The Holocaust: Members of German Ordnungspolizei massacred 31 people in occupied Poland for helping Jews.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.

The Ordnungspolizei were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany from 1936 to 1945. The Orpo was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly of power after regional police jurisdiction was removed in favour of the central Nazi government. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, the commander (Reichsführer-SS) of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was appointed Chief of the German Police in the Interior Ministry. The top and upper leadership positions of the Orpo were filled by police officers who belonged to or had joined the SS. Owing to their green uniforms, Orpo members were also referred to as Grüne Polizei. The force was established as a centralised organisation based in Berlin uniting the municipal, city, and rural uniformed police that had been previously organised on a state-by-state basis.

The Stary Ciepielów and Rekówka massacre was a Nazi war crime perpetrated by the German Gendarmerie in the villages of Stary Ciepielów and Rekówka within occupied Poland. On 6 December 1942 thirty-one Poles, including women and children, from the families of Kowalski, Kosior, Obuchiewicz and Skoczylas, were murdered for helping Jews. Among the victims were two Jewish refugees. The Stary Ciepielów and Rekówka massacre was one of the most severe crimes inflicted by Nazi-German occupants towards Poles who had helped Jews.