Rear-area security operations against armed irregular fighters ("pacification actions") were often indistinguishable from massacres of civilians, accompanied by burning down villages, destroying crops, stealing livestock, deporting able-bodied population for slave labour to Germany, and leaving parent-less children on their own.

[1] All versions of the badge feature a skull and crossed bones at the base, with a laurel wreath of oak leaves around the sides and a sword in the center.

The sword's handle has the "sun-wheel" swastika, with the blade plunged into a Hydra whose five heads represent the "partisans".

[3] Historian Philip W. Blood notes the similarities between the symbol of the occultist Thule Society, with a sword and a swastika, and the design of the badge.

He suggests that Himmler and Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski "had sealed [...] Germanic mythology into a medal for Lebensraum".