Главное управление имперской безопасности Германии (РСХА) (г. Берлин)

Microfilms are held by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. The collection's contents are catalogued in six inventories. Inventories no. 1, 2, and 6 are arranged by structure and chronology, and catalogue documents of departments I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII of the RSHA. Inventories no. 3, 4, and 5 are arranged by document type. These inventories catalogue orders, edicts, directives, instructions, accounts, surveys, reports, dispatches, employee directories, surveillance files, and correspondence of the Reich Security Main Office and its subordinate entities regarding the issues indicated. RSHA documents include orders, edicts, and other regulations on the structure, interaction, internal procedure, and recordkeeping of the SD, the Gestapo, and the police in the RSHA system. The collection's materials include extensive documentation from the prewar period on the Jews: orders, edicts, circulars, reports, dispatches, accounts, surveys, references, statistical information, letters, articles, pamphlets, bulletins, and newspaper clippings on the situation of Jews in Germany and other countries; on the activities of Jewish organizations; on repressive measures against Jews in Germany, in particular, on the restriction of the rights of Jews in economic, political, and social life, including with regard to property rights; on stripping Jews of German citizenship and confiscating their property; on restrictions on the Jewish press; on closing, dissolving, and banning Jewish political, social, religious, and cultural-educational organizations, individual newspapers and other media, schools, and libraries; on actions against the Jewish population (arrests, pogroms, bans on assembly, and internment in concentration camps); on entities engaged in deporting Jews; and on the forced deportation of Jews, financed by funds and property confiscated from the victims. There are documents of a review and analytical nature on the history of the Jewish people, its role in international life, and on plans to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. These include a Gestapo report on the conduct of and preparations for the World Jewish Congress (WIC) in Geneva (1934-37); newspaper clippings on the situation of Jews in Germany (1934); overviews of the activities of various Jewish organizations in Germany (1934-36); overviews of the activities of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), including maps of the jurisdictions of its regional bodies (1936); the report "Jewish Political Organizations of Germany as of 15 February 1936" (the report contains information on the following Jewish organizations: the Reich Union of Jewish Veterans, the Union of German Jewish Youth, the Association of Liberal Judaism, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, Keren Hayesod, the Jewish Girls' Association for Labour in Palestine, and the Jewish Women's League). The collection contains edicts and decrees on the Jews: an edict by Hitler's Nazi Party deputy, Hess, forbidding party members from associating with Jews; Gestapo reports on the activities of Jews in Germany; decrees that Jews be resettled to a separate city quarter in their respective municipalities, that Aryan domestic servants be forbidden to work in Jewish homes, that Jewish merchants be instructed to offer their goods to Aryans by telephone, in writing, or through middlemen, that strict surveillance be kept on the children of Jews who had left Germany, and that they be stripped of their German citizenship (1935-38); foreign newspapers and journal articles on the persecution of Jews in Germany (1935-38); explanations by the German. Minister of Justice regarding Nazi race laws pertaining to Jews (1936-38), including laws on stripping them of their citizenship, on firing all employees of non-Aryan origin, on introducing a quota for Jews in German schools and institutions of higher learning, on defining the concept of "Jew," and on rules for resettling Jews to a specially designated city quarter; a Darmstadt Gestapo telegram on measures against Jews in Heusenstamm (1937); decrees, laws, edicts, and notes on removing Jews from Germany's public life (1938-39); a file on the confiscation of Jewish orphanages and charitable institutions (1939); a law on concluding apartment rental contracts with Jews; and a Ministry of Communications circular forbidding Jews from using sleeping cars and restaurant cars (1938). The collection also contains documents requiring any child with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother to take the mother's last name; the banning of Jewish political organizations; a dispatch from the Breslau Gestapo on confiscating the property of a local B'nai B'rith lodge (1937); a file on the abolition of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (1937-38); and a file on drawing up a plan to abolish the Zionist organizations of Germany (1938). The collection contains extensive documents on Jewish emigration from Germany in the 1930s: reports of the Hansa Transport Bureau and its correspondence with the Reich Resettlement Bureau on resettling German Jews (1937-38); correspondence of the Hansa Bureau with the Gestapo and with private individuals on resettling Jews in Ecuador and Brazil; German Jewish Aid Society correspondence with the Gestapo on speeding up Jewish emigration from Germany; and Aid Society correspondence with HICEM, the JCA, and the JDC, all of which were prepared to finance this project. Also contained are documents on financial aid to Jews in Germany; financial statements of entities in charge of Jewish emigration; the minutes of interrogations of Jews on their preparations for resettlement (1934-37); Gestapo accounts and reports on the establishment of trade schools to prepare Jews for resettlement, and the curricula of these schools (1935-39); and lists of Jewish retraining camps (1937-38). The collection also contains reports and newspaper clippings on plans to resettle Jews in Mexico (1938), Italy (1932), Paraguay (1938), Poland (1938), Canada (1938), Madagascar (1938), Rhodesia (1928), and Australia (1938). The collection contains reports, overviews, and notes on various Jewish organizations, including the Jewish People's Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism in London, Israelitische Allianz, the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany, the Committee to Defend the Interests of Austrian Jews, the Organization of Legitimist Jewish War Veterans, the International Union of Revisionist Zionists, the Association of Jewish Medical Students, the Jewish Women's League, the Union of Jewish War Veterans, the youth league Hechaver, and the Jewish Colonization Association. The collection also contains statistical data on Jews in the cities of Germany. The collection also includes documents of Vienna-based Jewish organizations, such as (in chronological order) a report by the Jewish religious community of Vienna (1930), that contains data on the number of Jews living in Vienna, on the income of that organization, and on the issue of Jewish migration from the provinces to Vienna; a report on Jewish emigration from Vienna to the United States, Britain, and Palestine, and on contacts and collaboration of the Vienna community with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Ezra Society, the Jewish Colonization Association, the Zionist Federation of Germany, Hechalutz, Agudath Israel, Keren Hayesod, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, and the Alliance of Non-Aryan Christians; the charter of the Jewish State Party in Austria, and information on branches of the Jewish State Party in Czechoslovakia; the charter of the Jewish People's Party (Vienna); materials of the Judda Union of Jewish Students in Vienna and of other Jewish organizations in Vienna (1933-38); dispatches of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA); newspaper clippings and other materials on the Berne trial regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1934-35); documents on the activities of the B'nai B'rith, and confiscated documents of this organization (1933-38); a report by the leader of the Jewish religious community of Vienna on the activities of the community in November—December 1938; and a memo by the Jewish religious community of Vienna on the Second World Conference of Polish Jews (1938-39). The collection contains Gestapo bureau correspondence on the activities of Jewish organizations (1940-43); alphabetized lists of German Jews residing in Paris in 1939-41. The collection also includes reports by Einsatzgruppe, police and Security Service squads, and informational bulletins on their activities in the mass annihilation of Jews and the creation of ghettos (the report of Einsatzgruppe A, attached to the Army Group North, on the annihilation of 229,052 Jews in the territory of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, and the northwestern regions of Russia during the period October 1941—January 1942). Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow. A guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive, ed. by D. E. Fishman, M. Kupovetsky, V. Kuzelenkov, Scranton - London 2010. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was created in September 1939 by the merger of the Security Police and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) of the Reichsführer-SS. The RSHA was headed by Reinhard Heydrich, and, after Heydrich's assassination in 1942, by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The RSHA numbered approximately 70,000 employees, and its structure was altered repeatedly. As of October 1943, it included seven departments: I: organizational issues and the training of personnel; II: finance and economics; III: surveillance of internal political life; IV: the functions of the former Secret State Police Administration (Gestapo); V: criminal police (this department included the Criminal Technical Institute and the Criminal Biological Institute; the establishment of a central institute of forensic medicine was planned); VI: external reconnaissance; and VII: information, propaganda, and counter-propaganda. In 1944, after the elimination of the Abwehr, an eighth (military) department was created to lead reconnaissance-diversionary efforts. The departments were divided into groups, and the groups into sections.The RSHA was under the command of the Reichsführer-SS and chief of the German police Himmler. In 1943, Himmler be-came Reichsminister of the Interior and General Plenipotentiary for Reich Security. In the spring of 1941, in the context of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich formed the Einsatzgruppen, which were attached to Wehrmacht formations, to carry out the annihilation of Jews. Section IV B 4 of the RSHA, under Adolf Eichmann, was responsible for the Jews. From late 1941, it directed the deportation of most of European Jewry to ghettos, slave labor, and extermination camps. At the Nuremberg trial, the Gestapo, the SS, the storm detachments (SA) of the Nazi Party, and the Security Service (SD), by whose forces the RSHA had committed "crimes against humanity," were declared criminal organizations. Kaltenbrunner was executed by sentence of the Nuremburg tribunal.