from Hitler himself or one of Hitler’s immediate subordinates.
The RSD’s importance was underscored by the elaborate initiation
of all new recruits, administered annually in Hitler’s presence on
9 November—the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch—at the
Feldherrnhalle in Munich.REICHSSICHERHEITSHAUPTAMT (RSHA). The unified security
and intelligence service of the Third Reich, the Reichssicherheits-
hauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) came into official existence
on 1 October 1939. Created by Heinrich Himmler, it sought to give
coherence to the maze of confused jurisdictions that had existed pre-
viously, although the result was even greater bureaucratic complex-
ity. It was headed by Reinhard Heydrich until his assassination in
June 1942 and then, after a six-month hiatus, by Ernst Kaltenbrun-
ner until May 1945. Even the Abwehr eventually lost its separate
status and became part of this enormous apparatus in mid-1944.
Unlike two of its main components—the Gestapo and the Sicher-
heitsdienst—the RSHA was not declared a criminal organization by
the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
REIF, WOLFGANG (1937– ). An East German diplomat and agent
for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Bundesnach-
richtendienst (BND), Wolfgang Reif was serving as vice consul at
the embassy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Jakarta,
Indonesia, when his initial recruitment by the CIA under the code
name greif took place in 1978. Faced with escalating personal prob-
lems, he decided to leave the CIA and begin an association with the
BND in April 1980. Yet after his return to the GDR and the stabiliza-
tion of his marriage, some suspicious correspondence was subjected
to careful handwriting and chemical analysis by the Ministerium
für Staatssicherheit and led to his arrest on 20 December 1981.
Although his life sentence was later reduced to 15 years, his actual
release occurred in December 1989 following the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
REILE, OSCAR (1897–?). A veteran counterintelligence officer and
author, Oscar Reile served in World War I and became a police
officer in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) in 1923. After joining the
REILE, OSCAR • 365