The Order Police Origin

When I first began to read Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, I felt completely lost within the first few pages as to how many police organizations there were and who was sent where, how many groups of men there were, and what they did. Thus, I decided to do a breakdown of what exactly happened. Heinrich Himmler, who was in charge of the SS, decided to break the police units into two groups: Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and the Order Police, both having main headquarter offices located in Berlin. The Security Police consisted of the Secret State Police, also known as the Gestapo, and the Criminal Police, or Kripo, both under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich. Their main focuses were on fighting the Nazi Party’s political enemies as well as other nonpolitical crimes, respectively. The second branch, on the other hand, consisted of three groups: the Schupo, or city police, the rural county police, and the small-town police.[1] The Order Police was under the leadership of Kurt Daluege. At this point in 1938, the Order Police consisted of 62,000 men. As the threat of war grew, however, so did the numbers in the force. Within one year, their numbers had more than doubled[2], and by mid-1940, they had grown to almost 245,000 men.[3] Once the war erupted, the battalions were in full force. They started with 21 brigades, and soon extended to 101. They were wherever Germany was fighting; 13 battalions were sent to central Poland, where they collected weapons and captured Polish soldiers, 7 were sent to incorporated territories, 10 were sent to Bohemia and Moravia, 6 were in Norway, while 4 were stationed in the Netherlands[4]. Their most important job: to ensure the territories Germany occupied stayed in German hands.

[1] Browning, Christopher R. “The Order Police.” In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, p. 4.

[2] Browning, p. 5.

[3] Ibid, p. 6.

[4] Ibid, p. 6.

Media Source:

Author: Unknown. Polizeibataillon 101 in Łódź. November 1940/Spring 1941. Permission: PD-Polish. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Washington, D.C. Accessed: November 12, 2015. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polizeibataillon_101_in_%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA.jpg