[7] During World War II, it was a Nazi German prison, a place of secret detention and torture of Polish members of the Resistance,[8] Armia Krajowa.

1920; the son of Rafał Taubenschlag),[19] and was the place of imprisonment by the Nazis of Polish elite represented by the sculptor, Jan Krzyczkowski (1910–1980).

[20] It appears in the memoirs of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the proprietor of the famous Under the Eagle Pharmacy nearby, featured in the award-winning film, Schindler's List.

[21] The various methods of torture used by the Nazis against the detainees included an early form of waterboarding performed in a bathtub full of water, which close family members of the victims specially brought to the prison for the occasion were made to witness as an added terror tactic (e.g., in the case of Józef Świstak nom de guerre Bunkier, a member of the Szare Szeregi, d. 1944, whose mother was made to witness his martyrdom).

[29] The post of the Kommandeur of these two services was occupied from September 1943 until the end of the Nazi rule in Kraków on 17 January 1945 by Rudolf Batz (1903–1961) — who for fifteen and a half years after the War (until November 1960) avoided capture by living under an assumed identity.

[15] The building — not intended for prison use — was originally designed by the Polish architect Ferdynand Liebling (1877–1942) as a mixed-use courthouse-cum-taxation office for the town of Podgórze (Ger., Josefsstadt) and constructed in 1905 when the area was under Austrian occupation.

[16][33] The prison administration quarters housed in the post-War years an office of the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes (Okręgowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich, a defunct governmental body now subsumed within the IPN whose purview includes Communist in addition to Nazi crimes).

[34] During the Third Republic, on 22 May 1996, the prison complex was entered on the register of historical monuments protected by law, a fact further confirmed by an additional resolution of the City Council of 28 June 2006.

[36] Materials pertaining to crimes against humanity committed at Czarnieckiego 3 during the Second World War are preserved at the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw,[37] and at other archives in Poland (listed in part in Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939–1945: informator encyklopedyczny; see Bibliography) and at the Bad Arolsen Archives in Germany.