82 years ago on 6th November 1939 Sonderaktion Krakau happened in which 183 professors from Kraków universities were sent to concentration camps by Germans. It was a part of larger plan, the Intelligenzaktion, which aim was to eradicate the Polish intellectual elite.
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> Following loud international protest by prominent Italians including Benito Mussolini and the Vatican,[9] 101 professors who were older than 40 were released from Sachsenhausen on February 8, 1940. Additional academics were released later. Some elderly professors did not survive the roll-calls, held three times a day even in ice and snow, and the grim living conditions where dysentery was common, warm clothes rare and food rations scarce.[10] Twelve died in the camp within three months, and another five within weeks of release
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
> The Intelligenzaktion or Intelligentsia mass shootings, was a mass murder conducted by Nazi Germany against the Polish intelligentsia (teachers, priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society) early in the Second World War (1939–45). The operations were conducted to realise the Germanization of the western regions of occupied Poland, before territorial annexation to the German Reich.
> The mass murder operations of Intelligenzaktion killed 100,000 Polish people; by way of forced disappearance, the Nazis imprisoned and killed selected citizens of Polish society, identified before the war as enemies of the Reich; they were buried in mass graves at remote places.[4] To facilitate the depopulation of Poland, the Nazis terrorised the general populace with the public, summary executions of selected intellectuals and community leaders, before effecting the expulsions of the general population from occupied Poland. The executioners of the Einsatzgruppen death squads and the local Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, the German-minority militia, pretended that their police-work was meant to eliminate politically dangerous people from Polish society.[4]
> The Intelligenzaktion was a major step towards implementing Sonderaktion Tannenberg (Special Operation Tannenberg), the installation of Nazi policemen and functionaries — from the SiPo (composed of the Kripo and Gestapo), and the SD — to manage the occupation and facilitate the realisation of Generalplan Ost, the German colonization of Poland.[6] Among the 100,000 people killed in the Intelligenzaktion operations, approximately 61,000 were of the Polish intelligentsia, whom the Nazis identified as political targets in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, compiled before the war began in September 1939.[5] The Intelligenzaktion occurred soon after the German invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), and lasted from the autumn of 1939 until the spring of 1940; the mass murder of the Polish intellectuals continued with the operations of the AB-Aktion
>
> Some of the regional operations include:
> 1. Intelligenzaktion Pommern, a regional mass murder operation in the Pomeranian Voivodeship; 23,000 Poles were arrested, imprisoned, and killed soon after identification and arrest. To terrorise the general populace, the Nazis then selected prominent citizens, from the arrested people, and publicly executed them, leaving the corpses on display, as formal warning against resistance to German occupation.[4]
> 2. Intelligenzaktion Posen, the mass murder of 2,000 victims from Poznań.
> 3. Intelligenzaktion Masovien, regional mass murder in the Masovian Voivodeship, 1939–40, 6,700 people killed, from Ostrołęka, Wyszków, Ciechanów, Wysokie Mazowieckie, and Giełczyn, near Łomża.
> 4. Intelligenzaktion Schlesien, regional mass murder in the Silesian Voivodeship in 1940; 2,000 Poles killed.
> 5. Intelligenzaktion Litzmannstadt, regional mass murder in Łódź, 1939; 1,500 people killed.
> 6. Zweite Sonderaktion Krakau
> 7. Sonderaktion Tschenstochau in Częstochowa
> 8. Sonderaktion Lublin, regional mass murder in Lublin; 2,000 people killed, most were priests of the Roman Catholic Church.
> 9. Sonderaktion Bürgerbräukeller in the Łódź Voivodeship
> 10. Professorenmord, mass murder of the intelligentsia in the Stanisławów, the Kresy region, Czarny Las Massacre; 250–300 Polish academics killed.
Israel did the same with iraqiand Iranian scientists in various occasions since 2003.
I guess history repeat itself.
What strikes me is that the Nazis believed the Polish (and other Slavs) to be inferior intellectually, yet still felt the need to remove their thinkers.
and to this day, authoritarians have not stopped their attacks on academia, professors, colleges, and education in general. Always be vigilant. This keeps popping up throughout history under different names.
Poland never intellectually recovered after WWII and it’s terrible.