Jakub Berman

Jakub Berman
Jakub Berman
Born	26 December 1901 Warsaw, Russian Empire
Died	1984 Warsaw, Poland
Citizenship	Polish
Occupation	Politician
Known for	Head of State Security Services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa)

Jakub Berman (Warsaw, 26 December 1901 – 10 April 1984, Warsaw, Poland) was born into a middle-class Jewish family. Berman first became a prominent Polish-Jewish communist in prewar Poland. Toward the end of World War II he joined the Politburo of the Soviet-formed Polish United Workers' Party. Between 1944 and 1953, he was considered Joseph Stalin's right hand in the People's Republic of Poland – in charge of the notorious State Security Services Urząd Bezpieczeństwa – the largest secret police in Polish history and one of its most repressive institutions. Berman was the brother of Adolf Berman, a Zionist activist who emigrated to Israel in 1950.

Biography

Berman received a law degree in 1925 from Warsaw University. He was a member of the Communist Youth Union, and in 1928 joined the early Communist Party of Poland. He worked on his doctoral thesis as an assistant to Marxist sociologist Prof. Ludwik Krzywicki, but was never to finish it. In September 1939, after the Invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the USSR, he fled to the Soviet occupied eastern part of Poland – first to Białystok and then in the spring of 1941 to Minsk. There, he worked as an editor at Sztandar Wolności (The Banner of Freedom), the Polish-language bulletin of the Belarusian Communist Party.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Berman escaped to Moscow and later became an instructor at the Comintern school in the city of Ufa (south-east of Kuibyshev), training displaced Polish communists who formed the new Soviet sponsored Polish Workers' Party. In December 1943 he met with Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin, gained his trust and became a prominent figure among Polish communists in the USSR. In 1944 Berman joined the Politbiuro of the Polish Workers' Party. Upon his return to Poland in 1944 – together with hardliner Bolesław Bierut and the Jewish economist Hilary Minc – Berman formed a triumvirate of Stalinist leaders in postwar Poland.

Between 1944 and 1956 Berman was a member of Politbiuro of the totalitarian Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP). He was responsible for propaganda, and ideology; put in charge of State Security Services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB), the largest and the most notorious secret police force in the history of the People's Republic of Poland, employing 33,200 permanent security officers, one for every 800 Polish citizens.

After the death of Bolesław Bierut – first secretary of the PUWP – Berman resigned from the PUWP Politbiuro in June 1956, incriminated by Dir. Józef Światło who defected to the West. He was relieved from Central Committee of PUWP in the fall of 1956, and in 1957 dismissed from PUWP altogether, as responsible for "Stalinist-era errors and distortions" (abuse of power and gross human rights law violations). Until retirement in 1969, Berman worked in the state-run "Ksiażka i Wiedza" ("Book and Knowledge") publishing house.

References

• Teresa Torańska, Them: Stalin's Polish Puppets, Harper & Row, 1987, ISBN 0-06-015657-0.