Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
국가보안본부 (RSHA)
The security headquarters of Nazi Germany created by Himmler on 27 September 1939 by merging the Security Police (Gestapo and criminal police) with the SS Security Service (SD). Charged with fighting “enemies of the Reich” at home and abroad, it organised and carried out repression and the Holocaust.
In depth
Its first chief was Reinhard Heydrich; after his assassination in Prague in 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner succeeded him in January 1943. It was divided into seven departments: Department III was Otto Ohlendorf’s domestic SD, Department IV Heinrich Müller’s Gestapo and Department VI foreign intelligence. Adolf Eichmann, head of section IV B4 within the Gestapo, organised the deportation of the Jews. The Einsatzgruppen operating under the RSHA murdered Jews and Communists in the occupied East, and Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. The RSHA was a hybrid body, at once an SS office and a state police authority.