(Reich Commissariat for the Ukraine), the German civil administration in the Ukraine during World War II.
In mid-1941 the Nazis decided to establish a Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, which would administer the territories newly-conquered from the Soviet Union. That July, they further decided to divide the territories in two, Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and assigned each a civilian administration. Erich Koch served as Reichskommissar.
Hitler officially transferred the Soviet districts of Volhynia, Rovno, and Kamenets-Podolski to the authority of Reichskommissariat Ukraine in August 1941. As the German army advanced further and further into the Soviet Union, more areas were put under the administration's control. Certain districts, however, stayed under the control of the German military as long as it occupied the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of 1943, Reichskommissariat Ukraine covered 130,994 square miles and included almost 17 million inhabitants. Its capital was Rovno. The administration's Higher SS and Police Leader, Hans-Adolf Pruetzmann, had his headquarters in Kiev. Einsatzgruppen C and D, two of the mobile killing units that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Soviet Union, were active in both the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and in the part of the Ukraine that was controlled by the German military administration.
