"Sipo and SD was a conglomerate, formed... when Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuehrer SS, became chief of the German Police. He fused the Criminal Investigative Police (Kripo) and the (the political police) to form the Security Police ( or Sipo) under the command of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. ...[T]he exchange of personnel ...produced an amalgam of party and state agencies that became central to the execution of most of the terror and mass murder of the Third Reich. ...Although no single organization carries full responsibility for the evils of the Third Reich, the SS-police system was the executor of terrorism and "population policy" in the same way that the military carried out the Reich’s imperialistic aggression. Within the police state, even the concentration camps could not rival the impact of Sipo and SD. It was the source not only of the "s" who administered terror and genocide by assigning victims to the camps, but also of the police executives for identification and arrest, and of the command and staff for a major instrument of execution, the . ...Sipo and SD was ...central to many ...controversial developments in the Third Reich—the totalitarian efforts to achieve conformity and to end opposition, the race and resettlement programs, the development and implementation of imperialistic expansion ...The creation of the totalitarian police state as an essential step toward the provides one ...perspective for this study. ...[H]ow [could] a modern of such cultural prestige as Germany... be twisted to Hitler's ends, how so many thousands of functionaries—more ordinary Germans than Nazi extremists or sadists—could be found to execute Hitler's will[?] When the Nazi experience becomes the will of the ... the result is both an alabi... and a smoke screen that obscures insights into how similarly extreme developments might reoccur, perhaps without a Hitler or a German '."