consolidated into four in March 1941: crime policy and prevention; opera-
tions; police records and tracing; and the Institute of Criminal Technology.
The establishment of an Institute of Criminal Biology in December 1941
underlined the great importance that the Kripo continued to assign to
prevention based on ‘the biology of heredity’. Finally, in 1943 an Institute
of Criminal Medicine was established, based in Vienna.
9
Office III (SD Home Affairs), under Otto Ohlendorf, which essentially
emerged from Central Department II1 (Assessment of the Various Spheres
of National Life) of the SD Main Office, consisted of four departments
responsible for issues of ethnicity, legal and constitutional matters, culture,
and the economy. The SD Home Affairs Office produced the ‘Reports from
the Reich’, the detailed monthly reports on the population’s ‘mood and
bearing’, and had the task of watching out for developments in the individ-
ual ‘spheres of life’—such as culture, the economy or ‘ethnic matters’
(Volkstum)—that ran counter to Nazi aims and reporting them to the
appropriate authorities.
10
Office VI (SD Foreign Affairs), the successor to Office III of the SD Main
Office, was the largest Office in the RSHA, with a total of eight departments
and thirty-eight sections,
11
and was headed by Heinz Jost. Born in 1904,he
was a lawyer by profession, had been a party member since 1927 , and was a
senior official in the SD.
12
Nevertheless, the foreign department of the SD
achieved only modest successes during the first two years of the war.
It succeeded in building networks of agents in the important neutral
countries, namely Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, as well as in
Italy, Germany’s ally, and it worked closely with the secret services of the
south-east European countries. However, it failed to achieve significant
espionage successes against Great Britain, the United States, or the Soviet
Union.
13
Office VII (Research into and the Combating of Opponents) was initially
composed of the departments: Basic Research, Ideological Opponents,
Domestic Issues, and Foreign Issues. In March 1941 the work of Office
VII, whose head, Franz Alfred Six, was simultaneously pursuing his aca-
demic ambitions,
14
was reduced to ‘scholarly’ research on opponents, while
various sections involved in combating opponents using intelligence meth-
ods were transferred to the Gestapo. Others which were involved in the
active investigation of opponents were assigned to the Home Affairs and
Foreign Intelligence Offices.
15
repression in the reich 471