What does Hiwi mean in Nazi Regime?

Hiwi

Hiwi is a German abbreviation meaning either "voluntary assistant" or "assistant scientist". 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, Częstochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Kraków, Białystok, Majdanek as well as Auschwitz, not to mention Trawniki itself.

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