where Sonderaktion Krakau was carried out.
After the invasion of Poland that officially started World War II, the Nazis set about culturally crippling the occupied country by eliminating its intellectual elite. Kraków, Poland’s cultural capital, was an obvious target as the Nazis intended to Germanise the entire region. Jagiellonian University, the second oldest university in Europe, was deemed to be of particular danger to Nazi plans of brainwashing the population, and under the codename Sonderaktion Krakau ('Special Operation Kraków'), the Nazis orchestrated an attack against Jagiellonian’s academics.
On November 6th, 1939 , German authorities ordered all professors to attend a lecture on ‘German plans for Polish education.’ When 183 professors, staff and students gathered (under armed obligation) in lecture hall 66 (now 56 after renumbering) of Collegium Novum , as you can guess, no lecture took place and everyone in the building was arrested by armed Nazi soldiers. The flimsy pretence was that the university was ‘operating without German consent’ and all 183 detainees (of which 142 were UJ professors) were immediately rounded up and sent to Kraków's Montelupich prison, then a prison in
