Much of how the SS was moulded into a brutal and feared organisation can be laid at the door of Himmler. By late 1934, Himmler and his deputy, SD chief Reinhard Heydrich, had centralized the regional German political police departments within a single new agency in Berlin, the Secret State Police. After Hitler appointed him Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police on June 17, 1936, Himmler centralized the various criminal police detective forces in Germany into the Reich Criminal Police Office and united the Gestapo and Criminal Police within the Security Police Main Office. Himmler secured SS control over a centralized concentration camp system in 1934. Throughout Germany, various civilian authorities and police agencies had established …show more content…
Units known as SS Death's-Head Units guarded and administered the camps. Although the Security Police had exclusive authority to incarcerate, release, and “officially” order the execution of prisoners, the daily life of prisoners lay in the brutal and merciless hands of the camp commandants and these SS Death's-Head Units, which were not part of the police forces.
Then when Hitler appointed Himmler Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police on June 17, 1936, he centralized the various criminal police detective forces in Germany into the Reich Criminal Police Office and united the Gestapo and Criminal Police within the Security Police Main Office.
Himmler also centralized the German uniformed police forces, known as the Order Police, within the Order Police Main Office in Berlin under the command of SS General Kurt Daluege. On September 27, 1939, four weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland to initiate World War II, Himmler fused the Security Police and the SD into the Reich Security Main Office, the agency that would be tasked with implementing the Holocaust in
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He aimed to utilize the executive authority of the police to implement ideological policies deemed by the Nazi leadership to be essential for the survival and expansion of the German race. These included smashing political opposition and expelling or eliminating “undesirable” racial groups at home (such as Jews, Roma and Sinti, and people with hereditary disabilities), initiating a program of military expansion, and establishing permanent rule of a German “master race” in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The security of this “thousand-year Reich” would be guaranteed by the elimination of “enemy races,” such as the Jews—wherever they lived—and the enslavement of other “inferior races” such as Poles, Russians, and other Slavic peoples, after physically annihilating their intellectual, cultural, military, and political elites. Late 1934, Himmler and his deputy, SD chief Reinhard Heydrich, had centralized the regional German political police departments within a single new agency in Berlin, the Secret State Police. After Hitler appointed him Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police on June 17, 1936, Himmler centralized the various criminal police detective forces in Germany into the Reich Criminal Police Office and united the Gestapo and Criminal Police within the Security Police Main