When Odilo Globocnik, SS and police leader in Lublin, Poland, transferred to the Italian OZAK region in late 1943, he took with him a group of around 100 men who had run the notorious Aktion Reinhard extermination camps--Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor--where 1.5 million people (mostly Jews) had been killed. This book describes the little-known activities of this group, known as Abteilung R (Reinhard), in the OZAK region from 1943 to 1945. Here they not only continued persecuting Jews, but also became involved in the fight against the armed resistance movement, participated in security tasks,...

After occupying the Balkans early in the war, the Axis powers constantly struggled to police the region. The partisan presence was quite substantial, and while the various fractured guerrilla groups expended a great deal of energy fighting among themselves, they were still a threat to German/Italian control. The Germans and Italians were heavily engaged with the Allies across multiple fronts, so manpower was thinly spread. Therefore, much of the responsibility for combating a ruthless and in some cases highly militarized resistance contingent fell to nonmilitary police units. An example of...