The Kindly Ones

GLOSSARY

AA (Auswärtiges Amt, “Department of the Exterior”): Foreign Office, headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop.

ABWEHR: Military intelligence service. Its full name was Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, “Foreign Office/Defense for the Armed Forces High Command.”

AMT: Office.

ARBEITSEINSATZ (“work operation”): Department in charge of organizing forced labor of inmates in concentration camps.

AOK (Armeeoberkommando): The headquarters of an army, which controlled a certain number of divisions. At all levels (Army, Division, Regiment, etc.), the organization of military headquarters included, among other things, a Chief of Staff; a Ia (pronounced “One-a,” “Eins-a,” in German), the general officer in charge of operations; a Ib (Eins-b) or quartermaster in charge of supplies; and a Ic/AO (Eins-c/AO), the officer in charge of military intelligence, or Abwehroffizier.

BERÜCK: Commander of the rear zone of an Army Group.

EINSATZ: Action, operation.

EINSATZGRUPPE (“action group” of the SP and SD): Deployed for the first time in 1938, for the Anschluss and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, these SS groups were in charge of dealing with the most urgent security tasks until permanent police Stelle (“offices”) could be set up. The system was formalized for Poland in September 1939. For the invasion of the USSR, following a formal agreement between the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the Wehrmacht, an Einsatzgruppe was posted to each Army Group (with a fourth, Einsatzgruppe D, attached directly to the Eleventh Army for the Crimea and the Romanian occupation zone). Each Einsatzgruppe was made up of a Gruppenstab, or general staff, and several Einsatzkommandos (Ek) or Sonderkommandos (Sk). Each Kommando was in turn subdivided into a general staff (the Kommandostab), with support perso

GAULEITER: Nazi Germany was divided into administrative regions called Gaue. Each Gau was supervised by a Gauleiter, a member of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) appointed by Hitler, to whom he reported.

GESTAPO (Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police”): Directed by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, from 1939 till the end of the war. See RSHA.

GOLDFASANEN (“Golden Pheasants”): Pejorative term for civil servants in the Ostministerium, because of their yellowish-brown uniforms, and for other Nazi functionaries.

GFP (Geheime Feldpolizei, “Secret Military Police”): Branch of the Wehrmacht in charge of military security in the theater of operations, especially in the fight against partisans. Most of the officers in the GFP had been recruited from the German police and so belonged to the Security Police (SP) or else the SS; still, this service of military security remained distinct from the services of the RSHA.

HÄFTLING (plural Häftlinge): Inmate.

HIWI (Hilfswillige, “voluntary workers”): Native auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, usually recruited from prisoners’ camps, and employed in the rear for transport, supplies, hard labor, etc.

HONVÉD: The Hungarian army.

HSSPF (Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer, “Supreme Head of the SS and the Police”): To ensure coordination of all SS offices or suboffices at the regional level, in 1937 Himmler established the HSSPFs, who, in principle, had all SS groups in their zone under their orders. In Germany, the Reichsführer-SS appointed one of them for each Wehrkreis (“defense region,” defined by the Wehrmacht), and, later on, one for each occupied country, who sometimes had under his orders, as in occupied Poland (the “Generalgouvernement”), several SSPFs. In Soviet Russia, during the invasion of 1941, Himmler appointed an HSSPF for each of the three Army Groups, North, Center, and South.

IKL (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager, “Inspectorate for Concentration Camps”): The first concentration camp, the one in Dachau, was created on March 20, 1933, followed by many others. In June 1934, following “the Röhm putsch” and the elimination of leaders of the SA, the camps were placed under the direct control of the SS, which then created the IKL, based in Oranienburg, under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, the commander of Dachau, to whom Himmler gave the mission of reorganizing all the camps. The “Eicke system,” which was put in place in 1934 and which lasted until the first years of the war, aimed at the psychological, and sometimes physical, destruction of opponents of the regime; forced labor, at the time, was used only as torture. But in the begi

KGF (Kriegsgefangener): Prisoner of war.

KL (Konzentrationslager, “concentration camp,” often incorrectly called KZ by the inmates): The daily management of a KL was the responsibility of a department overseen by the Kommandant of the camp, the Abteilung III, run by a Schutzhaftlagerführer or Lagerführer (“head of preventive detention camp”) and his adjunct. The office in charge of the organization of inmate labor, the Arbeitseinsatz, was attached to this department under the designation IIIa. The other departments were respectively: I, Kommandantur; II, Politische Abteilung (“Political Department,” or representatives in the camp of the SP); IV, administration; V, medical and sanitary (for the SS in the camp as well as for the inmates); VI, training and upkeep of the troops; and VII, guard troop of the SS. All these offices were administered by SS officers or noncoms, but the majority of the work was carried out by inmate-functionaries, often called the “privileged ones.”

KRIPO (Kriminalpolizei, “Criminal Police”): Headed by SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe from 1937 to July 1944. See also RSHA.