The massacre of the Lwów professors

During the night of 3–4 July 1941, four days after German troops entered Lwów (Lviv), small squads of the German Security Police drove up to the homes of professors at the city’s universities and colleges. The scholars were led out of their flats, together with their sons, wives, guests and lodgers who happened to be there. Those detained were taken to the former Abrahamowicz hostel, interrogated and beaten, and at dawn on 4 July they were shot on the nearby Wulka Hills (PL) and buried in a pit dug at the place of execution. Some forty people died there, among them about twenty professors and lecturers of the Jan Kazimierz University, the Lwów Polytechnic and the Academy of Veterinary Medicine, as well as the best-known Polish literary critic and translator of the day, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, who was on no list – he was taken from his brother-in-law’s flat.

The crime, known in Polish literature as the massacre of the Lwów professors, continued in the following weeks of July, when several more people were murdered, including the former prime minister Kazimierz Bartel. According to the findings of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 52 people were arrested in connection with this operation between 2 and 11 July, of whom seven were released and 45 murdered. Many war chronologies speak of a mass murder of Polish scientists and writers committed “by German troops”. This is not entirely accurate: it was not a Wehrmacht unit but a special unit of the Security Police and SD (Sipo-SD), subordinate to the Reich Security Main Office, and the victims were above all doctors, engineers, mathematicians and lawyers, not writers – Boy was the exception among them.

Lwów between two occupations

Before the war Lwów was the third-largest city in Poland and one of the country’s most important centres of learning. It was home to the Jan Kazimierz University, the Lwów Polytechnic, the Academy of Veterinary Medicine and the Academy of Foreign Trade. The Lwów School of Mathematics was associated with the city, and Lwów’s doctors and engineers were among the leaders in their fields. Roughly half the inhabitants were Poles, nearly a third Jews and some 10–20 per cent Ukrainians.

In September 1939, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, Lwów came under Soviet occupation, and in November Moscow formally incorporated the eastern lands of the Polish Republic into the USSR. The universities continued to function, but as Ukrainian institutions: the university was renamed the Ivan Franko University, the medical faculty was separated off as an independent medical institute, and the Polytechnic became the Polytechnic Institute. Most of the Polish professors kept their chairs, but the running of the institutions was taken over by newcomers from the east. At the same time the NKVD arrested judges, officers, officials and activists. Several staff members of Lwów’s universities who were reserve officers died in the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940, and in 1940–1941 hundreds of thousands of people were deported from the eastern lands into the interior of the USSR; the last major operation was carried out in May and June 1941, in parallel with the June deportations in the Baltic states.

The Soviet authorities courted the loyalty of the scholars. Some of them, having no choice, published in the Soviet press, stood as candidates for the city and oblast councils in December 1940, or travelled to Moscow at official invitation. In German eyes this made the Polish professors “Bolshevik collaborators”. Historians regard it at most as one of the pretexts for the crime; its cause lay in the German policy towards the Polish elites pursued since the autumn of 1939.

The German attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 transformed Lwów’s situation within a week. As it withdrew, the NKVD murdered several thousand political prisoners – Ukrainians, Poles and Jews – in Lwów’s three prisons, on Łącki Street, in Zamarstynów and in the Brygidki; estimates range from about 3,500 to 7,000 victims (NKVD prisoner massacres). The same happened in other towns of the eastern borderlands, including in the area of the Battle of Białystok–Minsk. In the Brygidki, the retired professor of medicine Roman Rencki (PL), held by the NKVD since 1940, escaped execution by breaking out of the prison on 29 June. A few days later he was among the victims of the Germans.

On the morning of 30 June units of the German 1st Mountain Division and the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion, subordinate to the Abwehr, entered the city, which the Red Army had abandoned. That same evening activists of Stepan Bandera’s faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, with a government under Yaroslav Stetsko; the Germans did not recognise it and soon arrested its leaders. The NKVD’s crimes were blamed on “Jewish Bolsheviks”. From 30 June to 2 July a pogrom raged in which the Ukrainian militia and the mob, with the consent and participation of the Germans, murdered Jews – several thousand, according to historians’ estimates – and immediately afterwards Einsatzgruppe C shot a further 2,500–3,000 people (Lwów pogroms). The professors were arrested the day after the first pogrom ended, in a city where mass executions were already under way.

A special-purpose unit

From the first weeks of the occupation of Poland in 1939 the German Security Police had been tasked with “combating elements hostile to the Reich” behind the front, which in practice meant destroying the Polish leadership class. In the territories annexed to the Reich this was done through the Intelligenzaktion, in Kraków through the arrest of the professors of the Jagiellonian University in November 1939, and in the General Government in the spring and summer of 1940 through the AB-Aktion. The case of the Kraków professors, released from Sachsenhausen after protests from abroad, had taught the occupiers something. On 30 May 1940 the Governor-General, Hans Frank, told police commanders that the Kraków professors had caused them “unpleasant trouble”, which would not have arisen had the matter been dealt with on the spot, and instructed that no one else be sent to camps in the Reich. In Lwów no one was sent anywhere.

From January 1941 the commander of the Security Police and SD in the General Government was SS-Oberführer Eberhard Schöngarth, a lawyer and a member of the Nazi Party since 1922. When the offensive in the East began, with the consent of the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, he formed a special-purpose task force (Einsatzgruppe zur besonderen Verwendung) made up of Gestapo and SD officers from the General Government. Its units operated in the occupied lands of pre-war Poland, alongside the four large Einsatzgruppen following the front. On 2 July Einsatzkommando z.b.V. Lemberg arrived in Lwów, numbering, according to various sources, from several dozen to about 150 men. It was quartered in the building of the former cadet school, a few hundred metres from the Wulka Hills, and its staff set up in a building on Pełczyńska Street previously occupied by the NKVD.

On the morning of that same day the Gestapo arrested, in his office at the Polytechnic, the mathematician Kazimierz Bartel, a former rector of the institution, five times prime minister of Poland between 1926 and 1930 and a close associate of Józef Piłsudski. His family was thrown out of their villa, in which Gestapo officers took up residence, and his collections and library were plundered. Bartel was held separately, as a prisoner of special importance.

To detain the other professors the Germans needed names and addresses. According to the findings of Polish historians, the list was prepared by Ukrainian students linked to the OUN who had come to Lwów with the Germans from Kraków; its compilation is associated with the name of Mykola Lebed, one of the leaders of the Bandera faction. The list was out of date: it included professors who had died before the war, and the Gestapo men, not finding them at the given address, suspected their families of hiding them. Historians differ on whether the authors of the list knew what it would be used for. Adam Redzik and Włodzimierz Bonusiak allow that they did not; Grzegorz Motyka believes that the nationalists wanted the Polish intelligentsia destroyed, and points out that similar lists were drawn up before the executions in Krzemieniec and Stanisławów.

The night of 3–4 July

The arrests began late in the evening of 3 July, after the curfew. Each squad was led by a German officer, with several subordinates and Ukrainian guides and interpreters – in German uniforms, according to some witnesses. It was not only the professors on the list who were detained. From the flat of the 82-year-old retired gynaecologist Adam Sołowij (PL) his 19-year-old grandson, Adam Mięsowicz, was also taken. At the home of the professor of civil law Roman Longchamps de Bérier, a former vice-rector of the university, his three sons were arrested, the youngest of them eighteen. At the home of the mathematician Włodzimierz Stożek, his two sons, both engineers. At the villa of the surgeon Tadeusz Ostrowski (PL), where valuable art collections were kept, they took his wife and everyone present: Dr Stanisław Ruff, head of surgery at the Jewish Hospital, with his wife and son, the priest Władysław Komornicki (PL), the nurse Maria Reymanowa and the English teacher Katarzyna Demko.

In the flat of the internist Jan Grek (PL) they arrested the professor, his wife Maria and his brother-in-law Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, who had been living with them since the autumn of 1939 and was married to Maria Grekowa’s sister. Boy was a universally known figure: the author of Słówka, the translator of more than a hundred volumes of French literature, a columnist who in the 1930s had waged the most celebrated battles over morals and social mores in Poland, and under the Soviet occupation head of the chair of French literature at Lwów University. He was not, however, on the list – the Gestapo took him because they found him in the Greks’ flat.

The detainees were taken to the Abrahamowicz hostel, a boarding house on Abrahamowicz Street that the Germans had turned into a temporary gaol. They were made to stand in a dark corridor facing the wall with their heads bowed; any movement was punished with a beating. They were led out one by one for interrogation. The Gestapo men took their valuables. When Dr Ruff’s son, the engineer Adam Ruff, had an epileptic fit, he was shot on the spot. The only professor to be released was the paediatrician Franciszek Groër (PL). Accused of treason, he replied that he was a Pole. He was let go towards morning, together with several members of the domestic staff. According to Dieter Schenk, author of a monograph on the crime, the Germans may have feared publicity, since Groër’s wife was British. While waiting to be released, Groër heard bursts of machine-gun fire from the direction of the hills.

The execution on the Wulka Hills

At dawn on 4 July the prisoners were led to the Wulka Hills, sandy, scrub-covered slopes between Wulecka and Kadecka streets. Some walked, carrying the body of the murdered Adam Ruff; some were brought by lorry; the women were driven there separately. A pit had been dug on the slope, and the victims were shot beside it in groups. The execution was watched from their windows by residents of nearby houses, among them the engineer Tadeusz Gumowski, the brother-in-law of one of the victims, and the wife of the mathematician Antoni Łomnicki, who, not yet knowing her husband’s fate, watched from afar as group after group of five were led up the slope.

Those killed on the hills were: the dentist Antoni Cieszyński; the surgeons Władysław Dobrzaniecki, Henryk Hilarowicz and Tadeusz Ostrowski; the internists Jan Grek and Roman Rencki; the ophthalmologist Dr Jerzy Grzędzielski (PL); the pathologist Witold Nowicki (PL); the paediatrician Stanisław Progulski (PL); the forensic doctor and former rector of the university Włodzimierz Sieradzki; the gynaecologist Adam Sołowij; the lawyer Roman Longchamps de Bérier; the veterinarian Edward Hamerski (PL); and the professors of the Polytechnic: the mathematicians Antoni Łomnicki and Włodzimierz Stożek, the electrical engineer Włodzimierz Krukowski (PL), the chemist and petroleum technology specialist Stanisław Pilat (PL), the mechanical engineer Kazimierz Vetulani, the geodesist Kasper Weigel (PL) and the machine-construction specialist Roman Witkiewicz (PL). Boy-Żeleński died with them. Their relatives and household members were shot too: the wives of Grek and Ostrowski; the sons of Longchamps de Bérier, Stożek, Nowicki, Progulski and Weigel; Sołowij’s grandson; Dr Ruff and his wife; Father Komornicki; and two men taken from Dobrzaniecki’s flat. Those murdered included people of Jewish origin, such as Hilarowicz and the Ruff family. Many of the professors had been defenders of Polish Lwów in November 1918.

The figures in the literature differ slightly. It is most commonly accepted that some 40 people were shot on the Wulka Hills on 4 July, including twenty-odd scholars, counting Boy. Several people detained that night were killed separately, in the courtyard of the Abrahamowicz hostel, on 4 or 5 July: among them the gynaecologist Dr Stanisław Mączewski (PL) and Katarzyna Demko.

Bartel and further victims

On 11 July the Gestapo arrested two professors of the Academy of Foreign Trade, the economist Henryk Korowicz and the mathematician Stanisław Ruziewicz. They were murdered the following day at an unknown location.

Kazimierz Bartel spent more than three weeks in German custody. At first, according to a fellow prisoner, he was treated correctly. Around 21 July he was moved to the prison on Łącki Street, where he began to be treated brutally. The order to kill him was given by Heinrich Himmler, and on 26 July (25 July according to some sources) Bartel was shot in the courtyard of the Brygidki prison – the same courtyard in which, a few weeks earlier, the bodies of the NKVD’s victims had been dug up. He was 59.

In November 1941 Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski said that the Germans had proposed to Bartel that he form a collaborationist government and that he had refused. The IPN historian Sławomir Kalbarczyk considers that this often repeated version finds no confirmation in the documents. What runs through the German correspondence is rather a suspicion that the former prime minister had discussed with the Soviet authorities the creation of a Polish government that would take the field against the Reich together with the USSR.

The killings were accompanied by plunder. Furniture, paintings and jewellery were carried off in SS vehicles from the flats of the Ostrowskis, the Greks, Dobrzaniecki and Bartel. Immediately after the massacre Ostrowski’s villa, where the Jabłonowski and Badeni collections among others were kept, was occupied by the Dutch art dealer Pieter Menten, who had lived in Lwów for years before the war and in 1941 accompanied Schöngarth’s unit as an interpreter and guide. Some historians believe that the motive of robbery influenced the choice of some of the victims.

The perpetrators

The operation was directed by Schöngarth, who according to witnesses’ testimony was present at the execution. The crime is attributed to members of the Einsatzkommando under his command: his chief of staff Heinz Heim, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, Walter Kutschmann, Kurt Stawizki (PL) and Felix Landau, who described his part in executions in Lwów in the diary he kept in those weeks. In 1942 Krüger, interrogating Karolina Lanckorońska in Stanisławów and convinced that she would not leave prison alive, admitted to her that he had taken part in killing the Lwów professors. According to one witness, the shooting was done by a squad of several men that included, besides Germans, Ukrainian auxiliaries in German uniforms.

For years a false version also circulated. From 1959 Soviet and East German propaganda attributed the massacre to soldiers of the Nachtigall Battalion and its German liaison officer, Theodor Oberländer, then a minister in the West German government. This was a KGB disinformation operation. In 1960 the Supreme Court of the GDR sentenced Oberländer in absentia to life imprisonment, and in 1993 a court in Berlin quashed the verdict. Researchers of the crime, from Zygmunt Albert to Dieter Schenk, found no evidence that Nachtigall took part in the execution, although according to an IPN prosecutor the role of the Ukrainian formations present in the city, including during the arrests, requires further investigation.

No one was ever tried for the murder of the professors. Schöngarth was hanged at Hameln on 16 May 1946, sentenced by a British military court for killing a downed Allied airman in the Netherlands. Landau received a life sentence in Stuttgart in 1962 for crimes in Drohobycz; Krüger a life sentence in Münster in 1968 for the murder of Jews in Stanisławów; and Menten ten years’ imprisonment in the Netherlands in 1980 for his part in executions in Podhorodce. Kutschmann hid in Argentina and died in custody in Buenos Aires in 1986, before his extradition case was decided. Proceedings in West Germany were discontinued, and the investigation by the IPN’s investigative branch in Rzeszów, reopened in 2003, was closed in 2006 because the perpetrators could not be identified.

The Germans also covered their tracks. On 8 October 1943 Jewish prisoners of Sonderkommando 1005, which under Aktion 1005 was digging up mass graves and burning the bodies, exhumed the bodies from the grave on the Wulka Hills – 38 bodies, according to the IPN’s findings – and burnt them in the Krzywczyce Forest. One member of the commando, Leon Weliczker, described after the war how documents belonging to Polish professors were found in the pockets of elegant clothes. The victims’ final resting place remains unknown.

Place in the war

The massacre on the Wulka Hills was the most notorious, but not the only, example of the destruction of the Polish elites in the lands occupied by the Germans in the summer of 1941 – a continuation of the Intelligenzaktion and the AB-Aktion, carried into territory that the Soviet Union had occupied for less than two years. In Wilno (Vilnius), taken on 24 June, the Germans took hostages, Poles among them, and mass shootings began at Ponary. In Krzemieniec in Volhynia some thirty members of the Polish intelligentsia, arrested from a list drawn up by Ukrainian nationalists, were shot at the end of July. Krüger, appointed head of the Gestapo outpost in Stanisławów, had some 250 members of the local Polish intelligentsia shot in the Black Forest in mid-August, and in the autumn directed the mass murder of Jews. On 1 August 1941 Lwów and Eastern Galicia were incorporated into the General Government as the District of Galicia. The Lwów universities were not reopened; some scholars survived as lice-feeders at Rudolf Weigl’s institute, which produced a typhus vaccine, as the job brought papers that protected against arrest.

For the Jews of Lwów July 1941 marked the beginning of the Holocaust. Of the more than one hundred thousand Jews living in the city in 1941, few survived the war – from several hundred to a few thousand, according to various estimates. Many Lwów scholars of Jewish origin also perished, among them the mathematicians Herman Auerbach and Juliusz Schauder.

After the war Lwów went to the Ukrainian SSR, and most of the surviving Polish professors moved to Wrocław, Kraków and Gliwice. In Poland the crime became a symbol of the fate of Lwów’s scholarship. Zygmunt Albert, a doctor on the Lwów medical faculty, began collecting witnesses’ accounts while the war was still on; his book Kaźń profesorów lwowskich (“The Execution of the Lwów Professors”, 1989) remains the basic collection of sources. In Wrocław a monument was unveiled in 1964, on which the communist authorities had a vague inscription placed about scientists murdered during the occupation; a plaque bearing the names of the Lwów professors was added only in 1981. In Lwów, on 3 July 2011, the 70th anniversary of the crime, a monument by the Kraków sculptor Aleksander Śliwa, built jointly by Wrocław and Lviv, was unveiled on the Wulka Hills.