Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones

OKW ( Oberkommando der Wehrmacht , “High Command of the Armed Forces”): Created in February 1938 by Hitler to replace the War Ministry and placed directly under his command. In principle, the OKW controlled the OKH (the Army), the Luftwaffe (the Air Force, commanded by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring), and the Kriegsmarine (the Navy, commanded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz). Its Chief of Staff was Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel.

ORPO ( Hauptamt Ordnungspolizei , “Main Office of the Order Police”): Organism integrated into the SS in June 1936 under the command of SS-Oberstgruppenführer Kurt Daluege and grouping together the gendarmerie and the various forces of uniformed police ( Gemeindepolizei, Schutzpolizei or Schupo, etc.). Police battalions from the Orpo were deployed on numerous occasions to commit wholesale massacres in the context of the “Final Solution.”

OSTMINISTERIUM: Common name for Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete , “Ministry for the Occupied Territories in the East,” headed by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century .

OUN ( Organizatsiya Ukrainskikh Natsionalistiv ): “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.”

PERSÖNLICHER STAB DES REICHSFÜHRER-SS: Personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.

REVIER: Hospital or infirmary. In some concentration camps, it was called the HKB, Häftlingskrankenbau or “hospital for inmates.”

RKF ( Reichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums , “Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of the Germandom”): The destructive tasks given to the Einsatzgruppen , in Poland at the end of 1939, and especially beginning with the invasion of the USSR, were organically linked with a set of “positive” tasks also entrusted to the Reichsführer-SS: the repatriation of Volksdeutschen (“racial Germans” from the USSR and the Banat) and the settlement of German colonies in the East. To carry out these tasks, Himmler created the RKF within the SS, and was appointed its Reichskommissar. The two sectors of activities, destruction of Jews and Germanification, were closely linked both conceptually and on the organizational level: thus, when the region of Zamosc was chosen as a primary objective for Germanization, Himmler gave this task to the head of the SS and of the Police (SSPF) of the district of Lublin, SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, who also commanded Einsatz Reinhard, a structure set up to administer the three extermination camps in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, and the Orpo battalions deployed to commit massacres in the region.

ROLLBAHN: Wehrmacht units in charge of transport and supplies for troops (the term also designated the main military supply roads in the East).

RSHA ( Reichssicherheitshauptamt , “Reich Security Main Office”): Upon the Seizure of Power, on January 30, 1933, the SS sought to extend its privileges in terms of security functions. After a long internal struggle, mainly against Göring, Himmler managed, in June 1936, to take control of all the German police forces, the new political police as well as the criminal police and the ordinary police grouped together in the Orpo. These police forces nonetheless remained State institutions, financed by the budget of the Reich, whose employees remained functionaries, subject to the rules of recruitment and promotion of the State bureaucracy. To legitimize this bureaucratically incoherent state of affairs, the Reichsführer was appointed Chief of the German Police within the Ministry of the Interior. The Kripo (Criminal Police) was joined to the Gestapo to form a Security Police (SP), which remained a government structure; the Security Service (SD), however, continued to function within the SS. The SP and the SD were thus joined through “personal union”: SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich became officially Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD , a position, like that of his leader Heinrich Himmler, straddling the Party and the State.

In 1939, just after the invasion of Poland, an attempt was made to officialize this curious situation by creating a bastard structure: the RSHA, which was supposed to regroup the SP and the SD into a single organization. This reorganization was in fact carried out successfully: all the administrative services of the different structures were fused into an Amt I (personnel) and an Amt II (budget, administration, organization); the SD was divided into an Amt III ( SD-Inland , or “Interior”) and an Amt VI ( SD-Ausland , or “External”); the Gestapo was rebaptized Amt IV, with the pompous designation of Gegnererforschung und -bekämpfung (“Investigation and Struggle Against Adversaries”); and the Kripo became Amt V under the name Verbrechensbekämpfung (“Struggle Against Criminals”). An Amt VII was also created for “Ideological Research and Evaluation,” Weltanschauliche Forschung und Auswertung . But none of this was ever legalized: the ministerial bureaucracy was opposed to the amalgamation of State administrations and Party organizations; it was out of the question to finance the SD out of the Reich’s budget. Thus, even if the RSHA existed in actual fact, it had no letterhead, and it was forbidden to use the term in correspondence; Heydrich officially remained “Chief of the SP and the SD.”

The structure of the RSHA was reproduced at all the regional levels, Oberabschnitt, Abschnitt , etc.: in each district there was an Amt III, an Amt IV, and an Amt V, all under the responsibility of an Inspekteur der SP und des SD (IdS). After the beginning of the war, the same structures were established in the occupied territories, where the Inspekteur became a Befehlshaber (“Commander”) der SP und des SD (BdS), who sometimes had under his orders several Kommandeur der SP und des SD (KdS). The Orpo followed the same scheme, with IdO, BdO, and KdO.

SA ( Sturmabteilung , “Stormtroops”): Paramilitary units of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) who played a major role during the rise to power of the Party and just after the Seizure of Power in January 1933. In June 1934, with the support of the SS and the Wehrmacht, Hitler liquidated the leaders of the SA, including its chief, Ernst Röhm. The SA continued to exist until the fall of the regime, but no longer played any political role.

SD ( Hauptamt Sicherheitsdienst , “Main Office of the Security Service”): SS structure created in the autumn of 1931 under command of Reinhard Heydrich. See also RSHA.

SP ( Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei , “Main Office of the Security Police”): Sometimes called Sipo. See also RSHA.

SPIESS: Familiar term designating the noncom in charge of a company, usually a Hauptfeldwebel (Sergeant-Major).

SS ( Schutzstaffel , “Protection Detachment”): The first SS units were formed within the National Socialist Party in the summer of 1925, initially as bodyguards for the Führer, Adolf Hitler, who was already seeking to create a counterweight to the SA. Heinrich Himmler was appointed Reichsführer-SS , “Supreme Leader of the SS,” on January 6, 1929. The SS became completely independent of the SA in the fall of 1930 and played a major role in the elimination of its leaders in June 1934.

STO ( Service du travail obligatoire ): Program instituted in France by the German occupants to send forcibly recruited workers to Germany.

VOLKSDEUTSCHEN: Unlike Reichsdeutschen , these were Germans who had been living for several generations abroad, most of them in homogeneous communities.

WVHA ( Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt , “Economy and Administration Main Office”): This SS structure was created in the beginning of 1942 to regroup the administrative-economic branch of the SS, the branches in charge of matters of construction and supplies, the economic enterprises of the SS, and the Inspectorate for Concentration Camps (IKL). Headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, Himmler’s economic éminence grise, the WVHA included five Amtsgruppe , or “groups of offices”: Amtsgruppe A, Truppenverwaltung (“Troop Administration”), and Amtsgruppe B, Truppenwirtschaft (“Troop Finance”), managing all questions of administration and supply for the Waffen-SS (the fighting units of the SS) as well as the concentration camp guards; Amtsgruppe C, Bauweisen (“Construction”), including all technical services of the SS linked to building; the Amtsgruppe D was the rebaptized IKL; as for the Amtsgruppe W, Wirtschaftliche Unternehmungen (“Economic Enterprises”), it covered the immense SS economic empire, which included firms in sectors as diverse as construction, armaments, mineral water, textiles, and publishing.