headed by SS Colonel Dr. Nockemann .
- Amt III, German Occupied Territories, headed by Otto Ohlendorf , which dealt with ethnic Germans outside of Germany's prewar borders and matters of culture.
- Amt IV, Investigation and Fighting of Enemies, headed by Heinrich Müller, which was comprised of the Gestapo and the border police. Adolf Eichmann who was one of the main executioners of the Holocaust was head of section 4 of this Amt.
- Amt V, Fight Against Crime, under Arthur Nebe. This was the Kriminalpolizei ("Criminal Police"), which dealt with non-political crimes.
- Amt VI, Foreign Countries, led first by Heinz Jost, and later by Walter Schellenberg. This was the foreign intelligence service of the SS.
- Amt VII, Ideologies - Research and Evaluation, overseen by Professor Franz Six . This was responsible for "ideological" tasks, by which was meant the creation of anti-semitic and anti-masonic propaganda.
External link
Weisenthal Centre - Reichssicherheitshauptamt
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany or the Third Reich commonly refers to Germany in the years 1933 1945, when it was under the firm control of the totalitarian and fascist ideology of National Socialism with Adolf Hitler as dictator. The term Nazi is a short form of the German
