Salomon Morel (November 15, 1919 – February 14, 2007) was an officer in the Ministry of Public Security in the Polish People's Republic, and a commander of concentration camps run by the NKVD and communist authorities until 1956.
After Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Morel and his family went into hiding to avoid being placed in one of the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. Both Salomon and his brother survived part of the war and Holocaust under the protection of a local Polish farmer, before joining communist partisans.
Beginning in the early 1990s Morel was investigated by Institute of National Remembrance for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the revenge killings[4] of more than 1,500 prisoners in Upper Silesia, most of whom were either native speakers of Silesian German or Polish political prisoners.[5][1][6][7] In 1996, he was indicted by Poland on charges of torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and communist crimes.[3] After his case was publicized by the Polish, German, British, and American media, Morel fled to Israel and was granted citizenship under the Law of Return. Poland twice requested his extradition, once in 1998 and once in 2004, but Israel refused to comply and rejected the more serious charges as being false and again rejected extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations against Morel had run out and that Morel was in poor health.[8] Polish authorities responded by accusing Israel of applying a double standard, and the controversy over Morel's extradition continued until his death.[5]
Background and youth
Salomon Morel was born on November 15, 1919, in the village of Garbów near Lublin, Poland, the son of a Jewish baker who owned a small bakery. During the Great Depression, the family business began to falter. Therefore, Morel moved to Łódź where he worked as a sales clerk, but returned to Garbów following the outbreak of war in September 1939.[9]
Morrel's two brothers died during the war, one in 1943, another in 1945.[9][bettersourceneeded] According to the IPN, as the Eastern Front advanced, Morel and other communist partisans came out of hiding. In the summer of 1944, Morel joined the Milicja Obywatelska in Lublin.[9] Later, he became a warden at the Lublin Castle, where many soldiers of the anti-communistArmia Krajowa (Home Army) were imprisoned and tortured.[9][11]
The Israeli mass media and government presented yet a different version of his life.[12] The Israeli letter rejecting extradition states that Morel joined the partisans of the Red Army in 1942, and was in the forests when his parents, sister-in-law, and one brother were allegedly killed by Blue Police.[12][13] According to a number of media sources,[14] Morel claimed that he was at one point an inmate in Auschwitz and over thirty of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust.[12]
Memorial to the victims of "totalitarian violence inflicted by the Nazi and the Communist regimes" in front of the former main gate of Zgoda camp, with text in Polish, German and English
Sometimes children were sent to the camp along with parents.[15][bettersourceneeded] Prisoners were not accused of any crime, but were sent by decision of Security Authorities. Authorities tried to convince society that prisoners were only ethnic Germans and former Nazi war criminals and collaborators.[15]Keith Lowe notes that "in reality almost anyone could end up there" and the memorial in front of the camp's main gate describes the prisoners as mainly local population.[1] It is estimated that close to 2,000 inmates died in the camp where torture and abuse of prisoners were chronic and rampant[13] and resulted in an average 100 inmate deaths a day. Solomon Morel's preferred method of torture was the ice water tank where prisoners would be put in with freezing water up to their necks until they died. The camp was closed in November 1945.[13][bettersourceneeded]
The survivor Dorota Boriczek described Morel as "a barbaric and cruel man" who often personally tortured and killed prisoners.[7] Gerhard Gruschka, a local Upper Silesian of Polish descent, was imprisoned in Zgoda when he was 14 years old and wrote a book about his experiences, detailing the endemic torture and abuse in the camp.[2] Morel was also accused of an extensive pattern of sadistic torture in John Sack's book An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, which contributed to publicizing his case in the Anglophone world in the 1990s.[4]
Historians Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones note that Morel "presided over a murderous regime founded on ubiquitous assaults and atrocities against German captives."[16]Keith Lowe notes that "when millions of bruised and destitute refugees began flooding into Germany in the autumn of 1945, they brought with them some disturbing stories of places they called 'hell camps', 'death camps' and 'extermination camps'". Zgoda camp was among the most notorious of these camps, and is discussed in detail by Lowe. Lowe notes that survivors' stories of Zgoda and other camps had a profound impact on West German society and that their stories were taken extremely seriously by the German government and the general population as examples of Stalinist brutality.[1]
From February 1949 to November 1951 Morel was commander of Jaworzno concentration camp, a Stalinist-era concentration camp for political prisoners (designated "enemies of the nation") in Poland. By that time he already had a reputation in Poland as an "exceptional sadist."[17] During Morel's time as the commandant the prisoners were primarily Poles who were arrested for their opposition to Stalinism, and included soldiers of the Polish Home Army and members of other Polish underground resistance organisations such as Freedom and Independence that was active from 1945 to 1952. Prisoners were often tortured and subjected to forced labor. Morel left the camp when it was turned into a camp for adolescent political prisoners.[18][19]
Later career
Morel continued working as commandant of Stalinist-era concentration camps until 1956. When the Polish October weakened the hard-line Stalinist faction in Poland, the Stalinist concentration camps were closed down.[20] After 1956, Morel worked in various prisons in Silesia and was promoted to the rank of colonel in the political police, the MBP. In the 1960s he was head of a prison in Katowice.[9][bettersourceneeded] In 1964 he defended his master's degree with a thesis on the economic value of forced labor at Wrocław University's Law School.[9][bettersourceneeded] During the 1950s, the Polish communist government awarded him the Cavalry Cross of the Polonia Restituta and the Golden Cross of Merit.[9][bettersourceneeded]
Dismissal
Morel was dismissed from his position in May 1968 in the wake of the 1968 Polish political crisis, which saw the purging of both Jewish officials and ex-Stalinists.[21] As Morel was both Jewish and had a background as head of Stalinist-era concentration camps, he became an obvious target for the 1968 campaign. Unlike most other Polish Jews, and although the Polish communist government pressured Jews to emigrate, Morel nevertheless chose to remain in Poland, and lived there as a retiree from the age of 49.[3]
Criminal prosecution
In 1990, after the fall of communism, the General Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation, precursor to the Institute of National Remembrance, started investigating the abuses carried out at the Zgoda camp.[9][22] Fearing prosecution, Morel emigrated to Israel in 1992.[9][3]
Indictment
In 1996 Salomon Morel was formally indicted of genocide by the Polish public prosecutor's office.[23] The indictment was later amended to include war crimes, crimes against humanity and communist crimes. The latter charge was added in 2004 and constitutes a specific crime under Polish criminal law.[3]
Extradition controversy
In 1998, Poland requested that Morel be extradited for trial, but Israel refused.[9] A reply sent to the Polish Justice Ministry from the Israeli government said that Israel would not extradite Mr. Morel as the statute of limitations had expired on war crimes.[9]
In April 2004, Poland filed another extradition request against Morel, this time with fresh evidence, upgrading the case to "communist crimes against the population."[9] The main charge against Salomon Morel was that, as commandant of the Zgoda camp at Świętochłowice, he created for the prisoners in this camp, out of ethnic and political considerations, conditions that jeopardised their lives, including starvation and torture.[9] The charges against Morel were based primarily on the evidence of over 100 witnesses, including 58 former inmates of the Zgoda camp.[9] In July 2005 this request was again formally refused by the Israeli government. The response rejected the more serious charges as being false, potentially part of an antisemitic conspiracy, and again rejected extradition on the grounds that the statute of limitations against Morel had run out, and that Morel was in poor health.[9] Ewa Koj, a prosecutor with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, criticized the decision. “There should be one measure for judging war criminals, whether they are German, Israeli or of any other nationality,” Koj said. Morel died in Tel Aviv on February 14, 2007, seventeen years after the investigation and prosecution of him started.[9][24][25][7][5]
a Holocaust victim, a communist criminal, a man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, a man consumed by a sadistic fury against Germans and Poles – a fury which may or may not have originated from his victimhood, and may or may not have been connected to his communism. He was deeply vengeful, and profoundly violent. He was awarded medals by the communist Polish state, was prosecuted by the post-communist Polish state, and was defended by the Israeli state, though he had expressed no interest in moving to Israel until half a century after the war, and even then only after he started to fear prosecution.[3]
1 2 Gerhard Gruschka, Zgoda - miejsce grozy: obóz koncentracyjny w Świętochłowicach, Wokół Nas publishing, Gliwice 1998, ISBN83-85338-74-8. (in Polish)
1 2 3 "Świętochłowice - Zgoda Labor Camp". Archived from the original on February 28, 2006. Retrieved 2006-02-28.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), Institute of National Remembrance, from Internet Archive.
The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation is a Polish state research institute in charge of education and archives which also includes two public prosecution service components exercising investigative, prosecution and lustration powers. The IPN was established by the Polish parliament by the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance of 18 December 1998 through reforming and expanding the earlier Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation of 1991, which itself had replaced a body on Nazi crimes established in 1945.
An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 is a 1993 book by John Sack, in which Sack states that some Jews in Eastern Europe, Czech Republic, and Poland took revenge on their former captors while overseeing over 1,000 concentration camps in Poland for German civilians. Sack provides details of the imprisonment of 200,000 Germans "many of them starved, beaten and tortured" and estimates that "more than 60,000 died at the hands of a largely Jewish-run security organisation."
Świętochłowice is a city with powiat rights in Silesia in southern Poland, near Katowice. It is also one of the central cities of the Metropolis GZM, with a population of 2 million, and is located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Rawa River.
Stutthof was a Nazi concentration camp established by Nazi Germany in a secluded, marshy, and wooded area near the village of Stutthof 34 km (21 mi) east of the city of Danzig (Gdańsk) in the territory of the German-annexed Free City of Danzig. The camp was set up around existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II and initially used for the imprisonment of Polish leaders and intelligentsia. The actual barracks were built the following year by prisoners. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. In 1962, the former concentration camp with its remaining structures, was turned into a memorial museum.
The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 throughout the territory of the Polish Republic, both in the areas annexed in 1939, and in the General Government formed by Nazi Germany in the central part of the country (see map). After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, a much greater system of camps was established, including the world's only industrial extermination camps constructed specifically to carry out the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
Gęsiówka is the colloquial Polish name for a prison that once existed on Gęsia ("Goose") Street in Warsaw, Poland, and which, under German occupation during World War II, became a Nazi concentration camp.
The Ministry of Public Security, was the secret police, intelligence and counter-espionage agency operating in the Polish People's Republic. From 1945 to 1954 it was known as the Security Office, and from 1956 to 1990 as the Security Service.
The Jaworzno concentration camp was a concentration camp in WW2 German-occupied Poland and later in Communist Poland. It was first established by the Nazis in 1943 during the Second World War and was later used from 1945 to 1956 by the Soviet NKVD and then by the Ministry of Public Security and other agencies of the Polish communist regime. Today the site is an apartment complex and also houses a memorial to the camp's victims.
Zgoda was a labour camp , set up in February 1945 in Zgoda district of Świętochłowice, Silesia. It was controlled by the communist secret police until its closure in November of the same year.
The terms "Polish death camp" and "Polish concentration camp" have been controversial as applied to the concentration camps and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland. The terms have been criticized as misnomers. The terms have occasionally been used by politicians and news media in reference to the camps' geographic location in German-occupied Poland. However, Polish officials and organizations have objected to the terms as misleading, since they can be misconstrued as meaning "death camps set up by Poles" or "run by Poland". Some Polish politicians have portrayed inadvertent uses of the expression by foreigners as a deliberate disinformation campaign.
Helena Wolińska-Brus was a military prosecutor in postwar communist Poland with the rank of lieutenant-colonel (podpułkownik), involved in Stalinist regime show trials of the 1950s. She has been implicated in the arrest and execution of many Polish World War II resistance fighters, including significant figures in Poland's wartime Home Army.
After the end of World War II, the Central Labour Camp in Potulice became a detention centre for Germans and anti-communist Poles. It was set up by the Soviet and Polish Communist authorities in Potulice in place of the former Nazi German Potulice concentration camp, the subcamp of Stutthof built in 1941. Following liberation by the Red Army, the camp was controlled by the Soviet NKVD Department of Prisoners and Internees until June 1945. Repopulated, it remained in operation until 1949 under the management of the Stalinist Ministry of Public Security of Poland.
The "cursed soldiers" or "indomitable soldiers" were a heterogeneous array of anti-Soviet-imperialist and anti-communist Polish resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II and in its aftermath by members of the Polish Underground State. The above terms, introduced in the early 1990s, reflect the stance of many of the diehard soldiers.
Bereza Kartuska Prison was operated by Poland's Sanation government from 1934 to 1939 in Bereza Kartuska, Polesie Voivodeship. Because the inmates were detained without trial or conviction, it is considered an internment camp or concentration camp.
Czesław Gęborski was a captain of the security forces of the People's Republic of Poland. He is best known for his role as commander of the Łambinowice transfer and internment camp created in the former German Stalag VIII-B. In October 1945 he was dismissed from the post and charged with setting fire to one of the barracks in the camp and ordering gunfire on the inmates trying to put out the flames, an incident in which 48 prisoners died.
Nazi crime or Hitlerite crime is a legal concept used in the Polish legal system, referring to an action which was carried out, inspired, or tolerated by public functionaries of Nazi Germany (1933–1945) that is also classified as a crime against humanity or other persecutions of people due to their membership in a particular national, political, social, ethnic or religious group.
The Supreme National Tribunal was a war-crime tribunal active in communist-era Poland from 1946 to 1948. Its aims and purpose were defined by the State National Council in decrees of 22 January and 17 October 1946 and 11 April 1947. The new law was based on an earlier decree of 31 August 1944 issued by the new Soviet-imposed Polish regime, with jurisdiction over "fascist-Hitlerite criminals and traitors to the Polish nation". The Tribunal presided over seven high-profile cases involving a total of 49 individuals.
Eintrachthütte concentration camp was a labour subcamp of the German concentration camp Auschwitz, opened in the Zgoda district in Świętochłowice in German-occupied Poland on 26 May 1943, in operation until 23 January 1945. Among its prisoners were Poles, Jews and Russians. Its commanders were SS-Hauptscharführer Josef Remmele and SS-Hauptscharführer Wilhelm Gehring. Both were brutal in relations to the prisoners, involved in tortures, and personally involved in executions carried out at the camp.
The Polish League Against Defamation is a right-wing nationalist non-governmental organization based in Warsaw, Poland. It was founded in 2013 by Maciej Świrski. Critics of the organization argue that its aggressive tactics have the opposite of the intended effect.
Polish concentration camp(s) or Polish death camp(s) may refer to:
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
