Salomon Morel



Salomon Morel (November 15, 1919 – February 14, 2007) was a Polish NKVD and MBP officer in the Polish People's Republic. He is known as the commander of a number of concentration camps run by NKVD and Polish communist authorities until 1956. He later immigrated to Israel and acquired Israeli citizenship, and was wanted on charges of torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and communist crimes in post-communist Poland.

In 1944 Morel became head of the Soviet NKVD prison at Lublin Castle. During most of 1945 he was commander of the Soviet NKVD Zgoda labour camp in Świętochłowice, Soviet-occupied Poland. From 1949 he was commander of Jaworzno concentration camp. Morel worked as commandant of concentration camps until they were closed down in 1956 following the Polish October. He then worked as head of a prison in Katowice and was awarded 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. Anne Applebaum described Morel as "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".

From the early 1990s, soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Morel was investigated by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder of more than 1,500 prisoners from Upper Silesia, most of them local population, i.e. Polish and German Silesians, but also including some other nationalities. 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; Israel also cited Morel's Jewish background as a specific reason not to extradite him. Polish authorities responded by accusing Israel of applying a double standard, and the controversy over Morel's extradition continued until his death.