Massacre of Lwów Professors

Date: July 4, 1941 • Location: Lviv, Ukraine

German AB-Aktion in Poland: After capturing Lwów, the Nazis executed professors of the University of Lwów along with their families.

Aktion AB was the second stage of Nazi Germany's campaign of violence in the occupied General Government (GG) of Poland. It followed the Intelligenzaktion, during Germany's invasion the preceding year, which sought to eliminate the intellectuals and the upper classes of the Second Polish Republic. The remaining Polish population would thus be docile and exploitable, making it easier to Germanise Poland and extirpate Polish cultural, ethnic and national identity. The November 1939 Sonderaktion Krakau was a template for Aktion AB. Most of the 150 faculty and staff at Jagiellonian University in Kraków who were arrested survived the concentration camps and were released within months. German leader Adolf Hitler had personally charged GG governor Hans Frank with keeping Poland stable during the invasion of France the following year. When security forces made their next wave of arrests, Frank concluded it would be better to execute those arrested shortly afterwards.