Killermorel

cinnati 2000, Real History, September 22-24, 2000 [ Information ] again your newsletter 60 Minutes – November 24, 1993 © 1993 by CBS News KROFT: [On tape: Steinberg] Elan Steinberg is Executive Director of the World Jewish Congress. He and his organization have been extremely critical of Sack’s reporting, citing a lack of documentary evidence and questioning the memories and motives of former prisoners.

ELAN STEINBERG: The problem is, when you investigate something as serious as this, you can not rely on eyewitnesses who, even with the best of intentions, with the best of intentions, can give you misleading information.

The Commandant STEVE KROFT: It’s the stuff of fiction: a Polish Jew who loses his entire family to the Nazis during the Holocaust finds himself, at the end of World War II, running a prison camp for Germans and Nazi collaborators, and with an opportunity to exact a terrible and very personal revenge. While it may sound like a novel or a made-for-TV movie, in fact that much of the story is true. But did Solomon Morel actually exact that revenge, brutalizing German prisoners under his command?

Or did he and others fantasize it? That’s the subject of an emotional historical debate and an ongoing investigation by the Polish government. [On tape: Solomon Morel in Israel] Solomon Morel is an old man now and in poor health, living in Israel alongside thousands of Holocaust survivors. As a young man, he saw his parents arrested and led off to be executed. He lost brothers, aunts and uncles, and more than thirty cousins to the Nazis.

During the war, he fought the Germans alongside the Russians on the eastern front. [On film: a battle in World War II] But he won’t talk about what happened after Soviet tanks finally drove the German army out of Poland. [On film: Russians with German prisoners] One of the first orders that went out was to round up all remaining Germans, Nazi sympathizers and collaborators, and put them into some of the same prison camps the Germans used during the war.

[On tape: Kroft at the former concentration camp at Swietochlowice] This is all that’s left of one of them, Swietochlowice. It was built by the Germans as part of the Auschwitz complex, where more than two million Jews died during World War II. But by February of 1945, the tables had turned. The prisoners at Swietochlowice were Germans. [Photograph: Morel in 1945, in uniform] And their commandant, their jailer, was Solomon Morel, a Polish Jew.

How did a Jew end up in the Polish secret police, running a prison camp for Germans? [On tape: Auschwitz] Most Polish Jews, more than three million of them, were dead at the end of World War II, killed at places like Auschwitz and Treblinka .

And many of those who survived fled as soon as the war was over. [On tape: Kroft and John Sack in Swietochlowice city] But according to journalist and author John Sack, who’s been working on the story for more than seven years, some Polish Jews, like Morel, were drafted into important positions in Stalin’s secret police. [On tape: Kroft interviewing John Sack] Why did Stalin want Jews running the secret police in Poland? JOHN SACK: He didn’t trust the Poles.

He thought the Poles were going to be loyal to Poland, not to Russia, not to the Soviet Union. He thought the Jews had no loyalty to Poland. And that was true. KROFT: Why would they have loyalty to Stalin? SACK: I don’t know if they had loyalty to Stalin. They just wanted revenge. They wanted vengeance. That’s why they did it. [On tape: Sack at Swietochlowice] This would be the main gate.

KROFT: And according to Sack — a respected journalist, the author of seven books, and himself a Jew — Solomon Morel took his revenge. [Photographs: Swietochlowice in 1945] During the ten months that Morel ran the prison camp at Swietochlowice, more than 1,500 people died there. Not just German soldiers but Polish civilians, women, teen-agers, people from families of German origin or under suspicion of Nazi sympathies.

Most died from neglect and disease and, according to Sack, many from brutal and sadistic beatings, [Photograph: Morel in 1945, in uniform] administered by Solomon Morel and his prison staff. SACK: He wanted to do to the Germans what they did to him. That’s what he said. On the first night at Swietochlowice, when the first contingent of Germans arrived, at about ten o’clock at night he walked into one of the barracks and he said to the Germans, “My name is Morel. I am a Jew.

My mother and father, my family, I think they’re all dead, and I swore that if I got out alive, I was going to get back at you Nazis. And now you’re going to pay for what you did.” KROFT: How do you know he said this? SACK: One man who was there told me the story, and he remembered it very, very specifically. KROFT: Describe the rest of that night, and tell me about Solomon Morel at Swietochlowice.

SACK: I suppose he thought that these people — he could picture these people possibly being the ones who killed his mother and father. At that point, he picked up a stool, a four-legged stool, and he just started smashing the Germans with the stool. Just went around beating them on the head, beating them on the chest.

KROFT: [On tape: Sack, writing] Sack’s reporting was based on face-to-face interviews with survivors, and on twenty-one affidavits from former prisoners at Swietochlowice [On tape: affidavits in the German Federal Archives] that have been on file collecting dust in the German Federal Archives. After the war, the rest of the world didn’t want to hear about the suffering of Germans.

So it was left to the German government to investigate what happened to more than two million of its people who died in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries immediately after the surrender. Sack came across the affidavits while researching a book on Jews in Poland after the war.

KROFT: [On tape: Alojz Richter ] But we went to Poland to conduct our own interviews with former prisoners at Swietochlowice, sixteen in all, including eight we found independently of John Sack or the German Federal Archives. And we heard the same stories over and over again. [On tape: Richter walking with Kroft] Alojz Richter was a teen-ager when the war ended. He says he was taken to Swietochlowice when his mother and brother were arrested.

He claims they were just farmers, not Nazi collaborators, and he says he remembers Solomon Morel. ALOJZ RICHTER [Through interpreter]: We had to lie down, and the commandant, Morel, would trample on us with his boots and kick us in the head. KROFT: Did people die from the beatings? RICHTER [Through interpreter]: Many of them, many of them.

KROFT: [On tape: Gerhard Gruschka ] Gerhard Gruschka, a former schoolmaster, now retired in Germany, says he was only fourteen when he was taken to Swietochlowice. [Photograph: Gruschka, age fourteen] He told us he had been forced into Hitler Youth, and expelled for failure to attend meetings. He, too, remembers Morel. GERHARD GRUSHKA [Through interpreter]: I can clearly remember Morel, definitely Morel, beating people to death. I can confirm this even after fifty years.

He took stools by the legs and used them to beat people over the head. He would do that until skulls were so badly smashed that people were left dying. KROFT: [On tape: Kroft and Dorota Boreczek at Swietochlowice] Dorota Boreczek told us it wasn’t just beatings that prisoners at Swietochlowice died from. When we brought her