Moshe Merin

Merin reconfigured the leadership of his councils by expelling those who opposed his methods, and by appointing Jews loyal only to him, including his brother-in-law and a notorious criminal, Abraham Gancwajch, to carry out further Nazi orders in Sosnowiec and its surrounding area. In spite of his full cooperation with the Nazis, Merin was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1943, one month before the last Holocaust transport left the Sosnowiec Ghetto.

In January 1940, Merin was installed by the Nazis as leader of the Central Office of the Jewish Council of Elders in East Upper Silesia (German: Zentrale der Jüdische Ältestenräte Ostoberschlesien), responsible for some 45 Jewish communities of approximately 100,000 Polish Jews. Within a year, he controlled dozens of Judenräte. Merin is noted to have been very harsh in his dealings with the Jewish groups opposing occupation including Hanoar Hazioni, Hashomer Hatzair, Gordonia, Poalei Zion, and Hitachdut. Merin aided the Nazis in the hunt for the leaders of the aforementioned groups, going so far as to place a request for their arrest and signing their execution orders himself. He did this with full cooperation of the Jewish Police Force, whose leader fervently defended Merin’s every decision.

After the German takeover of Sosnowiec on September 4, 1939, Merin presented himself to the Nazis as head of the Sosnowiec Community Council, when the former president (from before the invasion of Poland), Lejzerowicz, remained silent in a meeting with the German officers. Merin reported from behind the last row of community members subjected to a 24-hour detention in a public bath. It remains unclear whether or not he was on the pre-war council; his advance rested on the fact that he could speak the German language. Such was the beginning of his career as chairman of the Judenrat in the Sosnowiec Ghetto and the adjacent Będzin Ghetto forming a single administrative unit.

Moshe (Mosheh) Merin (also Moniek Merin and Moszek or Mojżesz Israel Merin in Polish; 1905 – June 1943) was the head of the Jewish Community Council, or Judenrat, in the Sosnowiec Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II. It is believed that he was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. As with most Jewish Council leadership of the time, his actions or lack thereof during the Holocaust in occupied Poland are highly controversial.