Massacre of Lviv Professors - Aftermath

Aftermath

After World War II the leadership of the Soviet Union made attempts to diminish the Polish cultural and historic legacy of Lviv. Crimes committed east of the Curzon line could not be prosecuted by Polish courts. Information on the atrocities that took place in Lviv was restricted.

In 1960 Dr. Helena Krukowska, the widow of Prof. Dr. Włodzimierz Krukowski, launched an appeal to the court in Hamburg. After five years the German court closed the judicial proceedings. Public prosecutor von Beelow argued that the people responsible for the crime were already dead. This however was not true since at the same time SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger, commander of the Gestapo unit supervising the massacres in Lviv in 1941, was being held in Hamburg prison (he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the mass murder of Jews and Poles in Stanisławów, committed several weeks after his unit was transferred from Lviv). As a result no person has ever been held responsible for this atrocity.

In the 1970s Abrahamowicz Street in Lviv was renamed Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński Street.

Various Polish organisations have made deputations to remember the victims of the atrocity with a monument or a symbolic grave in Lviv.

The case of the murder of the professors is currently under investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance.

In May 2009, the monument to the victims in Lviv was defaced with red paint bearing the words "Death to the Lachs (Poles)".

On July 3, 2011 a memorial dedicated to the 39 Polish professors murdered by the Gestapo on July 4, 1941 was opened in Lviv.