Since the beginning of 2022, the University of Graz, in cooperation with the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on Consequences of War, has been conducting a research project on "The Police in Austria: Fractures and Continuities 1938-1945". This project, funded by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, is intended to make a first contribution to the scholarly reappraisal of the history of the most important executive body of the Second Republic. Knowledge of the significance, function and development history of Nazi organisations with a police function, the abuse of police powers within the framework of a totalitarian unjust state and their concrete relation to Austria - or rather to Austrians - are of great importance here. The focus also lies on the judicial punishment and processing of Nazi crimes in the post-war period.