Order Police Played the Key Role in the Holocaust

In both “Holocaust by Bullets” and “Holocaust by Gas”, to be more precise. According to official estimates, Order Police battalions involved in direct killing operations were responsible for at least one million murders by shooting.

Using the “Nebe adjustments” (Order Police was no better than Einsatzgruppen in inflating their murderous “accomplishments”), this number is reduced to something like 350,000… which is also a lot (and thus does not change much).

Starting in 1941, the regional Order Police units (battalions) helped transport Jews from ghettos in both Poland and the USSR (and elsewhere in occupied Europe) to concentration and extermination camps; they also participated in operations to hunt down and murder Jews outside the ghettos.

The Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. After SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was appointed Chief of German Police by Hitler in 1936, he immediately reformed the Order Police and incorporated it into the SS.

The top and upper leadership positions of the Orpo were filled by police officers who belonged to or had joined the SS. Orpo was established as a centralized organization based in Berlin uniting the municipal, city, and rural uniformed police that had been previously organized on a state-by-state basis (as it is now).

Himmler and Kurt Daluege, chief of the Orpo, transformed Orpo into militarized formations ready to serve the regime’s aims of conquest and existential racial war. Police troops were first formed into battalion-sized formations right before the invasion of Poland, where they were deployed for security purposes, taking part in executions and mass deportations.

During World War II, Orpo was tasked with policing the civilian population of the occupied territories. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, its activities in no time escalated to genocide.

Over 11,000 members of the Order Police entered the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion. Orpo battalions attached to Wehrmacht security divisions and Einsatzgruppen independently and in collaboration with those units, became heavily involved in the “Holocaust by Bullets”. The first mass-murder of 3,000 Jews by Orpo occurred in occupied Bia;ystok on July 12, 1941.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the role of Orpo units in mass murder was obscured both by the lack of evidence (and reliable witnesses) and by deliberate obfuscation, while most of the focus was on far more visible SS Einsatzgruppen.