RSHA: Reich Security Main Office – Organisation, Activities, Personnel

• With over 1,000 RSHA named by department and function, detailed information of SD operations in France, the Middle East and South America are recorded
  
  
• How interrogations revealed concise details of all Gestapo and SD measures on military fronts as they collapsed in 1945
  
  
• Reports that fully explain how the Gestapo, SD and supporting agencies dealt with their enemies within the Nazi state and occupied territories
  
  
• How information from arrested Gestapo and SD officers showed that their jealousies and rivalries affected their abilities to work against the Allies

During the Nazi regime, all police forces were centralised under the command of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

The political police (Gestapo), criminal police (Kripo) and security service (SD) were

brought together under the RSHA umbrella in 1939 and originally commanded by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich.

Using RSHA in Berlin as the centre, the web of Heydrich’s control extended across Germany into every corner of Nazi-occupied Europe.

When British and American intelligence agencies were getting to grips with RSHA departments at the end of the war, they had to rely on captured RSHA personnel and documentation to establish their authenticity.

To provide Allied intelligence officers in the field with accurate knowledge, the Counter-Intelligence War Room (CIWR) was established in London to provide information and list further Gestapo, Kripo, SD and Abwehr officials to be arrested and interrogated.

The informative and clearly written CIWR reports give a precise examination of the RSHA intelligence organisation by department, some detailing how jealousies and rivalries were more helpful to the Allied war effort than the Nazi cause.

RSHA: Reich Security Main Office – Organisation, Activities, Personnel is a portrayal of how Nazi intelligence agencies failed.

[custom_html]The RSHA Berlin controlled the Gestapo, Kripo and SD in this account of their organisation and means.

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[smallDescription]The RSHA Berlin controlled the Gestapo, Kripo and SD in this account of their organisation and means.
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[tabs] [tab title="AUTHOR(S)"]Stephen Tyas is a retired businessman and now a freelance researcher. He has published numerous articles on German Security Police operations between 1939-1945. Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas jointly published A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942 (2001), the so-called Hoefle telegram.

[/tab] [/tabs][collection.author]stephen-tyas[/collection.author]