Sonderaktion Krakau

At noon on Monday 6 November 1939 more than 150 professors and lecturers gathered in Room 66 of the Collegium Novum, the main building of the Jagiellonian University. They had come to a lecture announced by the head of the Kraków office of the German Security Police, the SS officer Bruno Müller, who was to speak on the Reich’s attitude to learning and higher education. There was no lecture. In a few sentences Müller announced that the university had begun the academic year without the consent of the German authorities, that its professors had always been hostile to German scholarship, and that everyone present would be sent to a concentration camp. He threatened to shoot anyone who tried to resist. Policemen who had surrounded the building beforehand led the scholars out into the street and loaded them onto lorries.

That day 183 people were arrested in the university building: professors and lecturers of the Jagiellonian University, professors of the Academy of Mining and the Academy of Commerce, several schoolteachers, officials, students and chance visitors who happened to be in the building. In the afternoon the Mayor of Kraków, Stanisław Klimecki, was also detained at his home and shared the fate of the scholars. This is why the literature gives the number of those arrested as 184 as well as 183. The operation, known in Poland as Sonderaktion Krakau, or “Special Operation Kraków”, became a symbol of German policy towards Polish learning and culture.

Kraków under occupation

German troops entered Kraków without a fight on 6 September. The city was not destroyed, but already in the first weeks of the occupation units of the Security Police and the SD were active there, following the Wehrmacht as part of Operation Tannenberg. Kraków was the responsibility of Einsatzgruppe I (PL) under Bruno Streckenbach, and the city itself of its Einsatzkommando 2/I, commanded by Müller, a 34-year-old lawyer and former head of the Gestapo offices in Oldenburg and Wilhelmshaven. Their task was “combating elements hostile to the Reich”, which in practice meant eliminating the Polish leadership class.

On 26 October Kraków became the capital of the General Government. Governor-General Hans Frank arrived in the city in the first days of November and on 7 November took up residence at Wawel Castle. German plans for the Poles were already clear by then: on 17 October Adolf Hitler had told the chief of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, that the Polish intelligentsia must not be allowed to re-emerge as a leadership class and that the country was to be a source of cheap labour. Elementary schools were to be enough for the Poles. Universities, secondary schools, a press and scholarly life were things they did not need.

The authorities of the Kraków universities did not know this, or did not want to believe it. On 19 October the senate of the Jagiellonian University, assuming that hostilities were over, decided to open the 1939/1940 academic year and to accept student enrolments until 4 November. The German authorities were informed of the decision and raised no objection. On 4 November an inaugural service was held in St Anne’s Church. Lectures were to begin on 6 November, then were postponed to 13 November to avoid possible demonstrations on the anniversary of the restoration of independence on 11 November.

On 3 November Müller summoned the rector, the Slavist Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński, and ordered him to call a meeting of all the teaching staff for 6 November, at which Müller himself would give a talk on the German point of view on learning and higher education. The rector sent out the invitations. Most professors reckoned that staying away would be taken as a demonstration of hostility towards the occupiers, so they came. Some had to make their way through the police cordon that had already surrounded the building.

The trap in the Collegium Novum

Müller entered the hall escorted by police, read a short statement in German and allowed no one to speak. When the former rector, the 70-year-old legal historian Stanisław Estreicher, tried to say something, he was cut short, and Rector Lehr-Spławiński was told that he would be the first to be arrested. The scholars were pushed about, and some were beaten, including with rifle butts. Only the two women present in the hall were released, the Indologist Professor Helena Willman-Grabowska and the botanist Professor Jadwiga Wołoszyńska. It was they who told the families what had happened.

Those detained included 144 people connected with the Jagiellonian University, among them more than 70 professors from all five faculties, as well as 21 professors and staff of the Academy of Mining, who were holding their own meeting in the same building, although their institution had no intention of starting the year and its building had already been taken over by the Germans. Also arrested were three lecturers of the Academy of Commerce, one each from Wilno (Vilnius) and Lublin, six secondary-school teachers and six people who were in the building by chance. Among those detained were men who had shaped Polish scholarship for decades: the historian Władysław Konopczyński, the linguist Kazimierz Nitsch, the astronomer Tadeusz Banachiewicz, the legal historian and secretary general of the Polish Academy of Learning Stanisław Kutrzeba, the literary historian Ignacy Chrzanowski, the anatomist Kazimierz Kostanecki, the zoologist Michał Siedlecki, the economist Adam Heydel, the philosopher Father Konstanty Michalski and the literary historian Stanisław Pigoń. Only a handful escaped arrest, among them Bishop Michał Godlewski, who left the hall before the meeting began and hid in the building.

The code name “Sonderaktion Krakau” does not appear in any known German document. Polish historians began to use it in the 1960s, and according to the memoirs of the lawyer Jan Gwiazdomorski (PL), this was how the prisoners were supposed to answer in the camp when asked why they had been arrested. Their camp record cards were marked “operation against university professors” (Aktion gegen Universitäts-Professoren). Nor is it known exactly who decided on the operation. It was carried out by the Security Police, subordinate to Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, and not by the administration of Frank, who took up office in Kraków only in the following days.

Montelupich, Breslau, Sachsenhausen

The prisoners were taken first to the Montelupich prison and on the morning of 7 November to the barracks of the former 20th Infantry Regiment on Mazowiecka Street. There a dozen or so were released, among them the lawyer Fryderyk Zoll and the historian Jan Dąbrowski. On 9 November the rest, about 170 people, were taken by train to Breslau (Wrocław), where they spent more than a fortnight in two prisons. The Gestapo was waiting for places in Buchenwald concentration camp, and when none became available, during the night of 27–28 November it moved the prisoners to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

At Sachsenhausen the Kraków scholars were put in Blocks 45 and 46. They were not sent to work, but for many hours a day they had to stand in the barracks, and three times a day at roll calls in frost and snow, without warm clothing and on starvation rations. The SS men beat and humiliated them. The winter of 1939/1940 was exceptionally harsh, and many of the prisoners were over sixty. The first to die, over Christmas, was Professor Antoni Meyer (PL) of the Academy of Mining. Estreicher died on 28 December. In the following weeks those who died included Siedlecki, Kostanecki, Chrzanowski, the geographer Jerzy Smoleński (PL), the zoologist Tadeusz Garbowski, the Russian-language lector Stefan Bednarski, and engineers from the Academy of Mining. More than a dozen scholars died in the camp itself within three months.

Protests and release

News of the arrest of the professors of one of Europe’s oldest universities quickly reached the outside world and caused outrage. According to Polish accounts, 24 states and the Holy See of Pope Pius XII intervened in the matter in various ways, including through diplomatic channels. Scholars in neutral countries protested. An important part was played by an Italian woman, Luciana Frassati-Gawrońska, the wife of a Polish diplomat, who interested Benito Mussolini in the case. In January 1940 the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, instructed the embassy in Berlin to intervene on behalf of the prisoners, especially Father Michalski. Berlin preferred not to disregard the views of its only major ally.

On 8 February 1940, 101 prisoners were released from Sachsenhausen, all those aged 40 or over. They returned to Kraków the next day, emaciated and ill. Several died in the weeks that followed, among them Antoni Wilk, Jan Nowak, Stefan Kołaczkowski, Jan Włodek and Arnold Bolland. The younger scholars, born in 1900 or later, were transferred in March 1940 to Dachau. Most of them were released by the end of 1940, the last, the historian Kazimierz Piwarski, only at the end of 1941. Scholars of Jewish origin were not released: the classical philologist Leon Sternbach died in Sachsenhausen in 1940, the geographer Wiktor Ormicki in Mauthausen in 1941, and the philosopher Joachim Metallmann (PL) in Sachsenhausen in 1942. Some of those released were later arrested again. Adam Heydel was killed in Auschwitz in 1941, and Stanisław Klimecki was shot in December 1942 in the Niepołomice Forest. In all, at least twenty people died or were murdered as a result of the operation.

Release did not mean a return to work. The Jagiellonian University and the other Kraków institutions of higher learning remained closed, and their buildings, collections and laboratories were taken over by the Germans. Frank made no secret of the fact that the affair of the Kraków professors had caused him trouble. According to entries in his diary, in May 1940, when the AB-Aktion against the Polish intelligentsia was being prepared, he told his subordinates that there had been an enormous fuss over the professors and that had the matter been dealt with on the spot, it would have turned out differently. The AB-Aktion, in which several thousand people were murdered, was carried out quietly, without deporting the victims to camps in the Reich, where the world might hear of them.

Place in the war

Sonderaktion Krakau was part of a wider campaign to destroy the Polish elites, which historians call the Intelligenzaktion. In the territories annexed to the Reich, teachers, priests, landowners and community leaders were murdered in their thousands that autumn. In the General Government, where for the time being the Germans more often arrested than killed on the spot, the November arrests of the intelligentsia also extended to Lublin, where several hundred members of the local elite, including professors of the Catholic University of Lublin, were detained in the Sonderaktion Lublin. On 17 November a similar fate befell Czech students in Prague, and the Germans closed the Czech universities until the end of the war. In July 1941, after taking Lwów (Lviv), the SS shot several dozen professors and members of their families there in the massacre of the Lwów professors.

Throughout the occupation no Polish institution of higher learning operated in the General Government. The Poles were left with elementary and vocational schools, intended to train workers. The Kraków scholars responded with underground teaching. From 1942 a clandestine Jagiellonian University operated, and by the end of the war some 800 students had attended its classes. Among them was a student of Polish literature, and later of theology, Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II. Many of the teachers at the underground university had earlier passed through Sachsenhausen.

In 1941 Bruno Müller commanded one of the detachments of Einsatzgruppe D, which murdered Jews in Ukraine and Bessarabia. After the war a British military court sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment, but he was released in 1953, and Polish efforts to have him extradited came to nothing. He died in 1960, an insurance agent. The memory of 6 November 1939 is still alive at the Jagiellonian University. On every anniversary black flags are hung on the university buildings and the rector lays wreaths on the graves of the victims. The events in the Collegium Novum were also shown in Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 film Katyn.