Lone Sentry: TM-E 30-451 Handbook on German Military Forces: Internal Special Functions of the RF-SS: SS and Police: Other Military and Auxiliary Organizations

CHAPTER III. OTHER MILITARY AND AUXILIARY ORGANIZATIONS

Section I. SS AND POLICE

3. Internal Special Functions of the RF-SS

In his capacity as commander of the SS proper, Himmler has four special functions not directly connected with the organization and administration of the SS. They are:

a. The Department for the Repatriation of Racial Germans (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle—Vomi) is a bureau which is characterized as a Main Department (Hauptamt) because it comes directly under the RF-SS. Since October 1939 this department has carried out the far-flung resettlement plans for "racial" Germans from the western borderlands of Russia. Hundreds of thousands of such persons have been transferred to the annexed areas of Poland.

b. The Bureau Main Department SS-Obergruppenführer Heissmeyer (Dienststelle Hauptamt SS-Obergruppenführer Heissmeyer) has as its chief mission the control of the National Political Educational Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten—NPEA) and Boarding Schools (Heimschulen). The former are schools for selected pupils from all over Germany who are supposed to attain a high scholastic record while subjected to most severe indoctrination in Party ideology. Heimschulen are designed for the children of soldiers or of civil service officials who cannot maintain a permanent residence. These schools, in which political indoctrination is especially accentuated, have grown rapidly in number to accommodate large numbers of children rendered homeless by air raids.

c. The Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst des RF-SS—SD or SD des RF-SS) is nominally a branch of the General SS but is controlled, under Himmler, by the Central Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) along with the Security Police. It is officially the intelligence service of the Party against internal enemies, while the Security Police (including the Gestapo) is the executive agent for combatting them. From its original mission the SD has constantly grown in scope and in 1944 absorbed the bulk of the Abwehr, the intelligence organization of the Armed Forces. Many of its members were until recently engaged in occupied areas, but their number inside Germany has greatly increased with the shrinking of the areas still occupied. At the same time their importance in Germany has developed steadily and their preparations for the eventuality of defeat can be expected to be the most efficient and far reaching.

d. With the formation of Volks Grenadier units in the latter part of 1944 the RF-SS became responsible for the personnel of these units, acting through a new special branch of the Army Personnel Office (PA/P 7). It is believed that such personnel are more or less interchangeable with the members of the Waffen-SS.

TM-E 30-451 Handbook on German Military Forces		LoneSentry.com