Reich Main Security Office


The Reich Main Security Office was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS, the head of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel. The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany.

Formation

Himmler established the RSHA on 27 September 1939. Himmler's assumption of total control over all security and police forces in Germany was the "crucial precondition" for the establishment and growth of the Nazi state. He combined the Nazi Party's Sicherheitsdienst with the Sicherheitspolizei, which was nominally under the Interior Ministry. The SiPo was composed of two sub-departments, the Geheime Staatspolizei and the Kriminalpolizei. The RSHA was often abbreviated to RSi-H in correspondence to avoid confusion with the SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt.
The creation of the RSHA represented the formalization, at the top level, of the relationship under which the SD served as the intelligence agency for the security police. A similar coordination existed in the local offices. Within Germany and areas which were incorporated within the Reich for the purpose of civil administration, local offices of the Gestapo, criminal police, and SD were formally separate. They were subject to coordination by inspectors of the security police and SD on the staffs of the local higher SS and police leaders, however, and one of the principal functions of the local SD units was to serve as the intelligence agency for the local Gestapo units. In the occupied territories, the formal relationship between local units of the Gestapo, criminal police, and SD was slightly closer.
Throughout the course of wartime expansion, the RSHA continued to grow at an enormous rate and was "repeatedly reorganized". Routine reorganization did not change the tendency for centralization within the Third Reich nor did it change the general trend for organizations like the RSHA to develop direct relationships to Hitler, adhering to a familiar National Socialist pattern of the leader-follower construct. For the RSHA, its centrality within Nazi Germany was pronounced since departments like the Gestapo were controlled by Himmler and his immediate subordinate SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich; they held the power of life and death for nearly every German and were essentially above the law.
, the original chief of the RSHA, as an SS-Gruppenführer in August 1940
Heydrich remained the RSHA chief until his assassination in 1942. In January 1943 Himmler delegated the office to SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who headed the RSHA until the end of World War II in Europe. The head of the RSHA was also known as the CSSD or Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD.

Organization

According to British author Gerald Reitlinger, the RSHA "became a typical overblown bureaucracy... The complexity of RSHA was unequalled... with at least a hundred... sub-sub-sections, a modest camouflage of the fact that it handled the progressive extermination which Hitler planned for the ten million Jews of Europe".
The organization at its simplest was divided into seven offices :

Role in the Holocaust

The RSHA controlled the security services of Nazi Germany and the Nazi Party. Its activities included intelligence-gathering, criminal investigation, overseeing foreigners, monitoring public opinion, and Nazi indoctrination. The RSHA was also "the central office for the extra-judicial NS measures of terror and repression from the beginning of the war until 1945". The list of "enemies" included Jews, Communists, Freemasons, pacifists, and Christian activists. In addition to dealing with identified enemies, the RSHA advocated expansionist policies for the Reich and the Germanization of additional territory through settlement. Generalplan Ost, which was the secret Nazi plan to colonize Central and Eastern Europe exclusively with Germans, displacing inhabitants in the process through genocide and ethnic cleansing in order to obtain sufficient Lebensraum, stemmed from officials in the RSHA, among other Nazi organizations.
According to German historian, Klaus Hildebrand, the RSHA was "particularly concerned with racial matters". Adolf Eichmann stated in 1937 that "the anger of the people expressed in riots the most effective means to rob the Jews of a sense of security"; although the chaos of rioting was debated within the RHSA, it continued in many places and forms, not monitored, and even encouraged by the RHSA. An order issued by the RSHA on 20 May 1941 overtly demonstrates its utter complicity for the systematic extermination of Jews, namely since the order included instructions to block emigration of any and all Jews attempting to leave Belgium or France as part of the "imminent Final Solution of the Jewish question". Besides blocking emigration, the RSHA, working with Eichmann's Reich Association of Jews in Germany, deliberately deceived Jews still living in Germany and those of other countries by promising them good living quarters, medical care, and food in Theresienstadt if they turned over their assets to the RSHA through a 'phony' home-purchase plan.
The RSHA oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, death squads that were formed under the direction of Heydrich and operated by the SS. Originally part of the SiPo, in September 1939 the operational control of the Einsatzgruppen was taken over by the RSHA. When the units were re-formed prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the men of the Einsatzgruppen were recruited from the SD, Gestapo, Kripo, Orpo, and Waffen-SS. The units followed the invasion forces of the German Army into Eastern Europe. In its role as the national and NSDAP security service, the RSHA coordinated activities among a number of different agencies that had wide-ranging responsibilities within the Reich. Not infrequently, commanders of Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando sub-units were also desk officers from the main office of the RSHA. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen, related agencies, and foreign auxiliary troops co-opted by the Nazis, killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews.
Part of the RSHA's efforts to encourage other nations to hand over their Jews or entice them into the arms of the Nazis, included coercing them by assigning Jewish advisory officials, all of which was part and parcel to Eichmann's goal of rounding up and transporting "Jews from Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Romania". Entry into the Second World War afforded the RSHA the power to act as an intermediary in the areas extended far beyond the Reich, which according to Hans Mommsen, lent itself to solving "emergency situations" and the RSHA's radicalized destructive goals like the Final Solution, were implemented thereupon with bureaucratic methodical cruelty as its power expanded.

Rosenstrasse protest and RSHA involvement

As early as 1941, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels began to complain that large numbers of Jews had not been "evacuated" because of their work in the armaments industry. By late 1942, Hitler and the RSHA were ready to rid Berlin of the German Jews still residing there. Many were married to Aryan Germans and protected by their jobs in armament factories, as the firms deemed these Jewish employees irreplaceable laborers. These Jews believed that these factors ensured their safety. Auschwitz was pushing the government to send more laborers as they struck a deal with the arms producer IG Farben to construct a camp specifically for arms development using slave labor, further supporting Hitler’s decision. In September of 1942, Hitler decided that the protection of armament companies must end and that the Jews must go. As a result, the RSHA decreed the Fabrik-Aktion, an initiative which expressed their intent to "register" all Jews working in these firms; it also stated that the primary targets of this action were those Jews "living in mixed marriages."
The RSHA planned to remove all German Jews from Berlin in early 1943. On 27 February 1943, the RSHA sent plainclothes Gestapo officials to work, arresting intermarried Jews and charging them with various crimes; anywhere the Gestapo could find Berlin's Jews, they were detained. Around 2,000 intermarried Jewish men were taken to Rosenstrasse 2-4, where they were held. Goebbels complained that many of the arrests had been "thwarted" by industrialists since some 4,000 Jews were expected to be detained. Angry wives began appearing in front of the building on Rosenstrasse to protest—as "Women of German blood" on behalf of their husbands—against this action. On March 6, all but 25 of the intermarried Jews were released; the 25 still held were sent to Auschwitz. The RSHA had failed at quietly rounding up and deporting Jewish men married to German women. On March 8, RSHA head Ernst Kaltenbrunner told Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick that the deportations had been limited to Jews who were not intermarried.

Explanatory notes

Citations

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