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| AB-Aktion | |
|---|---|
 Polish Underground photo of the Nazi secret police deboarding victims at thePalmiry forest execution site nearWarsaw in 1940 | |
| Also known as | German:Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion |
| Location | Palmiry Forest and similar locationsin occupied Poland |
| Date | March–July 1940 |
| Incident type | Mass murder withautomatic weapons |
| Perpetrators | Hans Frank,Bruno Streckenbach,Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, and others |
| Participants |  Nazi Germany |
| Organizations | Waffen-SS,SS,Order Police battalions,Sicherheitsdienst,SiPo |
| Victims | 7,000 intellectuals and leaders of theSecond Polish Republic |
| Documentation | Pawiak andGestapo |
| Memorials | Murder sites and deportation points |
| Notes | Lethal phase of theoccupation of Poland |
TheAB-Aktion (German:Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktionlit. 'Extraordinary Pacification Operation',Polish:Akcja AB) was the second stage of theNazi German campaign of violence in Poland early inWorld War II, taking place between March and September 1940 in theGeneral Government (GG), territories that were merely occupied and remained nominally part of Poland.
As with the previousIntelligenzaktion, during the 1939invasion of Poland, it aimed to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of theSecond Polish Republic. Both primarily targeted present and former government officials, social and political activists, artists, educators, local business leaders and priests, all of whom the Germans believed would be instrumental in leading resistance to their rule, regardless of whether those targeted were actually inclined to do so. With the intellectuals eliminated, the Germans believed the remaining Polish population would be docile and exploitable whilst they Germanized Poland and extirpated Polish cultural, ethnic and national identity.
The November 1939Sonderaktion Krakau, in which 150 faculty and staff atJagiellonian University inKraków were arrested and sent toconcentration camps on the initiative of the local SS chiefBruno Müller, became a template for the AB Aktion. Most of those arrested survived their time in the camps and were released within months, following pressure from the Vatican and the Italian government.Adolf Hitler had personally chargedHans Frank, the German General Governor, with keeping Poland stable to avoid distractions to theinvasion of France the following year. Frank concluded it would be better to execute those arrested shortly afterwards, to avoid the same pressure, when security forces made their next wave of arrests before the France campaign.
In spring 1940 Frank, the four district governors and corresponding security and military officials held several conferences,including some jointly with the Soviet NKVD, to formalize plans for AB. Shortly afterwards theGestapo,SS,SD andSiPo in the GG began arrests. Over 30,000 Polish citizens were taken into custody;[1] about 7,000 were subsequently massacred.[2][3] Despite Frank's initial intentions to quickly execute all arrested, at ReichsfühererHeinrich Himmler's request many were sent to concentration camps, including thefirst to arrive atAuschwitz.
The resistance soon recovered from the major setback AB inflicted. By late 1941 the Germans switched to tactics that more specifically targeted known or suspected underground groups, as more Poles from all walks of life began taking action against the occupiers, contrary to German expectations. Mass executions continued as a method of state terror, joined later by the extermination of Jews, Roma and others the Nazis considered racially undesirable.
The Nazis considered thePolish intelligentsia to include not just the country's academics and artists, but its politicians, aristocrats, professionals, clergy, present and former military officers, and generally everyone sufficiently educated or wealthy to have a position of authority, even informally, in Polish society. Their ideology held that only these people had a truenational consciousness; the rest of the population was indifferent to the fate of the state and cared more about their daily lives.[4] Once the intelligentsia had been eliminated, the Nazis believed the remaining Poles would be useful to them as unskilled labour.[5]
The first mass murder of the intelligentsia, and any other people suspected of potential anti-Nazi activity, began in September 1939 as German troops beganinvading Poland and continued until the next spring.[6] This was seen by Nazi Germany as a pre-emptive measure to keep thePolish resistance scattered and to prevent the Poles from revolting during the planned Germaninvasion of France.[7]
This was theIntelligenzaktion, a plan to eliminate Poland's intelligentsia and leadership in the western and central part of the present Polish state, territoryannexed by Germany after the invasion, realized byEinsatzgruppen andVolksdeutscher Selbstschutz, a militia raised from the ethnicGermans in Poland. As the result of this operation 100,000Polish nobles, teachers, entrepreneurs, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were arrested (save those whose skills were temporarily needed for civil administrative purposes) in 10 regional actions.[8] Of those, nearly 50,000 were executed and the rest sent toconcentration camps that few survived.[9]
TheIntelligenzaktion was also extended to theGeneral Government (GG), the German-occupied rump of Poland not annexed to either the Soviet Union or Germany after the invasion. In general those actions were less intense and less lethal, sparing most of the Catholic clergy and larger landowners.[10] One such action, the November 1939Sonderaktion Krakau, in which the president and the entire faculty ofJagiellonian University inKraków were arrested and sent to concentration camps,[10] drew condemnation fromFascist Italy andthe Vatican.[11] All those who had survived their incarceration were eventually released; some died shortly afterwards as a result of maltreatment and undernourishment in the camps.[12]
By May 1940, Polish society had begun to recover from the previous year's military defeat, leading to an increase inresistance activity. With international attention diverted from Poland by the German invasion of France, Nazi German authorities thus decided the time was ideal for another anti-intellectual purge, this time to focus on the areas within the General Government.[13]
TheIntelligenzaktion was continued by the GermanAB-Aktion Operation in occupied territories of central Poland. Both murder operations were conducted in part according to an "enemies of the Reich list" prepared before the war by members of theGerman minority in Poland and printed ahead of time by the German Intelligence asSonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book-Poland).[2]
The later anti-PolishAB-Aktion had its roots in discussions with Soviet officials during a series of secretGestapo–NKVD conferences that began at the end of September 1939 after the two nations had defeated and divided Poland.[14] A secret protocol in theGerman–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed at that time bound both parties to "tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation which affects the territories of the other party [and] suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation."[15] By the end of the talks in March 1940 the two secret police agencies had begun primarily discussing how to suppress the resistance.[16]
By that time Hitler had also personally charged GG governor-generalHans Frank with keeping Poland under control to avoid any distractions during the upcoming actions on the Western Front.[17] Accordingly, on March 2, 1940, Frank convened a meeting with the military and security leadership and all four leaders of the GG's districts, to announce Aktion AB, its name from the words for "extraordinary pacification" in German. Noting that resistance organisations had already arisen, he warned that "we may wake up one morning and find ourselves overwhelmed by them if we do not soon launch a large-scale attack against at least their leaders."[18][19] At a meeting six days later he revealed that this initiative came on Hitler's personal orders. "The slightest attempt by the Poles to take action will result in a massive liquidation action against them", he warned. "I would not hesitate to use any method of terror and I would not shrink from any consequences."[17]
Immediately after the second meeting, SSBrigadeführerBruno Streckenbach, commander of theSicherheitsdienst (SD) andSicherheitspolizei (SiPo) in the GG, ordered his officers to begin arresting members of resistance organizations. He also froze the releases of any Poles still imprisoned after the 1939 actions. By the end of April he reported that of 2,200 to 2,400 suspected resistance members, a thousand were in custody.[20][21]
At a 16 May Kraków meeting with Streckenbach and GG administrative officials, Frank reiterated the danger posed from within. Citing the ongoingpartisan actions of theDetached Unit of the Polish Army and other recent incidents of attacks and sabotage against Germans and the occupying military,[22] the attendees agreed to initiate a plan to ensure that "the Polish resistance movement will be deprived of its leaders, the authority of the Führer and the Reich in the General Government will increase enormously, and peace in the country will be unconditionally maintained." All actions towards this end were to be centrally coordinated and authorised in order to emphasize German authority over the GG.[23] Frank ordered Streckenbach to begin Aktion AB immediately and granted him special legal authority to take those steps. It was expected that operations would conclude a month later, with the cases to be heard inStandgerichten, special temporary police courts, afterwards.[22][24]
Two weeks later, after the operation had started, another meeting was held to discuss the progress and further elucidate its goals and methods. Frank made it clear to all concerned that Aktion AB was specifically aimed at preventing the Poles from taking advantage of the invasion of France and the Low Countries to mount an uprising, which he described as a duty participants owed to the Reich.[25][26] For the first time he used the word "liquidation" to describe the goal of the operation, estimating that it would cost the lives of at least several thousand Poles.[27] Streckenbach reported that half of "the flower of Polish intelligentsia and resistance" had been arrested; he estimated that 75% of the total would be in German hands by the conclusion of Aktion AB.[25][28] Most of the arrested would simply be shot shortly afterwards rather than sent to camps, it was decided.[25] This, for Frank, was a lesson learned from the arrests of the Jagiellonian professors, which led to unnecessary "hassle" and would have turned out differently had the Germans just killed them.[29] He also ordered any Polish prisoners still held in camps in the Reich to be returned to the GG to avoid overburdening those camps.[30][31]
Aktion AB was envisioned not as the final action necessary to suppress the resistance but as merely the second of several. Through AB the Germans sought particularly to intimidate the whole population as they further eliminated those they believed could lead the resistance[32] To that end, they arrested 3,000 known criminals in order to discredit the intellectuals they were murdered alongside.[33]Ernst Zörner, governor of theLublin District, requested that workers and peasants be dropped from the lists for economic reasons, suggesting that originally the scope of Aktion AB had been broader.[25]
A catalyst for the liquidation of most prisoners was Frank's desire to avoid sending GG arrestees to camps in the Reich. But on a visit to Warsaw at the end of April, as planning for Aktion AB was getting underway, ReichsführerHeinrich Himmler had ordered that 20,000 Poles be sent west.[34][31] Accordingly, trains with up to a thousand prisoners at a time deposited Polish prisoners at camps in the Reich. One-third of the total, per Himmler's order, were taken toSachsenhausen.[35] In June 1940, one group of 728 Poles held inTarnów became thefirst large group taken toAuschwitz.[36] For many, the camps were a place to be held until a sufficient number had arrived to be shot, as happened to many prisoners taken from Warsaw toMauthausen in the autumn of 1940.Stanisław Grzesiuk reports that Gestapo officers from Warsaw were believed to be on hand to personally choose those to be shot.[37]
The majority of those arrested were, however, not transported to camps but shoten masse at selected sites in remote forests within the GG after being questioned about any involvement in or awareness of resistance activity.[29] TheStandgerichten were used to provide a veneer of due process to the executions in some cases, usually condemning the accused on thin grounds.[35][38] On the orders ofFriedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the GG's SS commander, units carrying out the executions were provided with "spiritually valuable" entertainment after completing their duties.[39]
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Many of those taken by Aktion AB came from Warsaw, not only Poland's capital but its social and cultural centre.[23] The arrests began at the end of March, targeting politicians, activists, teachers and professionals, all categories that in the opinion of the city's SS commander,Josef Albert Meisinger, could play a significant role in inciting and leading resistance to German rule. Among them wereMaciej Rataj, formerspeaker of parliament and deputy president of thePolish Second Republic, andJan Pohoski, vice president of Warsaw before the war. Arrests came in waves, and quickly. On April 20, 42 lawyers were arrested during a sweep of the city's bar association building, and three weeks later several primary school principals were arrested as a result of having dismissed students from school onConstitution Day a week earlier.[36][40] Unlike other districts, university professors were largely spared as Meisinger did not consider them, as a group, a significant threat.[41]
Most of those arrested in theWarsaw District were held at Warsaw'sPawiak prison until their fate was decided. Except for one group of 1,500 transported to Sachsenhausen at the beginning of May,[42] most were, as Frank had directed, murdered. An open area ofKampinos Forest northwest of Warsaw, near the village ofPalmiry, used for executions since late December, became the site ofhundreds of shootings of those arrested in AB, beginning with approximately 20 people in mid-June.[43][44] A week later, June 21 became one of Palmiry's deadliest days, when a series of three transports took 358 detainees from Pawiak there. Among the notable Poles killed were Rataj,Stefan Bryła,Tadeusz Tański,Mieczysław Niedziałkowski,Janusz Kusociński andStefan Kopec.[45]Sitno andŻelechów, in the outlying countryside, were also the sites of mass executions.[31]
Arrests in the city of Kraków likewise began at the end of March 1940 with a wave of a thousand taken into custody. German police also met many of those on their lists as they left church services on May 3. Others were arrested individually.[17] Most were held at theMontelupich Prison, where aStandgerichten presided over byLudwig Hahn heard cases on the ground floor. In May 290 arrestees were convicted of treason. While, as happened in Warsaw, some were taken to nearby forests nearPrzegorzały andNowy Wiśnicz to be shot, at least 150 executions were carried out at Fort 49 inWzgórza Krzesławickie in the city's northwest, continuing the site's use for that purpose since the preceding October.[46][47]
Outside Kraków, arrests did not begin in earnest until after the second May meeting where Frank had expressed his preference for executions over transport to camps. Those arrested were often concentrated in large prisons atSanok or Tarnów until their fate was decided.[46] To the categories of intellectuals targeted by Aktion AB elsewhere in the GG were added all those who had been captured while trying to escape across the border into theSlovak Republic andHungary.[23] By April 1940 Sanok, near the border, held 619, and the Germans took advantage of AB to reduce its population.[48] In early July 112 of those prisoners were shot on Gruszka Hill nearTarnawa Dolna, with an additional 93 killed in the woods nearSieklówka. All the deaths were officially listed as suicides. Most of those victims were officers and soldiers who had been trying to make their way toFrance and join Polish units there.[49]
Rzeszów Castle was another center for holding those imprisoned by Aktion AB until they could be massacred or transported. In late June a group of 83–104 prisoners, including 42 from youth resistance groups, was taken to the woods outsideLubzina and shot,[50][51] a death toll complemented the following day when 93Nowy Sącz prisoners were massacred in the woods nearTrzetrzewina.[36] Other small country towns in the region were also used as execution sites.[23]
Those the Germans spared were often sent to Auschwitz. A 20 June transport from Nowy Wiśnicz brought 313 people there,[52] with 65 Montelupich prisoners joining them the following month.[53] Other destination camps were Sachsenhausen, where a group of 500 from Tarnów was taken early in August,[46] andRavensbrück, which received 126 women.[29]
Aktion AB in the Lublin area did not start until June. Authorities there preferred mass arrests to operations against individuals.[54] These started early in the month inChełm,Puławy,Janów Lubelski,Radzyń Podlaski and other smaller outlying towns. On 24 June in the city ofLublin, 814 Poles aged 18 to 60 were arrested in one day and held atLublin Castle; that day 40 teachers attending what they had been told was a conference inBiała Podlaska were also taken into custody. Arrests over the next two days inZamość brought in 200, and on 26 June another 500 were arrested inLubartów.[55][56]
Those arrested in outlying areas were usually brought to Lublin Castle after a short stay in local prisons and jails such as theZamość Rotunda.[55][56] From Lublin, many were sent to camps, a thousand to Sachsenhausen with another 65 sent to Auschwitz in October.[57][58] The rest, about 450–500, wereexecuted at Rury Jezuickie, a short distance outside Lublin, in five large groups from the end of June through August, with some having been formally sentenced to death by theStandgerichten.[57][59][60] Alternatively, a shooting range near Czechów Górny was used; other killings in the area took place atNiemce andKonopnica.[23] Outside Chełm, 115 Poles arrested in the area were shot over 3–4 July in the woods near Kumowa Dolina.[60]
Aktion AB is considered to have begun in the GG'sRadom District with 42 arrests of "leadership class" intelligentsia inCzęstochowa and another hundred inRadomsko andPiotrków Trybunalski.[61] Two months later, additional raids were carried out in most towns within the district, with another 63 coming in Częstochowa, 53 (mostly school principals and teachers) in Radomsko[62] and 120 in Piotrków Trybunalski on 12 June.[63] The largest raid, withVolksdeutsche, local militia raised fromethnically German Poles, brought in 280 poles inTomaszów Mazowiecki, with another hundred taken prisoner inSulejów.[64][65] Later raids in theSkarżysko-Kamienna area led to another hundred arrests. The last wave took place in early August, primarily in the western area of the district, with 130 arrested in Piotrków Trybunalski and another 150 from Częstochowa and Radomsko.[46]
Most of the Radom District arrestees were sent to camps. A thousand from the early raids were taken to Sachsenhausen; in June a much smaller group was distributed among Auschwitz,Gross-Rosen andDachau. Later prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, and in mid-August the last group was divided. Men were sent toBuchenwald and the women to Ravensbrück.[66]
TheStandgerichten sentenced some prisoners to death.[63][67] Mass executions began in mid-June, with 63 prisoners shot at the forest stadium inKielce, with others killed there over the next month. Around the same time 117 Poles, mostly fromSandomierz, were shot in the woods nearGóry Wysokie.[68] On 29 June came one of the largest mass executions in the district with760 prisoners killed in the Brzask Forest near Skarżysko-Kamienna, along with 19 residents of the village ofKrólewiec who had been detained during a raid on the Detached Unit. Concurrently, an abandoned gunpowder magazine in the Wolborski Forest north of Piotrków Trybunalski was the site of another 42 executions.[69][70]
In the city ofRadom itself, approximately 258 Poles were executed in a series of seven mass executions in theFirlej district from May to July.[71][a] A total of 87 were shot in the woods nearOlsztyn andApolonka[b] in three mass executions.[62] Five were shot in the yard at Częstochowa prison.[73]
Several dates are given for the end of Aktion AB. The original plans called for all operations to be over by 15 June, and this date is sometimes considered the end.[10] But Streckenbach did not report that AB was over for almost another month, and Frank announced at a 23 July conference that it was finished.[74] Transports to the camps and executions continued past that date, into the later months of 1940.[75][76] From August to February, about 4,770 people were sent to camps from Warsaw area prisons. HistorianKrzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz thus considers Aktion AB to have symbolically ended on 17 January 1941, the day Streckenbach was dismissed from the GG.[77]
The active persecution of Polish intellectuals continued for the rest of the war. The direct continuation of the AB Aktion was a German campaign in the east started after theGerman invasion of the USSR. Among the most notable mass executions of Polish professors was themassacre of Lwów professors, in which approximately 45 professors of the university inLwów (now in Ukraine) were murdered together with their families and guests. Among those killed in the massacre wereTadeusz Boy-Żeleński, former Polish prime ministerKazimierz Bartel,Włodzimierz Stożek, andStanisław Ruziewicz. Thousands more perished in thePonary massacre, in German concentration camps, and in ghettos.[2]
_in_June_1946.jpg)
Aktion AB was one of Nazi Germany's deadliest acts of state terror in occupied Poland. While officially it was explained as a necessary response to the growth of the Polish resistance, its real purpose was to eliminate as many people as possible from the country's actual or potential leadership, and thus diminish Polish national identity.[75][78] It also directly continued what had been started with theIntelligenzaktion during the invasion.[79] As a resultAktion AB is considered to have been fundamentallygenocidal.[78]
There is no single comprehensive history of Aktion AB, and historians have not yet been able offer a full accounting of it. Most significant among the unknown facts is the exact count of victims.[80]Czesław Łuczak,Czesław Madajczyk, and other Polish scholars have generally accepted Streckenbach's figure of 6,500—approximately 3,500 intelligentsia killed, along with 3,000 criminals. However, his accounting has never been verified, so that number is not considered authoritative.[27] Records pertaining to the execution of the criminals are particularly fragmented and incomplete; it cannot be determined from them how many of those 3,000 actually were criminals.[76] The deportation of many of those spared execution to concentration camps that few survived further complicates reaching an accurate count of the victims.[81][33]
At first, as the Nazis had hoped, the rapid killing of so many members of the Polish athletic, cultural, economic, political and social elite had a damaging effect on the resistance, as many of its leaders and members were among those executed or deported.[82] The Gestapo was able to augment Aktion AB with several raids on small units of theUnion of Armed Struggle (ZWZ),[83] leaving what resistance organizations remained, already demoralized by thefall of France that June, chaotic and scattered.[82][84] It has been estimated that its numbers were reduced by a third.[2] In November ZWZ generalStefan Rowecki wrote to thePolish government-in-exile in London that both working conditions and security for the resistance had become much worse since May. More specifically, he noted that the Germans had arrested several high-ranking resistance officers in Kraków,Rzeszów,Przemyśl, andDębica in addition to eliminating several connections over the Slovak border, forcing the ZWZ to take even greater precautions.[85]
In the longer term, however, Aktion AB had no effect on the growth of the resistance. Despite the setbacks he admitted, Growecki's reports to London also document continued activity.[86] The ZWZ's calls to Poles to remain calm and focused blunted German hopes of intimidating society.[87] "Despite irreparable severe losses to Polish society, it stands taller", Growecki wrote in a January 1941 report. "More and more people are convinced that the losses to terror are war losses in the fight for survival and victory. Despite the terror, people continue to conceive plans for civil war and sabotage."[88]
The German occupying authorities, too, came to doubt the long-term efficacy of Aktion AB. Officers in the security services believed that suchad hoc actions yielded minimal results that, ultimately, did not impede the growth of the resistance.[87][c] Streckenbach conceded at a GG meeting a year after the operation that the belief that resistance came exclusively from those who had been officers, officials, activists or highly educated had been "mistaken and very dangerous". While that did account for a core group of the resistance leadership, he conceded, it had been largely "peasants and workers" carrying out its actions.[77] As a result the GG decided, after concluding Aktion AB, to forsake similar mass actions, at least for a while, and concentrate instead on targeting specific Polish resistance cells.[89]
Exactly how many people, and who, among the German occupying authorities were responsible for Aktion AB, has never been conclusively established. Frank, as governor-general, bears most of the responsibility along with Krüger and Streckenbach, the senior SS officials in the GG. The four district governors—Ludwig Fischer (Warsaw),Otto Wächter (Kraków),Ernst Zörner (Lublin) andKarl Lasch (Frank's brother-in-law) (Radom)—also were intimately involved in planning the operation, along with the district SS and police commanders likeOdilo Globocnik andFritz Katzmann. Those plans were then implemented by the SD and SP in the districts, led by Meisinger andLudwig Hahn, among others. Many lower-level members of those organizations also took part; those who sat on theStandgerichten bear special responsibility since they handed down formal death sentences when those were desired.[80][d]
A few of the perpetrators were tried for crimes against humanity, including Aktion AB, after the war. Frank and his deputy,Arthur Seyss-Inquart, were convicted atNuremberg and hanged. Fischer, Meisinger andJosef Bühler, State Secretary of the GG, were tried in Poland under theMoscow Declarations as that was where they had committed their crimes. They were convicted by theSupreme National Tribunal (NTN) and hanged as well.[91][92]
Hahn, the presiding judge of the StulpenichStandgerichten, initially remained free in postwar Germany, living under his own name inHamburg when he was arrested in 1960. Two attempts to bring him to trial failed due to insufficient evidence to support the charges; in 1972 he was finally tried, but convicted only on charges related to the execution of Polish political prisoners at Pawiak in 1944 and sentenced to eight years. In 1975 he was convicted of other charges relating to the deportation of Warsaw Jews toTreblinka and sentenced to life. Hahn was released in 1983 for health reasons and died three years later.[93]
Before the war was over, Lasch faced German criminal charges. He was appointed governor of the newly createdDistrict of Galicia in August 1941, an area attached to the GG that had been part of theUkrainian SSR before the war. A pawn in a power struggle between Frank and Himmler, he was relieved of that position and jailed in Kraków at the beginning of 1942 on embezzlement charges. Before Lasch could be tried, he was shot at the prison in Wrocław at Himmler's order. Whether this was by his own hand or a firing squad, and when, remains unclear.[94]
Some other perpetrators of AB, like many other prominent Nazis,took their own lives as the war ended. Krüger, having survived a 1943 assassination attempt in Kraków, went on to command Waffen-SS units in Yugoslavia, Finland, and finally Austria, where he killed himself in May 1945 as Germany surrendered. Globočnik was also in Austria at that time and was captured by British troops along with other wanted Nazis. He took a cyanide capsule and died before he could be questioned. Liphardt also took his own life in aSzczecin prison shortly after being returned to Poland. Zörner, removed as Lublin's district governor in 1943 and recalled to the Reich, is last known to have been serving with an army unit near Prague. He may have lived under an assumed name after that; his daughter's 1960 request to have himdeclared legally dead as of 21 December 1945 was granted.[95]
A few avoided trial entirely. Streckenbach, after declining a senior SS post in Austria in 1943, served in the Waffen-SS at his request until being taken prisoner by the Red Army, along with other survivors ofArmy Group Courland, inLatvia shortly after the end of the war. After his release in 1955, he returned to Hamburg and worked as a clerk. Charges against him for his activities as the city's Gestapo chief were dropped for insufficient evidence. In 1973 after documentation was found, he was charged again in the deaths of a million, but due to Streckenbach's failing health his trial was postponed the following year, and he died in 1977.[95]
Katzmann disappeared at the end of the war. He returned to Germany under an assumed name, without contacting his wife and children. In 1957, dying in aDarmstadt hospital, he revealed his true identity to the chaplain. Also using a false name, Wächter made his way to Rome viaratline from Austria after the war. There he was sheltered in a Catholic college by pro-Nazi Austrian bishopAlois Hudal and lived for a time as a monk. In 1949, while preparing for a flight toSouth America, he was taken ill with a blood disease, and upon being taken to hospital where he died a few days later, revealed his identity.[95]
At the same time that Aktion AB began, in April and May of 1940, the Soviet secret police, theNKVD, were carrying out theKatyn massacre of Polish army officers they had taken prisoners wheninvading Poland from the east as Germany had from the west the preceding September. This has led to speculation that the two powers coordinated their targeting of Polish leadership classes and that the Germans were aware that the Soviets had perpetrated Katyn, which German officers were tried for after the war, responsibility which the Soviets insisted on for decades until admitting their own culpability around the time the USSR collapsed.[96][97] The March 1940 GG meeting at which AB was authorised preceded by three days a meeting of theSoviet Politburo that similarly resulted in the decision to murder the captive Poles.[98] At one of a series ofGestapo-NKVD conferences, held nearZakopane, it has been argued that the plans for both AB and Katyn were shared and agreed by both sides.[99][100][101]
These allegations have been disputed. None of the documentary evidence from the Zakopane meeting, or any other Gestapo–NKVD conference, records any suggestion the two sides informed each other of their plans to murder many members of Poland's elite.[97] Extant Soviet records also suggest that such cooperation was improbable. It has thus been reasonably assumed that the Germans were unaware of the Katyn massacres until they unearthed the bodies after taking the area in 1943 and convened theKatyn Commission.[102]
InWilliam Styron's novelSophie's Choice andits film adaptation, the title character's father and husband are revealed to both have been professors in Kraków who, despite being strongly antisemitic Nazi sympathizers, were nevertheless arrested and executed along with their colleagues.[103]
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