The Germans take Kraków

On the morning of 6 September 1939 the first units of the German 14th Army under General Wilhelm List entered Kraków. The city was not defended. The Polish Army had left it over the preceding days, and the state authorities and most officials had evacuated to the east. The German soldiers who approached the bridge over the Vistula from the direction of Podgórze were met by the deputy mayor, Stanisław Klimecki. He went out to meet them and, to avoid any shooting, introduced himself in German as the mayor of Kraków. Poland’s former capital, with the Wawel and the tombs of its kings, fell into German hands on the sixth day of the war.

It is often written that the 14th Army took Kraków “practically without resistance”. That is true of the city itself. It does not mean, however, that the road to Kraków was easy for the Germans. In the first two days of the war the Polish Kraków Army fought hard battles in Silesia and the Beskid Mountains, and what decided that the city would be given up without a fight was the German breakthrough further north and the threat of encirclement.

The Kraków Army and its task

The Kraków Army, formed in March 1939, was to cover Upper Silesia and western Lesser Poland. It was commanded by Brigadier General Antoni Szylling. It comprised five infantry divisions, a mountain brigade and two cavalry brigades, among them the motorised 10th Cavalry Brigade of Colonel Stanisław Maczek, together with the units of the Silesia Fortified Area. Its sector was extensive and its position very difficult. The border with the Reich ran just beyond the suburbs of Katowice, and since March 1939 German troops had also been able to strike from the territory of Slovakia, which under the treaty of protection had become a German client state. The Kraków Army was therefore threatened from the west and from the south.

Against it advanced almost the whole of the 14th Army of General Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, and on its northern flank part of the 10th Army of General Walter von Reichenau. From Upper Silesia struck the VIII Corps of General Ernst Busch with the 5th Panzer Division, from the west the XVII Corps, and from Slovakia, along the Orava valley towards Jordanów and Nowy Targ, a corps with the 2nd Panzer Division, the 4th Light Division and the 3rd Mountain Division. Alongside the Germans, Slovak troops under the defence minister, Ferdinand Čatloš, entered Podhale and the Nowy Sącz region. In the very first hours of 1 September German aircraft bombed Kraków’s airfield at Rakowice.

The first two days

On 1 and 2 September the Kraków Army fought along its entire front. At Pszczyna the 6th Infantry Division of Brigadier General Bernard Mond beat off attacks by German tanks on 1 September, but on 2 September the 5th Panzer Division broke through its weakly fortified positions, and an unsuccessful Polish counter-attack in open country ended with heavy losses. In the south, at Jordanów, Maczek’s 10th Cavalry Brigade held up much stronger German divisions advancing from Slovakia for three days, withdrawing step by step without allowing itself to be encircled. In the Żywiec Beskids a handful of bunkers at Węgierska Górka, commanded by Captain Tadeusz Semik, held out on 2 and 3 September against an entire German division.

The decision, however, came on the northern flank. Near Częstochowa the 7th Infantry Division of Brigadier General Janusz Gąsiorowski found itself at the junction of the Kraków Army and the Łódź Army, in the gap into which the German XVI Panzer Corps drove. By the morning of 3 September the division had been destroyed and its commander taken prisoner. The road east, into the rear of the whole Kraków Army, lay open to the German armour, while from the south the German divisions coming from Orava threatened its other flank.

On the afternoon of 2 September General Szylling reported to the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, that the army was in danger of encirclement. At around 4 p.m. Rydz-Śmigły gave his provisional consent to a withdrawal, and in the evening he formally ordered the army to fall back behind the Nida and the Dunajec. During the night of 2–3 September the troops began to leave Upper Silesia. Kraków, which lay on the line of retreat, was to be given up without a fight. From the Polish command’s point of view, defending the city made no sense: its garrison would soon have been surrounded, and fighting in the historic city would have caused enormous destruction and civilian casualties.

Evacuation and the last days of Polish Kraków

In the city, which had suffered air raids since the first day of the war, the evacuation began. On 3 September the curator of the Wawel collections, Stanisław Świerz-Zaleski, and the conservator Józef Krzywda-Polkowski removed the most precious treasures from the castle, among them the tapestries of Sigismund Augustus and the coronation sword, Szczerbiec. The consignment made its way east across the war-torn country and then, via Romania, France and Britain, reached Canada in 1940. As a result these collections did not fall into German hands. They returned to Poland only after years of dispute, in 1959 and 1961.

On 4 and 5 September most of the state and provincial authorities left the city, as did the mayor of Kraków, Bolesław Czuchajowski (PL). Thousands of refugees followed them. Among those who stayed were the Archbishop of Kraków, Adam Stefan Sapieha, and Deputy Mayor Klimecki. On 4 September a citizens’ committee was formed to look after the city and maintain order, and on 5 September the city council entrusted Klimecki with the duties of mayor. Until 5 September retreating Polish units were passing through the city towards the east.

6 September

The first German units, from the VIII and XVII Corps, entered the city from the south on the morning of 6 September. Klimecki met a German patrol at the bridge over the Vistula and assured it that the city was open and would not be defended. At a meeting with members of the citizens’ committee, a representative of the German command demanded hostages to guarantee the safety of the troops. Twenty-five people were designated, among them Klimecki himself.

Kraków came through September 1939 almost unscathed, unlike Warsaw or Wieluń. Sparing the city, however, did not mean sparing its inhabitants. Close behind the front came Einsatzgruppe I, one of the operational groups of the Security Police which from the first day of the war had been carrying out Operation Tannenberg against the Polish elites. The first days of the occupation brought arrests, requisitions and the first acts of violence against the Jews, of whom nearly 60,000 lived in Kraków, about a quarter of the city’s population.

The fate of the Kraków Army

The Kraków Army’s retreat was arduous, but for several days the army held together. Its troops, divided into two groups, fell back north and south of the Vistula, pursued by German panzer and light divisions that were trying to overtake and cut them off. On 11 September the main forces crossed the Vistula at Baranów by a bridge that the sappers had built in a few hours. From there the army headed into the Lublin region, intending to break through towards the Romanian Bridgehead. On 17–20 September, together with the Lublin Army, it fought the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, one of the largest battles of the campaign. On 20 September, surrounded by the Germans, it capitulated. General Szylling spent the rest of the war in the German prisoner-of-war camp for officers at Murnau.

The 10th Cavalry Brigade, which in the second week of the war came under a different command, fought on in the approaches to Lwów (Lviv) and on 19 September crossed into Hungary. Most of its soldiers later made their way to France and then to Britain, where Maczek formed the 1st Armoured Division.

Place in the war

The capture of Kraków closed the first stage of the campaign in the south, just as the cutting of the Polish Corridor had done in the north two days earlier. Within six days the Germans had taken Upper Silesia, with its mines and steelworks, and western Lesser Poland. Industrial Silesia was later incorporated into the Reich. Kraków, by contrast, was not annexed to Germany but became the centre of a new entity that the occupiers created out of central Poland.

At the beginning of October the German military district “Krakau” was established under General List’s command. By Hitler’s decree of 12 October the General Government was created, formally coming into existence on 26 October with Kraków as its capital. At its head stood Hans Frank, who at the beginning of November took up residence in the Wawel. Kraków was to become an “ancient German city”, and Polish culture and learning were to disappear. On 6 November 1939 SS men of Einsatzkommando 2/I under SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Müller lured professors and staff of Kraków’s institutions of higher education to the Collegium Novum of the Jagiellonian University, supposedly for a lecture on the German attitude to scholarship. They arrested 184 people, most of them from the Jagiellonian University, and deported them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This Sonderaktion Krakau provoked protests abroad. Most of the prisoners were released in February 1940, but at least twenty died in the camps or shortly after their release. Stanisław Klimecki was arrested several times during the occupation and was shot in the Niepołomice Forest in December 1942.

The worst fate befell Kraków’s Jews. In 1941 the Germans shut them in a ghetto in Podgórze, and in 1942–1943 they murdered most of them, on the spot, in the Bełżec extermination camp, at Auschwitz and in the Płaszów camp. Kraków, spared by the fighting in September 1939, was for more than five years the capital of the occupation administration from which exploitation and terror in central Poland were directed. Soviet troops entered the city in January 1945.