Occupied Russia and Yugoslavia were the main theatres of partisan conflict for most of the war, although French and Greek partisans escalated their struggle into open warfare as German forces retreated during the summer of 1944. There was some partisan action in Italy from late 1944 onwards, but this was not on the scale of the conflict in Yugoslavia or Russia. By 1943, huge areas of Russia and Yugoslavia were in the hands of partisan forces and more than a million German soldiers, along with locally recruited auxiliary forces, had been diverted to combat the partisan threat. As the problem intensified, the Waffen-SS was increasingly drawn into this brutal and seemingly endless struggle.

Russia was by far the biggest theatre of partisan warfare for the Germans, and from late 1941 the Waffen-SS was actively involved in the struggle to crush this threat to Nazi rule. German plans to rule occupied Russia called for a sector, or operations zone, 160km (100 miles) behind the frontline to be controlled by the army. Each of the three army groups - North, Centre and South - had an army rear-area commandant who was responsible for ensuring the lines of communications to the fighting troops remained open. Three divisions of security troops were assigned to each army group to allow the commandants to protect key bridges, roads, railway junctions and supply dumps. These were largely second-rate units, often made up of medically downgraded recruits who suffered from flat feet and stomach ulcers, and who lacked heavy weapons and armoured vehicles.

Reich commissariats

Behind the operational zone, the Germans divided Russia into two Reich commissariats, with one covering the Baltic states and Belorussia, known as the Ostland Commissariat, and the other responsible for running the Ukraine. These were civilian branches of the German Government, and were responsible for the economic exploitation of Eastern Europe's population and natural resources. German civilian police units and locally recruited auxiliary police units were nominally responsible for security in the two commissariats, but they were soon overwhelmed by the task as partisan bands spread throughout Russia and the Baltic states. The German system of government and exploitation in the USSR was modelled on that set up in Poland after September 1939, where the Reich General Government had been established to control the rump of the country after the occupation. In Poland, the SS had deployed 12 police regiments and 14 battalions of locally recruited police, dubbed "Schumas".

Overlaying the military and civilian administration of Eastern Europe, Reichsführer-SS Himmler had set up a system of parallel control via representatives dubbed the "Higher SS and Police Leaders". They were posted to a series of headquarters that mirrored every level of army and civilian administration in the East, so Himmler's men were able to act quickly to stamp out any sign of resistance. In theory, they had the job of coordinating the activities of the Gestapo, the SD, German civil police, army and locally recruited auxiliaries. They thus soon became a law unto themselves.

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