What is "hiwi"

A Hiwi was a foreigner who volunteered to serve the Nazis. The name Hiwis acquired a thoroughly negative meaning following Operation Barbarossa in World War II. Between September 1941 and July 1944 the SS employed thousands of collaborationist auxiliary police recruited as German Hiwis directly from the Soviet POW camps. After training, they were deployed for service with Nazi Germany in the General Government and the occupied East.

In one instance, the German SS and police inducted, processed, and trained 5,082 Hiwi guards 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 known as the " Trawniki men" . Trawnikis were sent to 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 Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka II, Warsaw (three times), Częstochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Kraków, Białystok (twice), Majdanek as well as Auschwitz, and Trawniki itself.

Hiwi refer to:

• Hiwi (volunteer), POWs of occupied nations who volunteered to help the Nazis
• Hiwi al-Balkhi, the first Jewish Bible critic
• Hiwi people, a people of Colombia and Venezuela
• Guahibo language, the Cuahiban language spoken by them
• Waia language, a Trans-Fly language of Papua New Guinea
• Waboda language, a Trans–New-Guinea language spoken in the Fly River delta, Papua New Guinea