Hiwi (volunteer)

Hiwi is a German abbreviation meaning either "voluntary assistant" (Hilfswilliger, willing to help) or "assistant scientist" (Hilfswissenschaftler). Following Operation Barbarossa in World War II, the term Hiwis acquired a thoroughly negative meaning. Between September 1941 and July 1944 the SS began training and deploying collaborationist auxiliary police recruited directly from the Soviet POW camps for service with Nazi Germany in the General Government.

In just one instance, the German SS and police inducted, processed, and trained 5,082 Hiwi men before the end of 1944 at the SS training camp division of the Trawniki concentration camp set up in the village of Trawniki southeast of Lublin. They were called Hilfswilligen, lit. "those willing to help" and deployed in all major killing sites of the "Final Solution", which was their primary purpose of training. They took an active role in the executions of Jews at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Warsaw (three times), Częstochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Kraków, Białystok (twice), Majdanek as well as Auschwitz, not to mention Trawniki itself.

Hilfswilliger ("voluntary assistant")


The word entered into several other languages during World War II when German troops enlisted volunteers from the occupied territories for supplementary service (drivers, cooks, hospital attendants, ammunition carriers, messengers, sappers, etc.).

In the context of World War II the term often has connotations of collaborationism, and (in the case of the occupied Soviet territories) of anti-Bolshevism (and widely presented by Germans as such). A captured "Hiwi" told his People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or NKVD) interrogators:

"''Russians in the German Army can be put into three groups:
 * '' First: Soldiers mobilized by German troops, so-called Cossack sections, attached to German divisions.
 * '' Second: Voluntary Assistants (Hilfswillige) - Local civilians or Russian prisoners who volunteer or Red Army soldiers who desert to join the Germans. These wear full German uniform with their own ranks and badges. They eat like German soldiers and they are attached to German regiments.
 *  Third: Russian prisoners doing the dirty jobs, kitchens, stables and so on. The categories are treated differently, volunteers treated best."

Soviet authorities referred to Hiwis as "former Russians", regardless of the circumstances of their joining, and their fate at the hands of the NKVD was most likely death or the Gulag.

The reliance upon "Hiwis" exposed a gap between Nazi ideologues and pragmatic German Army commanders. Nazi leaders, such as German dictator Adolf Hitler, regarded all Russians as "sub-human" (Untermenschen) and therefore of no value to the "Aryan" German Army. On the other hand, the manpower was needed, and German Intelligence had recognised the need to divide the Soviet people. The contradiction was sometimes disguised by their reclassification as Cossacks. Colonel Helmuth Groscurth (Chief of Staff, XI Corps) wrote to General Beck: "It is disturbing that we are forced to strengthen our fighting troops with Russian prisoners of war, who are already being turned into gunners. It's an odd state of affairs that the "Beasts" we have been fighting against are now living with us in closest harmony." One quarter of 6th Army's front-line strength were Hiwis

Hilfswissenschaftler ("assistant scientist")
This is today's common usage in the German language. It is used for university students working part-time as teaching assistants or research assistants.