DESCRIPTION

Police Battallion x 52

By the time that the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR, the population was so corrupted and upset by the previous 20 years of communist rule that some chose to collaborate with the invaders. In fairness, it should be noted, that only a few of them could be counted as ideological enemies of Soviet communism, whereas the majority of them were only trying to better adapt to the conditions of the Nazi "new order" (which turned out to be no better than the old Bolshevik's one). Auxiliary police, although quite large in numbers, never had a single uniform apart from armbands with the seal of the local commander's office, and were divided into static and mobile units. These were formed into special battalions that performed punitive actions so horrific that even the Germans themselves shunned them. All in all there were 20 such battalions in Estonia, 25 in Latvia, 47 in Ukraine, and were even more numerous in the occupied territories of Russia itself. Also such punishers were widely exported from one place to another, as far as Slovakia, Poland and even to Italy and Southern France. After the turning point in the war was reached most of the occupation police rushed to the side of the winners, trying to infiltrate the ranks of the guerrillas, from which they differed very little in appearance because of their paramilitary clothes and weapons of all calibres.