The Black Forest massacre near Stanisławów

On 2 August 1941, the day after Eastern Galicia was incorporated into the General Government as the District of Galicia, the German Security Police office in Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) summoned members of the local intelligentsia – doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and officials – to “register”. Some eight hundred came, most of them Jews but many of them Poles. Some were sent home as specialists who were needed. The rest were detained and, over the following days, taken to a forest near the village of Pawełcze outside the town and secretly shot. A week later the Ukrainian police, acting on German orders, arrested almost three hundred Poles, mostly teachers, from prepared lists. On the night of 14–15 August about 250 of them were murdered in the same forest, known as the Black Forest (Czarny Las). The orders were given by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, head of the Stanisławów office of the Security Police and SD, who a few weeks earlier had taken part in Lwów in preparing the murder of the Lwów professors.

In Polish historical writing the name Black Forest massacre refers above all to the execution of the Polish intelligentsia in mid-August, but both crimes were part of the same operation: the German Security Police began its rule over the town by murdering its leading class, Jewish and Polish alike. Some lists call Krüger an “SS commander” and describe the killing as “the first application in Galicia of the ‘one bullet – one Jew’ method”. The first is inaccurate: Krüger headed a small Gestapo office, not an SS formation. The second finds no confirmation: the expression appears neither in contemporary documents nor in historians’ studies of the crime, and mass shootings of Jews had begun in Galicia as early as the beginning of July 1941 – in Lwów, Złoczów, Tarnopol and other towns. In Stanisławów itself, however, the execution in early August was the first mass murder, and it opened a series of crimes committed by Krüger.

Krüger in Stanisławów

Stanisławów, a pre-war provincial capital whose Jewish population, together with the surrounding area, numbered several tens of thousands in 1941, lay in July within the zone of Hungarian administration. The Hungarian military command did not permit pogroms or mass executions, and reports of the German Security Police complained that “individual actions against Jews” by the Ukrainian militia ended in immediate Hungarian intervention. The Germans were nevertheless preparing to take over the town. According to the historian Dieter Pohl, author of the standard study of the crimes in the Stanisławów region, a forward Gestapo detachment of a few men under Oskar Brandt, previously the Security Police official for Jewish affairs in the Kraków district, arrived in Stanisławów around 20 July. A week later Hans Krüger joined him. On 26 July the Gestapo ordered the creation of a Judenrat headed by Israel Seibald.

Krüger, born in Poznań in 1909, was one of the “old fighters” of the Nazi movement. His family had had to leave Poznań after the Greater Poland Uprising, and from his youth he had been active in far-right organisations, from 1929 in the SA. In 1933 he headed the political department of the Oranienburg concentration camp. He returned to the repressive apparatus in 1939 as a Gestapo officer. In occupied Poland he ran the Security Police school in Zakopane, where among others he trained Ukrainians as future policemen. At the beginning of July 1941 he came to Lwów with the special Security Police unit of Eberhard Schöngarth, which arrested and murdered the Lwów professors.

When the decision to incorporate Galicia into the General Government had been taken, Schöngarth ordered Krüger to set up in Stanisławów an outpost of the Lwów headquarters of the Security Police and SD. It was housed in the former court building on Bilińskiego Street, with a prison that only a few weeks earlier had served the NKVD. The office was small – according to Pohl it usually numbered about 25 Germans – but it was responsible for the Stanisławów and Kałusz counties and the area around Rohatyn, a region inhabited by more than 700,000 people. Krüger reinforced it with ethnic Germans and Ukrainian policemen, among them men he had trained in Zakopane. Exactly what orders he received is unknown, because after the war his testimony was full of lies. Pohl considers it likely that Schöngarth instructed him to murder the Jewish and Polish intelligentsia of Stanisławów.

The “registration” of 2 August

The German takeover of Stanisławów coincided with the creation of the District of Galicia on 1 August, although Hungarian units still remained in the region. The very next day Krüger organised his first operation. On the pretext of registering the “well-to-do class” and members of the professions, supposedly needed for work in the new administration, they were summoned to report to police headquarters. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Krüger ordered the chairman of the Judenrat to draw up a list of Jews in the professions. People came expecting nothing bad – registrations and censuses were part of everyday life under any occupation.

The sources differ on numbers and dates. According to the findings of the court in Münster, cited by Pohl, some eight hundred Poles and Jews reported; two hundred specialists were sent home, and the rest were taken the next day to the forest near Pawełcze and shot. The USHMM writes of more than five hundred Jewish men who were met on 3 August by SS and Gestapo officers and who, after being tortured, were murdered in a nearby forest. Polish studies give the date of 4 August and as many as a thousand victims, and also mention a forest near Uhrynów. The most commonly accepted figure is about six hundred dead, the overwhelming majority of them Jews. A list of 99 Polish victims of this operation has survived in the archives of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation.

The execution was carried out in secret. The families of those detained did not know what had happened to them and for many weeks continued to bring parcels of food and linen to the prison, which the guards accepted. The uncertainty was part of the method: it was meant to prevent panic and resistance before further operations.

The arrest of the teachers

The second operation was aimed at the Polish intelligentsia. On 8 and 9 August the Ukrainian militia, acting on Gestapo instructions, arrested about three hundred Poles in Stanisławów. According to Polish researchers, among them Tadeusz Kamiński, author of the book Tajemnica Czarnego Lasu (The Secret of the Black Forest), the list of names was drawn up by Ukrainian activists from local teaching circles, as in the earlier murders of the Polish intelligentsia in Lwów and Krzemieniec; Polish teachers who had taught in schools during the Soviet occupation were said to have appeared on it as “communists”. Some teachers were detained by a ruse, summoned to a meeting before the new school year; others were taken from their homes on the pretext of a brief interrogation. The courteous behaviour of the policemen lulled their suspicions. According to Polish studies, most of the teachers of Stanisławów’s secondary and elementary schools were arrested in this way, together with doctors, engineers, officials and merchants.

The detainees were held in the prison on Bilińskiego Street, where they were beaten and interrogated. Some were driven to construction work in the town, where for the first few days their families could still see them from a distance; then the guards began to shoot at anyone who tried to come close.

The night of 14–15 August

On the night of 14–15 August 1941 most of those arrested were taken in covered lorries to the Black Forest near Pawełcze, a few kilometres from the town. Peasants from a nearby village had been made to dig pits in advance. The prisoners were shot at the edge of the pits and buried on the spot. According to Polish studies about 250 people died; other sources give between 200 and 300 victims. Only one man escaped from the transport, a forester from Sołotwina who slipped off a lorry in the rain unnoticed by the escort.

Among those murdered were the headmasters of all three state grammar schools in Stanisławów – Franciszek Jun, Stanisław Umański and Władysław Piskozub – the heads of the men’s and women’s teacher-training colleges, dozens of secondary and elementary school teachers, doctors, engineers, state and municipal officials, among them the director of the Municipal Savings Bank and social activist Leon Ziobrowski. In practice it was the end of the Polish intelligentsia of Stanisławów.

The victims’ fate was long concealed. When a delegation of families came to Gestapo headquarters in September, Krüger assured them that the arrested men were alive and under investigation, and allowed them to send parcels of warm clothing for the winter. The truth came out only in the winter of 1942, when a German prosecutor revealed it in conversation with Karolina Lanckorońska, who had come to Stanisławów as a representative of the Central Welfare Council (Rada Główna Opiekuńcza) and been arrested there. Krüger himself, convinced that his prisoner would not leave prison alive, boasted to her of his part in the murder of the Lwów professors and gave her to understand that the Stanisławów teachers had met the same fate.

The perpetrators and the reckoning

The executions in the Black Forest were directed by officers of the Stanisławów office: Krüger, his deputy Oskar Brandt and the men he had brought from Zakopane, among them the Mauer brothers, ethnic Germans notorious in the town for their cruelty during interrogations. The Ukrainian militia, and from the second half of August the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, arrested the victims, guarded the prisoners and escorted the transports. After the war only one of the lesser perpetrators, the ethnic German Zygmunt Adamski, stood trial before a Polish court; he was sentenced to death in 1945.

Krüger evaded responsibility for years. In 1942 Berlin recalled him from Stanisławów – not for his crimes, but for betraying secrets to Lanckorońska and for irregularities in accounting for looted property – and from 1943 he headed the SD office in Chalon-sur-Saône in France. After the war he was released from Dutch captivity unrecognised and settled in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he ran a business and was active in expellee organisations. He was arrested only in 1962. On 6 May 1968 the regional court in Münster sentenced him to life imprisonment for the murder of Jews in the Stanisławów region. The crimes against Poles – neither the murder of the Lwów professors nor the executions in the Black Forest – were not included in the indictment, and the Polish side’s request for a separate trial was rejected. Among those who testified against him at the trial was Karolina Lanckorońska. Krüger was released from prison in 1986 and died two years later.

The graves in the Black Forest were found only in 1988, thanks to the efforts of the victims’ families and the help of local inhabitants: eight pits, each measuring about 10 by 12 metres. In 1991 a monument funded by the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites was erected there, followed in August 2011 by a cross commemorating the murdered Poles.

Place in the war

The August executions near Pawełcze were both the beginning and a foretaste of what was to come in Stanisławów. The murder of the Polish and Jewish elites continued the operations the Germans had been conducting in occupied Poland since 1939 – the Intelligenzaktion and the AB-Aktion – carried over to lands that the Soviet Union had occupied for two years. The Black Forest became the site of further executions: in November 1941 people arrested after a white-and-red Polish flag had been hung on the graves of Legionnaires on the anniversary of Polish independence were shot there. According to Polish estimates, the Germans murdered some 860 Poles in Stanisławów during the occupation.

For the Jews it was the prelude to the Holocaust. According to Pohl, in mid-August Heinrich Himmler ordered the Higher SS and Police Leaders in the occupied Soviet territories to murder Jews regardless of sex or age, and in September the decision was taken in Lwów to begin murdering the entire Jewish population in the southern part of the district. On 6 October 1941 Krüger’s men shot some two thousand Jews in Nadwórna, and on 12 October, a day later called “Bloody Sunday”, between 10,000 and 12,000 people – men, women and children – were killed in the Jewish cemetery of Stanisławów. It was the largest crime against Jews in the General Government up to that time, described by historians as the beginning of the “Final Solution” in the General Government. According to Pohl, Krüger’s small office and his successors organised, over sixteen months, the shooting of some 70,000 Jews and the deportation of a further 12,000 to extermination camps.

The crimes in Stanisławów belonged to the same wave of murder that swept across the lands occupied by the Germans in the East in the summer of 1941 – from Ponary (Paneriai) near Wilno to Galicia. They differed from it in that they were committed not by a large SS mobile unit following the front, but by a handful of officers of a permanent police office in a town that in August 1941 had become part of the General Government. It was in Galicia that this apparatus first moved on from murdering elites to murdering everyone.