Sicherheitsdienst (SD)
친위대 정보부 (SD)
The intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Founded in 1931 under Reinhard Heydrich as the first Nazi intelligence organisation, it was the sister organisation of the Gestapo and in 1939 became part of the Reich Security Main Office.
In depth
Heydrich intended the SD to bring every individual in the Reich under “continuous supervision”. An independent SS office from 1933 to 1939, it then moved into the RSHA, with domestic intelligence under Ohlendorf’s Department III and foreign intelligence under Department VI. SD men formed the Einsatzgruppen together with the Security Police and took part in the massacres in the occupied East and in organising local killing units in Lithuania and Latvia. Adolf Eichmann’s running of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in 1938 was the work of the SD’s Jewish section. The Nuremberg tribunal declared the SD a criminal organisation.