Montelupi Prison


The Montelupich Prison, named for the street on which it is 7 Montelupich Street, the so‑called Kamienica Montelupich, built in the 16th century and converted in the 19th century into part of an military tribunal. It is a historic prison in Kraków, Poland. It was used by the Gestapo during World War II and has been called "one of the most terrible Nazi prisons in occupied Poland". The Gestapo took over the facility from the German Sicherheitspolizei at the end of March 1941. One of the Nazi officials responsible for overseeing the Montelupich Prison was Ludwig Hahn.
The prison population during World War II consisted predominantly of ethnically Polish political prisoners and victims of Gestapo street raids in Poland, but it also housed German SS and Security Service members serving jail terms. British and Soviet spies, parachutists, soldiers who had deserted the Waffen-SS, and convicts of ordinary crimes were among the prison's other occupants. Between 1940 and 1944, approximately 50,000 prisoners either passed through Montelupich or died in it. Kurkiewiczowa states that the interrogation methods employed by the Germans were equivalent to "medieval tortures".
Although the inscription on the plaque by the side door of the prison in the attached 1939 photograph reads, "Sicherheits-Polizei-Gefängnis Montelupich", the name "Montelupich Prison" is informal, having been accepted into history only because of popular usage. The Montelupich facility was the detention center of the first instance used by the Nazis to imprison the Polish professors from the Jagiellonian University arrested in 1939 in the so-called Sonderaktion Krakau, an operation designed to eliminate Polish intelligentsia. Over 1,700 Polish prisoners were eventually massacred at Fort 49 of the Kraków Fortress and its adjacent forest, and deportations of Polish prisoners to concentration camps, including Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, were also carried out. The prison also contained a cell for kidnapped Polish children under the age of 10, with an average capacity of about 70 children, who were then sent to concentration camps and executed. In January 1944, 232 prisoners from Montelupich were executed by a Nazi firing squad at Pełkinie. In late January or early February 1944, Wilhelm Koppe issued an order for the execution of 100 Montelupich prisoners as a reprisal for the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Hans Frank. In the locality called Wola Filipowska near Kraków there is a monument commemorating the execution by the Nazis of 42 hostages, all Montelupich prisoners who died on the spot before a firing squad on 23 November 1943.
After World War II, Montelupich became a Soviet prison where NKVD and Urząd Bezpieczeństwa tortured and murdered Polish soldiers of the Home Army. Currently, the building serves as a temporary arrest and detention facility for men and women, with 158 jail cells and a prison hospital with an additional 22 cells.

History of the property

The building housing the prison was not originally constructed for its purpose but, instead, was a historical property that was redecorated in the Italianate Renaissance style in 1556 by the Italian Montelupi family, who introduced the first postal service in Poland for the court of Sigismund III Vasa. Their Kraków manor house, known in Polish as the Kamienica Montelupich, at Number 7 of the street to which it gave the name, was the starting point of the first international postal coach in Poland which departed from here for Venice in 1558. The Jalu Kurek Park in Kraków was formerly the palace garden of the Palazzo Montelupi.

Current status

The Montelupich was the site of the last execution in Poland before the death penalty was abolished: the hanging of Stanisław Czabański, who had been convicted of raping and murdering a woman, on 21 April 1988.
Despite being officially recognized as both a historical monument and a place of martyrdom, the facility continues to be operated to this day as a combination of remand prison and ordinary correctional facility by the Polish Prison Administration, a unit of the Polish Justice Ministry. Its current official name is Areszt Śledczy w Krakowie. The infamous history of this facility continues to the present day, as evident in the 2008 death of the Romanian detainee, Claudiu Crulic, an incident condemned by human rights groups which occasioned the resignation of the Romanian Foreign Affairs Minister, Adrian Cioroianu.
Vincent A. Lapomarda writes in his book on the Nazi terror that:
On inquiring about Montelupich, on Montelupi Street, when I was in Kraków on 18 August 1986, I was able to view it from outside and learned that even today, while still operating, it has not lost the evil reputation that it had during the Nazi occupation.

Notable inmates

Nazi war criminals

On 24 January 1948, twenty-one Nazi German war criminals, including two women, were hanged at the Montelupich Prison as a result of the death sentences handed down in the Auschwitz trial. Their names are listed below along with the names of the Nazi war criminals executed at Montelupich at other dates.

Eyewitness accounts

Historical studies