Jewish Order Police

The Jewish Order Police is presented as the institutional setting from which a ghetto control office developed and as part of a system of coercive surveillance under Nazi rule. The account focuses less on its routine work than on the office’s transformation: a body initially subordinate to the Jewish Order Police becomes dominated by criminal informers and profiteers, helping the authorities squeeze the population and gain access to its hidden resources.

Institutional Position

The narrator identifies the Control Office to Combat Black-Marketeering and Profiteering in the Jewish Residential District as having once been a subdivision of the Jewish Order Police. The office was responsible to the Gestapo, placing it within a chain of authority in which a policing body in the ghetto remained answerable to the Nazi security apparatus.

Recruitment and Transformation

The office had been recruited from the prewar underworld. The narrator then describes a reversal in its internal balance: spies, informers, pimps, and black-market operators came to run the operation. His sardonic reference to natural selection presents this change not as an orderly reform but as the consolidation of people suited to exploiting the system. The passage therefore distinguishes the office’s original place beneath the Jewish Order Police from the later dominance of its informant network.

Function and Significance

The narrator characterizes the arrangement as the criminalization of the gendarmerie. In his account, this was a way to squeeze a subject population and obtain access to wealth it had managed to hoard. He also describes turning to the control office to locate a Jewish person in the ghetto, revealing how surveillance and black-market enforcement could serve as practical means of finding individuals. The Jewish Order Police’s significance in this passage lies in this institutional relationship: the office’s development illustrates how policing within the ghetto was entangled with Gestapo oversight and the extraction of resources from those under persecution.