After bombing universities across the country, rounding up and killing professors, teachers and intellectuals, the occupant set their sights on the most prestigious university of Poland. Part of the larger INTELIGENZAKTION Germans launched Sonderaktion Krakau (special operation Cracow) in order to erase Polish culture.
On November 3 in occupied Cracow SS-Sturmbannführer Bruno Müller ordered the Rector of the Jagiellonian University to call a general meeting of the faculty for November 6, ostensibly to listen to a lecture on the German point of view on the issues of science and higher education.
It was a lure. With 183 professors present Müller dropped the pretenses:
"The university began its academic year without obtaining the consent of the German authorities. This is an act of malice. Furthermore, it is common knowledge that the professors have always been hostile to German science. These are the reasons why you will all be taken to a concentration camp ... Any discussion or even comment on this matter is forbidden. Anyone who dares to resist my orders will be shot."
The SS criminals beat the professors onto awaiting trucks before carting them off to Sachsenhausen concentration camp...
In the 1980s the United States designated the Catholic Church as the greatest threat, greater than Marxism, and waged brutal and bloody proxy war against the Church in Latin America. In 2026 the administration targeted the Vatican and the Pope himself. But it has been done before. The Catholic Church has been a target of empires since it came to exist.
During WWII Catholic priests were among the first group hunted down, rounded up and carted off to concentration camps: approximately 4,000 priests and monks and 1,100 nuns were incarcerated in concentration camps. All in all Germans murdered 20% of Catholic priests in Poland alone (about 2,000 out of 10,000)...
Hunting Poles for extermination began during the military campaign of September 1939 (Operation Tannenberg). Roundups and mass public street executions went on for the duration of the occupation and by 1943 reached a point where not a person was certain of returning home if they went out for the briefest of time: Germans blocked off entire city blocks, arresting everyone, or picking only men, either killing without further ado or carting off to death camps. In an attempt to sow more terror Germans announced the names of the executed by loudspeakers and printed and posted across the city. The victims had their hands tied with barbed wire and their mouths filled with plaster to prevent them from crying with their last breaths: Long Live Poland! Their bodies were quickly collected and buried in mass unmarked graves in the woods...
Growing up in Poland one cannot escape learning from the cradle about the horrors of WWII. It is not surprising for a nation that lost 22% of its population under German occupation. Yet, the tragedy of the Polish people is largely unknown in the West. Why?
"The word Holocaust suggest to most people the tragedy the Jews experienced under the Germans during World War II. From a psychological point of view, it is understandable why Jews today prefer that the term refer exclusively to the Jewish experience, thus emphasizing the distinctiveness of the wartime fate of the Jews. Yet, by excluding others from inclusion in the Holocaust, the horrors that Poles, other Slavs, and Gypsies endured at the hands of the Nazis are often ignored, if not forgotten.
From a historical point of view, no reasonable student of World War II can deny that Hitler's policy toward Poles was also genocidal and that about as many Polish Christians as Polish Jews died as a result of Nazi terror. [...] it is time to speak about the forgotten Holocaust of World War II. By failing to broaden the scope of research on the Holocaust, we have allowed our perspective on it to become distorted, and this has led to simplistic and false conclusions about the subject."
From: Forgotten Holocaust, by Richard C. Lukas
In the follow up to the Intelligenzaktion Germans launched Operation AB -- hunt for and extermination of possible leadership classes.
"Those leadership classes in Poland whose existence we have identified should be liquidated, and those that will regrow we must find and remove again at the appropriate time. ... We do not need to transport these elements to concentration camps in the Reich... let's liquidate them on the spot," Hans Frank, Nazi governor of occupied Poland.
Germans recognized one of the most effective ways to prevent the rebirth of the leadership class, ie intelligentsia, is to close all secondary schools and universities:
"The people of the East are not allowed to have any higher education beyond a four-year primary school. The purpose of such a school is to teach simple counting, up to five hundred at most, writing one's name, and teaching that the highest commandment is to obey the Germans. I do not consider reading necessary," Heinrich Himmler
The very first transport to newly opened Auschwitz Concentration Camp consisted of the victims of Operation AB:
Why focus on the intelligentsia?
"Poles can only have one master: he is a German, therefore all representatives of the intelligentsia should be killed," Adolf Hitler
During occupation Germans exterminated thousands of representatives of Polish political, social, intellectual and cultural life, among them 5.1% of all elementary school teachers, 13.1 highschool teachers and 28.5% higher ed teachers and professors. Many were murdered in death camps, others were driven to mass execution sites, such as this one in Palmiry, outside of Warsaw:
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Various posts related to Without Pity, its background and context. Historical events described here might not appear in chronological order
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