3 Jan. 46

treated both ministerial questions of leadership and individual executive questions, that is to say, matters of the Sipo and the SD. From the legal administrative point of view, however, the organizational scheme shows an illegal state of affairs in that the RSHA as such never actually had official validity. The formal, legal position was different from that shown on this chart. Party and State offices with different authority were amalgamated. Under this designation RSHA, no directives or laws or orders could be issued on a legal basis, because the State Police, in its ministerial capacity, was still subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior, whereas the SD, despite this set-up, was an organ of the Party.

Therefore if I wanted to reproduce this administrative scheme accurately, I should, for example, have to put in place of Amt IV, the Amt "Political Police", a part of the former Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei. This Amt "Political Police" existed formally to the very end and had sprung from the Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior. Also, the Secret State Police Amt, the Central Office of the Prussian Secret State Police, the head office of all the political police offices of the different Länder, continued to exist formally.

ThThus, ministerial questions continued to be dealt with under the heading of the Minister of the Interior. So far as it was necessary to emphasize the formal competence of the Ministry of the Interior, this was indicated in the heading "Reich Minister of the Interior" with the filing notice "Pol," the former designation of the Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior, together with the appropriate filing notice of the competent department of the former Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei; for example, filing notice "Pol-S" meant Sicherheitspolizei; "V" meant Amt Verwaltung und Recht (Administration and Law).

The RSHA was therefore nothing more than a camouflage designation which did not correctly represent the actual state of affairs but gave the Chief of the Sipo and the SD, as a collective designation for the Chief of the Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei and the Chief of the SD Hauptamt (an office which existed until 1939), the opportunity of using one or the other letterhead at any time.

At the same time it gave him the opportunity of an internal amalgamation of all forces and the opportunity of a division of the spheres of work on a practical, effective basis. But the State offices in this Amt did remain in a way dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, and similarly the departments of the SD remained departments of the Party.

The SD Hauptamt, or the RSHA, had formally only the significance of an SS Main Office, in which the SS members of the Sipo