The Kindly Ones

OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres, “Army High Command”): Whereas the OKH was in principle subordinate to the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), in practice it commanded the entirety of operations on the Eastern Front while the OKW controlled operations on all the other fronts. Hitler took direct command of the OKH in December 1941, after dismissing Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Brauchitsch.

OKHG (Oberkommando der Heeresgruppe): The headquarters of an Army Group, which controlled several armies.

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.