Zgoda: After Auschwitz Commander – Solomon Morel – Murderer, never held accountable for crimes against humanity. 

The Zgoda (or Swietochlowice) camp was opened in February 1945 for enemies of the Soviet Union in the formerly German province of Silesia in Poland. It was set up at the location of a former Auschwitz subcamp, where prisoners had been forced to work for the German war effort.

On March 15, 1945, the 26-year-old Colonel Salomon Morel, with no relevant training, became the commander of the camp. About 6,000 persons were imprisoned at the Zgoda camp, 1/3 of them were Germans and the rest were Poles and other nationalities. Some families had children with them to the camp. Statistics and witness statements speak of about 2 mothers with children between 1 to 5 years of age and perhaps 2 or 3 children 6 or 7 years old, that we know of. Most camp inmates were over 40 years old and there was a large group of people above 60 years old.

The inmates were systematically maltreated and tortured by the guards, including by Morel himself. They liked to make pyramids of beaten prisoners up to six layers high, causing suffocation.

At night the guards went to the women’s barracks, chose half a dozen women, took them to their quarters outside the barbed wire, and gang-raped them.

One of the cruelest punishments involved a bunker where inmates had to stand in cold water higher than their heads. A typhus epidemic broke soon out in the camp, but no medical help was offered to prisoners and no action was taken until the epidemic spread across the entire camp. Some estimates of the body count during the typhus epidemic were sixty to eighty, eighty to one hundred, and more than one hundred people per day. 

The bodies of the dead were being piled up on carts at night and taken outside the camp to hastily dug mass graves. Morel did not inform his superiors about the typhus epidemic until the news of the situation was reported by the local newspapers.

There are only 1,583 prisoners’ death certificates at Morel’s camp, but the Jewish commander did not report every death. The crimes at the camp are recognized by international law as crimes against humanity. When the Polish authorities started to investigate after the fall of communism in 1992, Morel took the first plane that he could to Tel Aviv. He is pictured again on the right.

He was subsequently wanted by the Polish authorities for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Poland requested his extradition twice, but this was denied. Morel died in Tel Aviv on February 14, 2007. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_MorelSalomon Morel aged 86 came from the small Polish town of Grabowo. 

Morel claims to be an Auschwitz ‘survivor’. However new evidence documenting his life reveals that he was never interned by the Germans. In fact, by 1943 he was employed peeling potatoes for Jewish partisans before moving to Bolshevik held Russia. Here he trained in the gruesome interrogation methods of the NKVD, the Bolshevik political police, before returning to Poland in 1945. 

Communists then put him in charge of a camp containing thousands of German prisoners including SS men, soldiers, and civilians. Jewish author of “An Eye for an Eye”, John Sack says Morel’s “favorite method of killing prisoners was hacking the skull of his victims with a wooden leg of a chair,” according to the book. “It is quite possible that in Swietochlowice several thousand persons were murdered by Morel and his men.” Survivor Dorota Boriczek said “I knew Morel in the camp. He was a very brutal man… He would come in at night. We could hear the cries of the men then. They would beat them and throw the bodies out of the window.” 

In 1989, a Polish reporter found Morel living in a part of Katowice assigned for former uniformed functionaries of the Communist terror. In the early 1990s, the Main Commission for the Investigations of Crimes against the Polish Nation started an official investigation of Morel’s activities in the Swietochlowice Camp after witness articles appeared in the press. 

In 1994, Mr. Morel sought political asylum in Sweden. This was refused. He then successfully sought sanctuary in Israel. Poland tried to extradite him in 1998 on torture charges. Israel refused. So prosecutors began preparing a genocide case, for which there is no statute of limitations. 

In July of 2005, they received a blank refusal from Israel saying “there was no basis whatsoever” to extradite Morel. Yet a Polish prosecutor has testimony from former inmates documenting Morel’s torture of prisoners.

Sources:

John Sack “An Eye for an Eye”

Dorota Boriczek