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Protective
Squadrons [SS] / Schutzstaffel
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| The SS was the very essence of
Nazism -- the elite group of the Party, composed of the most
thorough-going adherents of the Nazi cause, pledged to blind devotion to
Nazi principles, and prepared to carry them out without any question and
at any cost, including the deportation and Germanization of inhabitants
of conquered territories, enslavement of foreign labour and illegal use
of prisoners of war, concentration camps for the extermination of the
Jews and planning and waging aggressive war.
The sweeping National Socialist program and the
measures they were prepared to use and did use, could be fully
accomplished neither through the machinery of the government nor of the
Party. Things had to be done for which no agency of government and no
political party even the Nazi Party, would openly take full
responsibility. A specialized type of-apparatus was needed, an
apparatus which was to some extent connected with the government and
given official support, but which, at the same time, could maintain a
quasi-independent status so that all its acts could be attributed
neither to the government nor to the Party as a whole. The SS was that
apparatus. It involved, of course, the performance of
police functions. But it involved more. It required participation in the
suppression and extermination of all internal opponents of the regime.
It meant participation in extending the regime beyond the borders of
Germany, and eventually, participation in every type of activity
designed to secure a hold over those territories and populations which,
through military conquest, had come under German domination.
Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuehrer SS,
commanded the entire organization. The increasingly close collaboration
of the Security Service of the Reichsfuehrer SS (almost always referred
to as the SD) with the Gestapo and Criminal Police (Kripo) eventually
resulted in the creation of the Reich Main Security Office (or RSHA).
The SD originated as a part of the SS and always retained its character
as a party organization, as distinguished from the GESTAPO, which was a
State organization. However, the GESTAPO and the SD were brought into
close working relationship, the SD serving primarily as the
information-gathering agency and the GESTAPO as the executive agency of
the police system established by the Nazis for the purpose of combating
the political and ideological enemies of the Nazi regime. The Waffen SS, the combat arm of the SS, was
created, trained, and finally utilized for the purposes of aggressive
war. Although tactically under the command of the Wehrmacht while
in the field, it remained as much a part of the SS as any other branch
of that organization. The mission of the SS Death Head Units (SS
Totenkopf Verbaende) was guarding enemies of the State who were held in
concentration camps. The SS eventually succeeded in assuming control
over the entire Reich Police, out of which special militarised forces
were formed, originally SS Police Battalions, and later expanded to SS
Police Regiments. The Allgemeine (General) SS was composed of all
members of the SS who did not belong to any of the special branches.
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Reich
Main Security Office [RSHA] / Reich Sicherheits Hauptamt
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| The Reich Main Security Office
[RSHA]
was a department in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and in the SS.
The term "Chief of the Security Police and SD" describes the
person who is the head of the GESTAPO, KRIPO and the SD, and of their
headquarters office called the RSHA. The "Chief of the Security
Police and SD" and the "head of the RSHA" are always one
and the same person. The central offices of the GESTAPO and SD were
coordinated in 1936 with the appointment of Heydrich, the head of the
SD, as chief of the Security Police. The office of Heydrich was called
"Chief of the Security Police and SD." When the central
offices of the GESTAPO and SD, together with the Criminal Police, were
centralized in one main office (RSHA) in 1939, the functions were
somewhat redistributed. After Heydrich was assassinated in January 1943,
the RSHA was headed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Amt I of the RSHA handled personnel for the
three agencies. Subsection A 2 handled personnel matters of the GESTAPO,
A 3 handled personnel matters of the KRIPO, and A 4 handled personnel
matters of the SD.
Amt II handled organization, administration,
and law for the three agencies. Subsection C handled domestic
arrangements and pay accounts, and was divided into two sections, one to
take care of pay accounts of the Security Police and the other to take
care of pay accounts of the SD, since personnel of the former were paid
by the State and personnel of the latter were paid by the Party.
Amt III was the SD and was charged with
investigation into spheres of German life.
Amt IV was the GESTAPO
and was charged with combating political opposition.
Amt V was the KRIPO and was charged with
combating criminals. Subsection V D was the criminological institute for
the SIPO handling matters of identification, chemical and biological
investigations, and technical research.
Amt VI was concerned with foreign political
intelligence and contained subsections dealing with western Europe,
Russia and Japan, Anglo-American sphere, and central Europe. It
contained a special section dealing with sabotage.
Amt VII handled ideological research against
enemies, such as Freemasonry, Judaism, political churches, Marxism, and
liberalism.
The GESTAPO and SD took civilians of occupied
countries to Germany for secret trial and punishment. On 7 December 1941
Hitler issued the directive, since called the "Nacht und Nebel
Erlass" (Night and Fog Decree), under which persons who committed offences
against the Reich or occupation forces in occupied territories
were to be taken secretly to Germany and surrendered to the Security
Police and SD for trial or punishment in Germany. After the civilians
arrived in Germany, no word of the disposition of their cases was
permitted to reach the country from which they came, or their relatives.
On 18 September 1942, Thierack, the Reich Minister of Justice, and
Himmler came to an understanding by which antisocial elements were to be
turned over to Himmler to be worked to death, and a special criminal
procedure was to be applied by the police to the Jews, Poles, gypsies,
Russians, and Ukrainians who were not to be tried in ordinary criminal
courts. |
Security
Police [SD] /
Sicherheitsdienst
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| The SD was the intelligence service
of the SS. Membership in the SD was voluntary, and it had a membership
of about 3,000 in 1943-45. The SD was the intelligence service of the SS
during the years preceding the accession of the Nazis to power, though
it became a much more important organization promptly thereafter. It had
been developed into such a powerful and scientific espionage system
under its chief, Reinhard Heydrich, that on 6/9/1934, just a few weeks
before the bloody purge of the SA, it was made, by decree of Hess, the
sole intelligence and counterintelligence agency of the entire Nazi
Party. The task of the SD, after it became the
intelligence service for State and Party, was to obtain secret
information concerning the actual and potential enemies of the Nazi
leadership so that appropriate action could be taken to destroy or
neutralize opposition. To accomplish this task, the SD created an
organization of agents and informants operating out of various SD
regional offices established throughout the Reich, and later in
conjunction with the GESTAPO and Criminal Police throughout the occupied
territories. The organization consisted of several hundred full-time
agents whose work was supplemented by several thousand part-time
informants. The SD investigated the loyalty and reliability of State
officials, evaluating them by their complete devotion to Nazi ideology
and the Hitler leadership. Behind the scenes, operating secretly, the
SD, through its vast network of informants, spied upon the German people
in their daily lives, on the streets, in the shops, and even within the
sanctity of the churches.
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Secret
Police [GESTAPO] / Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt
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| The GESTAPO was the political
police force of the Reich. Much of its personnel consisted of
transferees from former political police forces of the States.
Membership in the GESTAPO was voluntary, and it had a membership of
about 40,000 or 50,000 in 1943-45. The GESTAPO was founded in April 1933
by Goering to serve as a political police force in Prussia. Himmler was
named Deputy Chief of the GESTAPO in Prussia in 1934. The GESTAPO,
through its great power of arrest and confinement to concentration camps
without recourse to law, was the principal means for eliminating enemies
of the Nazi regime. The headquarters organization of the GESTAPO
(Amt IV of the RSHA) was set up on a functional basis. In 1943 it
contained five sub-sections. Section A dealt with opponents, sabotage,
and protective service. Section B dealt with political churches, sects
and Jews, and was subdivided into four offices, including B4, which was
responsible for Jewish affairs, matters of evacuation, means of
suppressing enemies of the people and State, dispossession of rights of
German citizenship. (Eichmann was head of this office). Section C dealt
with card files, protective custody, and matters of press and Party.
Section D dealt with regions under greater German influence. Section E
dealt with security. Section F dealt with passport matters and alien
police.
Subordinate offices of the GESTAPO were
established throughout the Reich and designated as Staats
Polizeileitstellen or Staats Polizeistellen, depending upon the size of
the office. These offices reported directly to the RSHA in Berlin but
were subject to the supervision of Inspekteurs of the Security Police in
the various provinces. In the occupied territories the regional offices
of the GESTAPO were coordinated with the Criminal Police and the SD
under Kommandeurs of the Security Police and SD. The GESTAPO was one of the primary agencies for
the persecution of the Jews. The persecution of the Jews under the Nazi
regime is a story of increasingly severe treatment, beginning with
restrictions, then seizure and spoliation of property, commitment to
concentration camps, deportation, slave labour, and finally mass murder.
The GESTAPO carried out mass murders of hundreds of thousands of
civilians of occupied countries as a part of the Nazi program to
exterminate political and racial undesirables ("Einsatz
Groups")
During 1943 the program of mass murder carried
out by the Einsatz Groups in the East was modified, and orders were
issued to round up hundreds of thousands of persons for the armament
industry. The great power of the GESTAPO was "Schutzhaft" the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings on the
theory of "protective custody." This power was based upon the
law of 28 February 1933 which suspended the clauses of the Weimar
Constitution guaranteeing civil liberties to the German people. The
actions and orders of the GESTAPO were not subject to judicial review.
Under the law of 30 November 1933 the only redress available was by
appeal to the next higher authority within the GESTAPO itself. The first concentration camps were established
in 1933 at Dachau in Bavaria and at Oranienburg in Prussia. The GESTAPO
was given by law the responsibility of administering the concentration
camps. The reason assigned for the arrest and commitment of persons to
concentration camps usually was that, according to the GESTAPO, the
person endangered by his attitude the existence and security of the
people and the State. Further specifications of grounds included such offences
as that of "working against the Greater German Reich with
an illegal resistance organization," "being a Jew,"
"suspected of working for the detriment of the Reich,"
"being strongly suspected of aiding desertion," "because
as a relative of a deserter he is expected to take advantage of every
occasion to harm the German Reich," "refusal to work,"
"sexual intercourse with a Pole," "religious
propaganda," "working against the Reich," "loafing
on the job," or "defeatist statements." The most casual
remark of a German citizen might bring him before the GESTAPO, where his
fate and freedom were decided without recourse to law. In this
government, in which the rule of law was replaced by a tyrannical rule
of men, the GESTAPO was the primary instrumentality of oppression.
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Intelligence
Section OKW/
Amtes Ausland/ Abwehr
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| In February 1938 the Reich War
Ministry was abolished a new over-all Armed Forces authority, known as
the High Command of the Armed Forces -- Oberkommando der Wehrmacht --
usually known by the initials OKW. Coordination of all Armed Forces
matters was vested in the OKW, which was in effect Hitler's personal
staff for these matters. The Air Force as well as the Army and the Navy
was subordinated to OKW. The army and naval staffs were designated
"High Commands" -- Oberkommando des Heeres and Oberkommando
der Kriegsmarine, from which derive the initials by which they are
usually known (OKH and OKM). The Air Force did not receive the official
designation of Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL) until 1944. The Abbwehr was the OKW's intelligence agency
[its name deriving from the compound of ab-, meaning away or off, and
-wehr,
meaning defence]. Abwehr responsibilities covered the full spectrum of
intelligence activities, ranging from making reconnaissance flights over
Poland and England prior to the Polish campaign to prevention of
sabotage and nuisance activity carried out by commandos, and operating
very active sabotage organizations behind the enemy front.
The Abwehr achieved a number of striking
successes in their operations against the Allies. Operation North Pole
started with the arrest two Dutch underground agents infiltrated from
England. The Abwehr succeeded in contacting the agents' British
headquarters, and passing themselves off as being the agents. For two
years the Germans maintained this deception, capturing successive waves
of agents as soon as they landed on the continent. On 31 March 1941
Keitel, at Hitler's behest,
issued the first of a number of directives to the Wehrmacht on the
'Treatment of Political and Military Russian Officials.' This, which
came to be known as the 'Commissar Order,'The Commissar Order undermined
the task of the counterintelligence officers of the Abwehr who were
responsible for extracting information from Soviet prisoners of war and
enlisting intelligence agents. In mid-September, when there were already
1.5 million men in the camps, and more pouring in every day, Admiral
Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, made an attempt to have the order
rescinded. Since he knew that any appeal on humanitarian grounds would
simply harden Hitler's resolve, he based his argument on German
self-interest. Canaris argued [to no avail] that "the will to
resist of the enemy troops will be extremely strengthened by the enemy
intelligence service.... Instead of taking advantage of the tensions
among the populations of the occupied territories for the benefit of the
German administration, the mobilization of all internal opposition
forces of Russia for unified hostility will be facilitated."
Canaris was convinced that his failure to
prevent the attack on Poland would mean the end of Germany. A triumph of
the Nazi system would mean an even greater disaster, and it was the
purpose of General Canaris to prevent this. Canaris deliberately
manipulated his own operations to aid the Allied cause [and was thought
by some to be an agent of British intelligence]. The Abwehr failed to
provide the German military with information on the Anglo-American
landing in North Africa. Canaris during the first years of the war laid
great stress on good relations with the SS and the necessity for close
co-operation with the SS. But the Abwher department was abolished by
Himmler in February 1944, and its operations were integrated into the SS
intelligence service to destroy what had become a hotbed for dissent
against the Fuhrer [Oskar Schindler, of the movie Schindler's List,
joined the Abwehr in late 1938]. The Abwehr was in fact the centre of
the July 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, in the wake of which
Admiral Canaris was hanged on 09 April 1945, hours before Allied forces
entered the area.
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Gehlen
Organization
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| Major General Reinhard Gehlen
headed the Foreign Armies East section of the Abwehr, directed towards
the Soviet Union. Gehlen had begun planning his surrender to the United
States at least as early as the fall of 1944. In early March 1945 a
group of Gehlen's senior officers microfilmed their holdings on the
USSR. They packed the film in steel drums and buried it throughout the
Austrian Alps. On 22 May 1945 Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an
American Counter-intelligence Corps [CIC] team. After the War, the United States recognized
that it did not have an intelligence capability directed against the
Soviet Union, a wartime ally. Gehlen negotiated an agreement with the
United States which allowed his operation to continue in existence
despite post-war de-nazification programs. The group, including his
immediate staff of about 350 agents, was known as the Gehlen
Organization. Reconstituted as a functioning espionage network under
U.S. control, it became CIA's eyes and ears in Eastern Europe and in the
Soviet Union.
Hundreds of German army and SS officers were
released from internment camps to join Gehlen's headquarters in the
Spessart Mountains in central Germany. When the staff grew to 3,000, the
Bureau Gehlen moved to a twenty-five-acre compound near Pullach, south
of Munich, operating under the innocent name of the South German
Industrial Development Organization. In the early fifties it was
estimated that the organization employed up to 4,000 intelligence
specialists in Germany, mainly former army and SS officers, and that
more than 4,000 V-men (undercover agents) were active throughout the
Soviet-bloc countries. Under Operation Sunrise, some 5,000
anti-communist Eastern European and Russian personnel were trained for
operational missions at a camp at Oberammergau in 1946, under the
command of General Sikes and SS General Burckhardt. This and related
initiatives supported insurgencies in areas such as Ukraine, which were
not entirely suppressed by the Soviets until 1956. Operation Rusty
encompassed gathering positive and counterintelligence information
concerning the activities and organizations of an Intelligence Service
and activities of various dissident German organizations. The operation
involved close coordination and cooperation with foreign and other US
intelligence organizations. The Gehlen Organization played a role in the
creation of the "missile gap," providing CIA with reports on
Soviet missile developments, supposedly based on contacts with German
scientists captured by the Russians at the end of the war.
But by the mid-1950s it became increasingly
apparent that many of the assets of the Gehlen Organization were in fact
controlled by Soviet intelligence. Dozens of operations, hundreds of
agents, thousands of innocent civilians had been betrayed, many at the
cost of their life. In 1948 contact was established with a
supposedly anti-Communist Polish underground organization known as WIN.
The group provided evidence of actions conducted against Soviet troops,
and provided secret documents to Western intelligence. WIN was provided
with money, weapons, equipment and intelligence data. But by 1952 people
entering Poland to help WIN were disappearing and its information was
becoming less reliable. Late that year the underground was suddenly
disbanded and a radio broadcast by the Polish Communist government
demonstrated, in detail, that WIN had been created by the Soviet secret
police and had received Soviet help in deceiving the West. The documents
provided had been disinformation, the program had been financed with
Western money, and the episode had distracted from other efforts to
undermine the Polish regime while it was consolidating power. In April 1956 control of the Gehlen
Organization shifted to the newly-sovereign West German Federal Republic
as the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or "Federal Intelligence
Service"). Gehlen remained chief of the West German Intelligence
service until he retired in 1968.
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