Black Sunday in Kraków

On Sunday 6 August 1944, five days after the outbreak of the uprising in Warsaw, the German police and SS carried out the largest round-up in the history of the occupation of Kraków. From the morning, checkpoints were set up at the ends of the streets leading into the centre, and in the early afternoon the detention of young men began – in the streets, in parks, on trams and in horse-drawn cabs, in cafés and bars, on the Błonia meadows and on the beaches along the Vistula, as well as in flats that were searched. The operation went on until late at night. Those detained were taken by lorry to the concentration camp at Płaszów on the southern edge of the city. According to historians of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), there were more than 6,000 of them; the literature also gives an estimate of 6,000–8,000, and some studies give even higher figures. The people of Kraków called the day “Black Sunday”.

The round-up was not a reprisal for any particular act. It was preventive in character: the German authorities of the General Government, whose capital was Kraków, wanted to deprive the Polish underground in advance of the men from whom it might form units, and to intimidate the city before it could follow Warsaw’s example. Those detained were treated as hostages.

Kraków in the summer of 1944

Since the autumn of 1939 Kraków had been the seat of Governor-General Hans Frank, who had his offices in Wawel Castle, and of the whole occupation apparatus: the General Government administration, the Higher SS and Police Leader (from November 1943 this was Wilhelm Koppe) and the Kraków Gestapo. The occupier treated the city as an “ancient German town” and from the first months sought to erase its Polish character – from the arrest of the professors of the Jagiellonian University in November 1939 to the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943. In the summer of 1944 Kraków had about 300,000 inhabitants, including several tens of thousands of Germans – officials, soldiers, policemen and their families.

In July 1944 the Eastern Front rapidly drew closer to the city. The Red Army routed the German forces in Galicia, took Lwów (Lviv), where the Home Army had taken up the fight as part of Operation Tempest (the Lwów uprising), and at the end of the month seized bridgeheads on the Vistula at Baranów and Sandomierz – less than 200 kilometres from Kraków. Some of the Germans in the city began to evacuate, and on 11 July soldiers of the Parasol battalion carried out an assassination attempt on Koppe in Kraków, which he survived, though wounded.

The Home Army in Kraków

Kraków was the seat of the Home Army’s Kraków District, one of the largest in the country – by some estimates it numbered as many as 90,000 sworn soldiers, but about two-thirds of them operated in the Rzeszów Sub-District, far from the city itself. In June 1944 command of the district was taken over by Colonel Edward Godlewski (PL) (“Garda”), previously commander of the AK’s Białystok Area. At the end of July he ordered Tempest to begin in the district and took command of Operational Group Kraków, made up of re-formed AK divisions and a cavalry brigade, which were to operate in the west of the district.

Plans for an uprising in the city itself existed, but its chances were rated low. According to Kraków historians, among them Professor Andrzej Chwalba, only 10–15 per cent of the conspirators in the city were armed, while the German garrison – estimated at about 30,000 troops – was roughly twice as large as in Warsaw, a city three times the size; German officials were armed too. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on 1 August, the German authorities in Kraków began fortifying the German quarter and government buildings: ground-floor windows were bricked up, bunkers and anti-tank barriers were built at crossroads, and patrols were stepped up. At the same time the Red Army halted on the Vistula and the Germans were regaining the initiative – on 5 August they began, according to some studies with air support, to liquidate the so-called Pińczów Republic, an area held by partisans north-east of Kraków.

The round-up

Sunday 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, was a hot, sunny day, and many of Kraków’s inhabitants spent it on the Błonia or by the Vistula. Around noon German police units closed the approaches to the city centre and went into action simultaneously at many points in the city. Those detained were above all men aged from their teens to their forties or fifties. According to accounts, in the first hours the Germans would not even look at documents – neither passes nor certificates of employment in plants important to the Reich’s war economy helped. One of those detained, Adam Kamiński, wrote in his diary that a patrol pulled him off a tram on Limanowskiego Street at 5.15 p.m. and drove him to Płaszów, where at first the new arrivals were registered and relieved of their documents, money and valuables, but soon so many people were being brought in that registration was abandoned.

Officers also searched flats. According to accounts cited by Norman Davies and George Weigel, one of the young men sought that day was a 24-year-old worker at the Solvay plant and seminarian at the clandestine seminary, Karol Wojtyła, later Pope John Paul II. The Germans entered the house at 10 Tyniecka Street where he lived but did not find him; soon afterwards the Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, hid him and other seminarians in the archbishop’s palace on Franciszkańska Street.

Hostages in Płaszów

The Płaszów camp, founded in the autumn of 1942 as a labour camp for Jews and turned into a concentration camp in January 1944, was in the process of being evacuated in the summer of 1944 – on 6 and 7 August large transports of Jewish women prisoners left for Auschwitz and of male prisoners for Mauthausen. Those caught in the round-up were placed in a separate part of the camp, in huts intended for Poles. As Ryszard Kotarba, an IPN historian and author of a guide to the camp, stresses, the “August” hostages were not entered in the camp records, were not given numbers and were not assigned to work. They were, however, subjected to checks and interrogations: the Germans tried to fish out from the crowd those connected with the underground, and handed suspects over to the Gestapo.

Conditions were harsh: heat, overcrowding, vermin and, in the first days, no food or water. Accounts collected by the IPN historian Anna Czocher show that the first help for the hostages came from the Jewish prisoners, who passed pieces of bread and soup from their own rations through the wire until the SS men drove them away. The detainees also saw with their own eyes how the Jewish prisoners were treated – beatings on the roll-call square and a prisoner mauled to death by the dogs of the camp commandant, Amon Göth. The writer Witold Zechenter, one of those detained, later described this in his short story Dziewczyna w słońcu (A Girl in the Sun).

Releases

The next day Kraków was deserted and paralysed. Bakers, railwaymen, tram workers and postmen failed to turn up for work, and offices and businesses – including those working for the Germans – lost some of their employees; many of those who had escaped the round-up preferred, in any case, not to show themselves on the streets. The occupier had to take this into account. First to be released were employees of the German-run Polish-language press (the so-called “reptile press”), Ukrainians, ethnic Germans and foreigners, then railwaymen, tram workers, municipal employees, boys under 16 and men over 52. From 9 August a release commission operated in the camp, and in the third week whole groups of occupations needed by the economy began to be let out, usually at their employers’ intervention. According to IPN findings, the vast majority of those detained had regained their freedom before the end of August.

Not everyone, however, returned home. Those identified as members of the underground or regarded as suspect were handed over to the Gestapo, and their subsequent fate – Montelupich Street prison, deportation to camps in the Reich – was that of political prisoners. Popular accounts claim that many of those detained on 6 August were deported from Płaszów to Gross-Rosen or Mauthausen; the guide by Ryszard Kotarba (IPN), however, shows that the large transports from Płaszów to those camps in the summer and autumn of 1944 were part of the evacuation of the camp’s permanent prisoners, most of them Jews, whereas the “Black Sunday” hostages were released over the following weeks after brief investigations.

Trenches instead of an uprising

The round-up was only one element of the German “pacification” of Kraków. On 7 August Colonel General Josef Harpe, commander of Army Group North Ukraine, replied to Archbishop Sapieha, who had asked for Kraków to be recognised as an open city: according to accounts, the general announced that the city would be defended and promised to spare the civilian population, but warned that in the event of an uprising Kraków would be destroyed. Over the following days the General Government authorities called on the people of Kraków to dig field fortifications on the approaches to the city. Many volunteered: work outside the city protected them from round-ups, the Germans paid in food, cigarettes and alcohol, and there was the chance to stock up in the villages around Kraków as well. When these “perks” ran out, the diggers had to be recruited by force. Participation in this work was criticised in other parts of the country, and Archbishop Sapieha also took a critical view of it.

The Kraków AK did not take up the fight. As historians agree, the round-up struck at the cadres of the underground and further weakened its already small forces in the city, and the local underground politicians of all persuasions, as well as the Kraków curia, were opposed to an uprising. Most authors consider that “Black Sunday” was one of the factors that ensured there was no uprising in Kraków, though not the only one – the balance of forces, the Red Army’s halt on the Vistula and the course of events in Warsaw were equally important.

Place in the war

“Black Sunday” was the most massive, though relatively short-lived, act of repression the Germans applied in Kraków in 1944 – in the same week in which SS and police units in Warsaw were murdering tens of thousands of civilians in Wola. In the memory of the people of Kraków it became, alongside Sonderaktion Krakau, a symbol of the occupation terror in the city. It also showed that the occupation authorities, made wary by events in Warsaw and earlier by Operation Tempest in the east – in Wilno (Vilnius) (Operation Ostra Brama) and in Lwów – had no intention of waiting until the underground in the capital of the General Government went into action.

In the following weeks the AK command in Kraków concentrated above all on helping the fighting Warsaw: General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski called on the districts to send units to relieve the capital, and the Skała partisan battalion set off north from the Kraków area, but failed to break through the German lines. According to Professor Chwalba, the AK was still considering an uprising in Kraków in the autumn, most probably around 10 October, but it never happened. At the beginning of September Hans Frank, according to historians, appealed to Archbishop Sapieha to restrain any plans for a rising. The district commander, Colonel Godlewski, was arrested by the Germans in October 1944 and died in May 1945 in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp. Kraków, largely undamaged, was taken by the Red Army on 18 January 1945.