During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Polish works of art, volumes and archives, fell victim to looting or were destroyed forever. Many prominent Polish museum workers and people of culture, as well as museum employees, paid the highest price – the price of their own lives – while attempting to protect national heritage. Despite 80 years passing since the outbreak of the war, Poland has not ceased the search for and retrieval of stolen cultural property.
The targeted and precise actions taken by the Germans on September 1, 1939, and later by the Russians after September 17, 1939, led to the elimination of cultural achievements and the Polish elite. In the German concentration camp Mauthausen, thousands of Polish artists, architects, journalists, writers, poets, musicians, composers, social and political activists, university professors and students were imprisoned. About 30,000 of them were murdered.
German and Soviet crimes were targeted against the Polish intelligentsia, Polish culture, identity, independence; in a word, Poland. In November 1939, the German SS troops carried out Sonderaktion Krakau. Cracow scholars were deceptively gathered at the Collegium Novum of the Jagiellonian University in order to be transported to concentration camps. Among the victims of the crime in Palmyra – executions carried out between December 1939 and July 1941 – there were also representatives of the Polish political, intellectual and cultural elite. Fifty prominent Polish scholars, professors from Lviv, their relatives and co-workers were murdered in July 1941. We cannot forget about the many outstanding Polish artists who died fighting in the ranks of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising or even as a result of military operations carried out by the occupiers. Among the 6 million Polish victims of the war, including 3 million Polish Jews, a great number of representatives of the Polish intelligentsia were murdered, among others a third of the Polish elite. (more...)
The war against Polish culture
Related:
World War II looting of Poland
Objects Lost As A Result Of The Second World War
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