The tables had now been turned. In 1945 at a sub-camp of Auschwitz called Zgoda (“Harmony”), it was now Germans who were stuffed into the barracks. The Commandant, a Jew wearing the uniform of the Polish Office of State Security (UB or 'the Office') named Solomon Morel was standing in a barrack glaring around at them.
Jewish revenge for the Holocaust
He told them: “My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family,…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.” If you want to read a detailed article about Jewish revenge against Germans, please see this.
At a train station in Berlin in October of the same year, a political adviser to the U.S. military authorities wrote to Washington after seeing German refugees in Berlin who were forcibly expelled from Poland. Dying from exhaustion, malnutrition and illness, he wrote that, “in smelling the odor of their filthy condition, the mind reverts to Dachau and Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale practiced on women and children, the poor, the infirm…”
Jews help deport Germans from new Polish lands
Those Germans may have come from Breslau, the largest city in Polish-administered Germany, where the population was 300,000. Who was in charge of Breslau then? Jews. The chief of police, the chief of the Polish Army Corps of Internal Security, the chief of the Office of State Security’s section for Germans, and even the mayor of Breslau were all Jews.
They sent their troops to German homes, where they smashed open the doors with their rifle butts and shouted, “Get out! Raus! Raus!” Pointing their machine guns at the terrified Germans, they said, “Just as the Germans did. You have seven minutes. Six minutes. Five minutes. Schnell! Schnell!” Then they were chased to the Breslau train station and shoved into cattle cars, just like the Jews were.
Jewish atrocities against Germans
Hundreds of Jews who had been on the platforms at Auschwitz and other death camps did horrible things to German civilians. After the war several Jews became commandants of former Nazi concentration camps and prisons. They became as cruel as the SS and committed horrible deeds that rivaled Hitler’s black-clad elite but on a much smaller scale.
John Sack writes that “a second atrocity happened that the Jews who committed it covered up: one where Jews killed Germans…In 1945 they killed a great number of Germans…civilians, German men, women, children, babies, whose ‘crime’ was just to be German.”
Jews sign up with the UB
The chief of the Office of State Security (UB) in Silesia was a Jew, Major Josef Jurkowski. A dedicated communist, he broke out of a Polish prison in 1939 and walked to Russia. He volunteered for the Red Army and later switched to the Polish army in the Soviet Union.
Jurkowski was the administrator of 15,550 square miles of former German territory. Concentration camps, cellars and prisons in Silesia had to be staffed by him. Jurkowski put Jews in charge of Intelligence, Imprisonment, and the other departments of the Office under his control. It seems like it was Stalin's plan to hire Jews who survived the Holocaust to carry out a policy of de-Nazification.
Pinek Maka, a Jew who survived Gestapo interrogation and fought with a Polish partisan group, was made Secretary of State Security for Silesia. His province was all of southwest Poland and Polish-administered Germany; his region's population was close to five million. He called himself ‘Pawel’ and he wasn’t alone; many Jews in the Office took Polish names. Some even claimed to be ‘Catholic.’
News about concentration camps starts to spread
Word started to get out. On August 16, 1945, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons, “Enormous numbers [of Germans] are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain.” In the U.S. Congress, a senator spoke of “beatings, shootings, of water tortures, of arteries cut, of ‘brains splashed on the ceiling’ in the Office’s concentration camps.” Both the British and American ambassadors made official protests to the Polish government. Then the American Red Cross drove from Warsaw to Kattowitz to speak to ’Pawel’ Maka.
Three Red Cross representative wanted to inspect the Silesian camps. Maka said, "If you didn't go to Auschwitz, you won't go anywhere now....You didn't help the Jews, and I won't oblige you now."
"We'll have to report that to Warsaw."
"So do it. I don't respect the Red Cross....Go to hell!"
Maka never let in the Red Cross. Neither did the leaders of the other Polish provinces. And the torture, the starvation, the abuse, the disease, the murder of Germans continued for three years. Throughout Poland, there were 1,255 concentration camps in Poland for the Germans.
Sources
Sack, John. An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. Basic Books, New York, 1993.
The Commandant. Transcript of story on 60 Minutes, November 24, 1993.
An Eye for an Eye Corroboration.
de Zayas, Alfred-Maurice. A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950. St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994.
Response by the State of Israel to the application for the extradition of Salomon Morel and a report by Dr. Adam Dziurok and Prosecutor Andrzej Majcher on the subject of Salomon Morel and the history and operation of the camp at Swietochlowice-Zgoda.
Read more at Suite101: Solomon Morel: A Jewish Death Camp Commandant in Stalinist Poland
Eric Brothers - Eric Brothers' forthcoming book,The Berlin Ghetto, will be published by The History Press in the U.K. in 2012.
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