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Salomon Morel

Salomon Morel
Salomon Morel
Salomon Morel in 1948
Born(1919-11-15)November 15, 1919
Garbów, Poland
DiedFebruary 14, 2007(2007-02-14) (aged 87)
Tel Aviv, Israel
CitizenshipPolish, later Israeli
Occupationofficer at the Ministry of Public Security
Known forCommander of Zgoda labour camp and Jaworzno concentration camp

Salomon Morel[a] (November 15, 1919 – February 14, 2007) was a Holocaust survivor who managed former Nazi concentration camps[b] after World War II. He also served the Ministry of Public Security in the Communist Poland.[1] In Nazi-occupied Poland, Morel and his Jewish family hid with the help of a Polish farmer,[1] which allowed him to survive the Holocaust.[1]

Career

Morel ran the NKVD prison at Lublin Castle in 1944.[1] He became the commander of the Zgoda labor camp in Świętochłowice in 1945, then that of the Jaworzno concentration camp in 1949.[1] Before his dismissal by Poland's communist regime in 1968, he was the colonel of the Ministry of Public Security.[1][2]

Zgoda labor camp

The Zgoda labor camp at which Morel worked had three categories of prisoners:

  • Those declared traitors by the Polish National Liberation Committee on November 4, 1944[3]
  • Those declared "Fascist-Nazi criminals and traitors" by the same committee on August 31, 1944[3]
  • Those declared "hostile elements" of Polish society by the same committee on May 6, 1945[3][4]

Controversies

War crimes allegations

In the 1990s, Poland's official Institute of National Remembrance accused him of war crimes over alleged revenge murders of over 1,500 prisoners, most of whom were reportedly either Silesian German or Polish political prisoners.[5] Fearing unfair trial, Morel immigrated to Israel, which rejected Poland's extradition requests twice in 1998 and 2004.[6] The Polish government gave up on seeking his extradition in July 2005.[6]

Issues

Notably, over 50 anti-Jewish pogroms[c] happened in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine between 1944 and 1948.[9][10] Dozens of anti-Jewish incidents happened in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands[10][11] to the extent that Holocaust survivors were advised not to speak Yiddish in public.[10] Meanwhile, it is a common theme in far-right propaganda to exaggerate wartime Jewish misdeeds, including the allegations against Salomon Morel, to draw a false equivalence between Jews and the Axis.[12]

By August 1, 1945, the Zgoda labor camp had processed 5,048 prisoners.[13] Documents showed that many prisoners were convicted of Nazi-associated crimes,[14] some of whom were voluntary Ortsgruppenleiter ("Local Group Leader") in Nazi-occupied areas.[14] There was a typhus outbreak that killed 30% of the prisoners during operation.[13] This outbreak, however, was not mentioned in one of the books that accused Morel of killing the prisoners.[15] The other book that accused Morel was even pulled from circulation in Germany in 1995 after a journalist called it an "antisemitic fodder".[16]

Reactions

Elan Steinberg

Elan Steinberg, executive emeritus and former president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), said:[6]

“ The Morel case has been abused in order to draw equivalencies between the Holocaust and what Jews did to others after the Holocaust [...] part of an effort of Holocaust denial. ”

Israeli Justice Ministry

The Israeli Justice Ministry said that they found Poland's accusations of Morel having committed "genocide" to be baseless,[6] adding that Morel saw his whole family killed by Polish Nazi collaborators during the Holocaust.[6][d]

The Ministry emphasized that there were only 600 prisoners in the Zgoda labour camp, many of whom were "Nazi collaborators",[6] whose number did not change throughout Morel's employment period,[6] which made the alleged death toll of 1,695 impossible.[6] In addition, the Ministry said that about 1,000 Jews were killed by Polish citizens right after the war ended.[6]

Anne Applebaum

American historian Anne Applebaum said:[2]

[Morel was] 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.

Aftermath

United States

The allegations against Salomon Morel have been co-opted by antisemites into their propaganda. For instance, prominent Catholic[17] antisemite[18] Candace Owens brought up those allegations in one of her podcast shows to draw a false equivalence between Jews and the Axis.[19]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hebrew: סלומון מורל
  2. ↑ Taken over by the Soviet occupiers in Poland in 1944‒45
  3. ↑ A pogrom is a form of riot that targets an ethnic or a religious group. It is derived from the Russian word погром ("pogrom"); from "громить" IPA: [grʌˈmitʲ] ‒ to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.[7][8]
  4. ↑ Mainstream historians found that Polish collaboration with Nazi authorities in occupied Poland was more common than previously believed. See sources:
    • Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
    • Grabowski, Jan; Engelking, Barbara; Skibińska, Alina; Szurek, Jean-Charles; Zapalec, Anna; Panz, Karolina; Frydel, Tomasz; Swałtek-Niewińska, Dagmara (2022). "Night without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland". Combined Academic Publishers. Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253062864. Retrieved January 5, 2025. Series: Studies in Antisemitism. 546 pages, 152.00 x 229.00 mm, 73 b&w photos, 8 maps, 1 chart, 35 b&w tables.
    • Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
    • Grabowski, Jan (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews". Jewish Quarterly. London, United Kingdom. Retrieved May 25, 2025. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Lowe, Keith (2012). "The new 'extermination camps'". Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780241962220.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Applebaum, Anne (2012). Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 9780385536431. Salomon Morel war criminal.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Article 1 of this decree stated that "A Polish citizen who, during the German occupation, declared his allegiance to German nationality on the territory of the so-called General Government and voivodship of Białystok ... shall be subject to ... detention for an unspecified period in a detention centre (camp) and compulsory work", Dz.U [Official Journal] no. 11/44, item 54.
  4. ↑ Letter from Salomon Morel to the Regional Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish People in Katowice dated 7 XI 1992, IPN Ka, Case files..., pp 78-81, see also Oboz Pracy w Swietochlowicach w 1945 roku. Dokumenty, zeznania, relacje, listy [Labour Camp in Swietochlowice in 1945. Documents, testimonies, reports, letters], selected and edited by and with an introduction by A. Dziurok, Warsaw 2002, pp. 89-92.
  5. ↑ "War crime suspect stays in Israel". BBC News. July 7, 2005.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 Shoshana, Olidort (July 29, 2005). "Poland Gives Up Campaign To Extradite Israeli Citizen". The Forward. Retrieved May 30, 2025. Poland's most recent appeal for the extradition was denied by the Israeli Justice Ministry in a letter citing a statute of limitations that makes the extradition "neither possible under Israeli law, nor required under the Extradition Convention." It was the second time Israel denied the request, which Poland first submitted in 1998.
  7. ↑
  8. ↑
  9. ↑ Tokarska-Bakir, J. Postwar Violence against Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, 2020.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Waligórska, Magdalena; Weizman, Yechiel; Friedman, Alexander; Ina, Sorkina (May 27, 2023). "Holocaust Survivors Returning to their Hometowns in the Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands, 1944–1948". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 191–212. Retrieved May 16, 2025.
  11. ↑ Adam Kopciowski, “Anti-Jewish Incidents in the Lublin Region in the Early Years after World War II,” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały (2008): pp. 177–205, specifically p. 177; Kwiek, Nie chcemy Żydów u siebie, pp. 214–5.
  12. ↑ Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved January 20, 2025. Four distortions dominate Wikipedia's coverage of Polish–Jewish wartime history: a false equivalence narrative suggesting that Poles and Jews suffered equally in World War II; a false innocence narrative, arguing that Polish antisemitism was marginal, while the Poles' role in saving Jews was monumental; antisemitic tropes insinuating that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), that money-hungry Jews controlled or still control Poland, and that Jews bear responsibility for their own persecution.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 G. Gruschka, Zgoda-miejsce zgrozy. Oboz koncentracyjny w Swietochlowicach [Zgoda, a place of doom. The concentration camp at Swietochlowice], Gliwice 1998, p. 51.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 H. Piecuch, Akcje specjalne: od Bieruta do Ochaba [Special operations: from Bierut to Ochab],Warsaw 1996, pp. 27-28.
  15. ↑ Robins, Nicholas; Jones, Adam (2009). Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice. Indiana University Press. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  16. ↑ Streitfeld, David. (February 15, 1995). Book on Jewish-Run `Revenge' Camps Is Pulled[permanent dead link], The Washington Post ("A German publisher has abruptly canceled a book that investigates the Jewish role in running internment camps in Poland after World War II, saying the work otherwise could be "cause for some misunderstanding."")
  17. ↑
  18. ↑ "2024 Top Ten Worst Global Antisemitic Incidents" (PDF). Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC). 2025. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  19. ↑ "Candace Owens calls Mengele's Holocaust experiments 'bizarre propaganda' in latest antisemitic scandal". New York Post. July 10, 2024. Retrieved May 30, 2025.

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