Reichenaustadt, named after its Nazi conqueror, General Walter von Reichenau, was once called Dnipropetrovsk. Along with Kharkiv, it was the centerpiece of the Soviet industrialisation program in Ukraine, playing host to ambitious public works projects, newly built universities and technical colleges, and other programs ingredient in the communist project. That vision died when Panzers crashed through the city suburbs; the devastation restored the city to a largely agrarian state. Famine returned. The conditions imposed on Dnipropetrovsk decimated the population and forced the survivors into lives of meager subsistence.

Reichenau is dead, but the fear he and the Nazi state first inspired in the people of Ukraine has not diminished. It has been tempered and challenged by the rage of the oppressed, by a grim resolve to fight on for a free Ukraine, but it has not gone. It still exists in the makeup of things and events in Reichenaustadt, in the ideology he brought into battle and governance. His Severity Order still captures the governing philosophy of Reichskommissariat Ukraine in simple, military language: