Poland: Last surviving leader of 1950s political police dies.

(From BBC Monitoring International Reports)

Anatol Fejgin, a notorious commander of the political police of Poland's Stalinist era, died in Warsaw in July, aged 93. Although he did at one point serve over eight years in prison for some of his crimes, there were other matters for which he never faced a court. At the time of his death he was still the subject of further investigations by National Remembrance Institute [IPN] prosecutors. The following is an excerpt from a report by Polish news agency PAP:

Warsaw, 10 August: Anatol Fejgin, the last of the leadership of the Stalinist-era Ministry of Public Security [MBP], died in Warsaw towards the end of July at the age of 93. After October 1956, the name of Fejgin (together with a number of others) symbolized the terror of the Security Administration [UB].

The UB was the generic name of MBP units, the political police, created under the supervision of the NKVD after the entry of the Red Army onto Polish territory in 1944... In November 1956, after the October "thaw" and under the pressure of criticism for "infringements of socialist legality", the UB was transformed into the Security Service [SB] of the Ministry of Internal Affairs [MSW].

Fejgin was one of the trusted individuals of people's power, an activist of the pre-war Communist Party of Poland [KPP], later the Polish Workers' Party [PPR] and Polish United Workers' Party [PZPR]. In the years 1950-54, he stood at the head of the MSW Tenth Department. His personal file contained the details: "nationality - Jewish, origin - worker intelligentsia".

As he himself testified in 1995, during the trial of Adam Humer and other UB functionaries, he was directed to this work, and before this to the Main Information Board (military counter-intelligence), by the leadership of the state, including President Bierut himself, with whom he had direct contact.

Capt Wincenty Romanowski, a military Information officer and later sentenced to a term of imprisonment, spoke about his former chief during his trial before the Military Garrison Court in Warsaw in 1998. He called Fejgin an authority. "He had a theory: not the force of argument, but the argument of force," Romanowski recalled...