The Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, always serves as Office VI's main historiographical foil, for the agencies' contentious relationship defines the scholarly literature. Office VI's self-definition as a foreign intelligence service, its claim for totality, and its usurpation of the Abwehr in 1944 account for this focus. Yet as the preceding chapters have shown, it was comparatively easy for Office VI to paint the Abwehr as insufficiently ideologized and to take it over. A closer investigation indicates, however, that Office VI's main rival was not the Abwehr, but the Auswärtige Amt under minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Confrontations between Office VI and the Auswärtige Amt were endemic to Office VI's understanding of its role at the intersection of intelligence gathering and ideological foreign political activism. The tensions between the two entities only grew as Schellenberg, who fancied himself a foreign policy expert and a politician, came into his own as the head of Office VI and deliberately encroached on the sphere of the Auswärtige Amt.

The Auswärtige Amt reported on political and economic developments abroad; this had been a key task of diplomatic posts since time immemorial. With its concentration on political and economic information and its poorly defined mandate, Office VI was set to infringe on Auswärtige Amt territory – initially by default but increasingly by design. However, conflict was not restricted to Office VI's information gathering. Ribbentrop attempted to make the collection and evaluation of information central to his office and even though he targeted primarily information gathering in Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, Office VI was affected as well.