Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis (German abbreviation for Hilfswilliger, literally "those willing to help"), Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.

[3]: 366  Although the majority of Trawniki men or Hiwis came from among the prisoners of war, there were also Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe among them,[4][5] valued because of their ability to speak Russian, Ukrainian and other languages of the occupied territories.

[5] The conscripted civilians and former Soviet POWs included Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Estonians, Georgians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Tatars, and Ukrainians.

[8] Streibel, with the assistance of his officers, visited all POW camps for the Soviets behind the lines of the advancing Wehrmacht, and after individual screening recruited Ukrainian as well as Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers as ordered.

[1][2] Due to successful adaptation of Soviet army's strategy and tactics against German forces, as well as Nazi policy of Soviet war prisoners' extermination, the influx of POW was dramatically reduced, so Streibel's personnel from the summer of 1942 started to conscript civilians of Ukrainian nationality, generally young males, from Western Ukraine (Galicia, Volhynia, Podolia and Lublin).

"[10] French publicist Louis Saurel, in an analogous book about the death camps, wrote: "Part of the SS soldiers were not Germans.

[11] The Trawniki-men were assembled at a training facility adjacent to the Trawniki concentration camp built for the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto.

The complex (serving dual purpose in 1941–43) was set up in the industrialized village of Trawniki about 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Lublin with rail lines in all directions in the occupied territory.

They took an active role in the extermination of Jews at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Warsaw (three times), Częstochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Kraków, Białystok (twice), Majdanek as well as Auschwitz, not to mention Trawniki concentration camp itself,[1][12] and the remaining subcamps of KL Lublin/Majdanek camp complex including Poniatowa, Budzyn, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa, and also during massacres in Łomazy, Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations, augmented by the SS and Schupo, as well as the Reserve Police Battalion 101, part of over two dozen Order Police battalions deployed to the occupied territories.

The German Order Police performed roundups inside the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland shooting everyone unable to move or attempting to flee, while the Trawnikis conducted large-scale civilian massacres in the same locations.

This is when they introduced the Rotten (Rotte ["Chain"] > "File" or "Fire Team") level of organization at a time when the depleted German Army was consolidating into Halbzüge ("half-platoons" or "Sections").

[6] The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov, who made a study of the Trawniki men serving at death camps, claimed that there was little sign of any attraction to National Socialism among them.

"[13] Despite the generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS expectations in the mistreatment of Jews.

The Trawnikis used to arrive in squads numbering around 50 at the killing site, and start by sitting down to a sandwich and bottles of vodka from their knapsacks behaving like guests,[13] while the Germans dealt with unruly crowds of thousands of ghetto inhabitants: as in Międzyrzec, Łuków, Radzyń, Parczew, Końskowola, Komarówka and all other locations.

[23][26] The main difference between them and the Trawnikis apprehended in the Soviet Union was that the former claimed lack of awareness and left no live witnesses who could testify against them,[27] while the latter were charged with treason and therefore were doomed from the start.

[1] The notoriety of crimes committed by Trawnikis at the extermination camps of Belzec [Be], Sobibor [So], and Treblinka [Tr] during Operation Reinhard have led to many specific names being publicized in postwar literature and by museums of the Holocaust, based on Jewish and Polish survivor-testimonies, memoirs, and archives.