Reichskommissariat (English: Reich Commissariat) is the German designation for a type of administrative entity headed by a government official known as a Reichskommissar (English: Reich Commissioner). Although many different such offices existed primarily throughout the Imperial German and Nazi periods in a number of different fields (ranging from public infrastructure and spatial planning to ethnic cleansing) it is most commonly used to refer to the quasi-colonial administrative territorial entity established by Nazi Germany in several occupied countries during World War II. While officially located outside the German Reich in a legal sense, these entities were directly controlled by their supreme civil authorities (the Reichskommissars), who ruled their assigned territories as German gov