November 15, 1919 - Salomon Morel
His postwar career placed him in command of Soviet-run and communist-administered camps in Poland at a moment when ethnic Germans, Silesians, and perceived political enemies were being detained in large numbers under brutal conditions. The Zgoda camp, which he ran during 1945, saw the deaths of hundreds of prisoners in a matter of months; later investigations attributed more than 1,500 deaths across his years of command to conditions and violence that met the legal threshold for crimes against humanity. Poland's Institute of National Remembrance pursued charges against him into the 2000s, but he had by then emigrated to Israel, which declined extradition requests, and he died there without facing trial.
From Wikipedia
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.
In 1944 Morel became warden of the Soviet NKVD prison at Lublin Castle. During most of 1945, he was commander of the Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice. In 1949 he was made commander of Jaworzno concentration camp and remained a commandant of numerous concentration camps until they were all closed down in 1956 following the Polish October. He then worked as head of prison in Katowice and was promoted to the rank colonel in the political police, the MBP. He was dismissed during the 1968 Polish political crisis which saw the purging of ex-Stalinists.
Beginning in the early 1990s Morel was investigated by Institute of National Remembrance for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the revenge killings of more than 1,500 prisoners in Upper Silesia, most of whom were either native speakers of Silesian German or Polish political prisoners.
- Last updated on .
