Aktion gegen Universitäts-Professoren, commonly known as Sonderaktion Krakau, has left its mark on the history of Cracow and modern history in general, as an unprecedented attack on Polish academic circles.
The representative of the German occupation authorities, SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Müller, commanded Jagiellonian University Rector, Professor Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński to convene a meeting of all the university’s lecturers at the administrative center building in the Collegium Novum.
The meeting of 6 November 1939 turned out to be a trap – after a few-minute speech by Müller, in which he stated that the university had always been the “source of anti-German attitudes”, the professors were arrested. In total, 183 people were detained – mainly scholars associated with the Jagiellonian University, the University of Mining and the Cracow Academy of Commerce, as well as several other people who were then in the building or its surroundings at the time. The arrested were transported to the police prison on Montelupich Street, and then to the barracks on Mazowiecka Street. Several days later, 172 of them (a few people had been released in the meantime) were taken to Wrocław, from where they were transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp located on the outskirts of Oranienburg. (more...)
The Victims of Sonderaktion Krakau
An amazing synchronicity: I was enrolled at New College (Collegium Novum) at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate engineering student. There, I found myself among many undeNazified offspring of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. It would appear that powerful freemasons had given shelter to ratline Nazis in Canada after the war. Not exactly the summer of love crowd.
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