On September 27, 1939, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Security Main Office was established from the Secret State Police, Criminal Police, and the SS Security Service. It saw itself as the executive and conceptual core of an ideologically oriented police force, whose task was to maintain the purity of the German national body. Its mission was to eliminate the opponents of the racially and nationally based Nazi regime - primarily the Jews, seen as the embodiment of the counter-race, the anti-people - in the fate struggle invoked by Hitler. It was from the war youth, which lacked the experience of the front lines of World War I, that Heydrich recruited the leaders of his fighting administration - politically engaged young men who abandoned their secure careers as doctors, lawyers, or educators to serve in a system unbound by any legal foundation.