The Reichsführer-SS and his empire The Secret State Police The Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS The Reich Security Main Office

 

The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) With the establishment of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on September 27, 1939, Himmler concentrated the state-run Security Police (Gestapo and Criminal Investigation Division) and the party-run Security Service into one institution. He appointed Reinhard Heydrich head of the RSHA.

This organisational restructuring meant neither the dissolution of the older departments nor their concentration in one area. The offices of the RSHA, which in 1942 employed more than 3,400 workers in Berlin, were spread out over the entire city. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 housed the administrative offices and served as the postal address of the RSHA.

 

An intricate network of agencies was placed under the command of the RSHA. In addition to the guard units of the concentration and extermination camps, the most feared instruments of the National Socialist policy of repression and annihilation were the Security Police (Gestapo and Criminal Investigation Division), the agencies of the Security Service and the police battalions of the Order Police. In the occupied territories, the Special Police Units (Einsatzgruppen) and commandos served as mobile headquarters, while the commanders of the Security police and SD and their subordinate units were stationary. With the RSHA, Himmler and Heydrich created a centre of National Socialist rule from which almost all the policies of persecution and extermination in the "Third Reich" were directed.