The rector agreed and sent an invitation throughout the university for a meeting scheduled at the administrative center building in the Collegium Novum (entrance pictured).

Instead, they were told by Müller that the university did not have permission to start a new academic year and that Poles were hostile toward German science and acted in bad faith.

An additional 13–15 university employees and students who were on site were also arrested, as well as the President of Kraków, Dr Stanisław Klimecki who was apprehended at home that afternoon.

[6] Following loud international protest by prominent Italians including Benito Mussolini and the Vatican,[9] 101 professors who were older than 40 were released from Sachsenhausen on 8 February 1940.

Some elderly professors did not survive the roll-calls, held three times a day even in ice and snow, and the grim living conditions where dysentery was common, warm clothes rare and food rations scarce.

Among the 800 students of their underground college was Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, taught by Prof. Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński among others.