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 (SD) 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.