Anatol Fejgin

Anatol Fejgin
Anatol Fejgin
Born	(1909-09-25)25 September 1909 Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died	28 July 2002(2002-07-28) (aged 92) Warsaw, Poland
Citizenship	Polish
Occupation	Interrogator
Employer(s)	Polish People's Army Ministry of Public Security (UB)

Anatol Fejgin (25 September 1909 – 28 July 2002) was a Polish communist activist before World War II, and after 1949, commander of the Stalinist political police at the Ministry of Public Security of Poland,^[1] in charge of its notorious Special Bureau (the 10th Department).^[2] During the Polish October of 1956, his name – along with a number of others including his colleague Col. Józef Różański, and Minister Jakub Berman – came to symbolize communist terror in postwar Poland.^[3]

Fejgin was born into a middle-class Jewish family,^[4] and in 1927 began medical studies in Warsaw, which he never finished. In 1928, he joined the Communist Party of Poland and in 1929 was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for communist agitation. Released, Fejgin was arrested again in 1932 and incarcerated for four years. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Fejgin escaped to Lwów in the Soviet occupation zone, got in touch with the NKVD and began working for the Soviet authorities. In May 1943 he joined the Soviet sponsored Polish 1st Tadeusz Kosciuszko Infantry Division, where he became a propaganda officer, a paramilitary rank commonly feared. In January 1945, Fejgin took the post of the director of personal department of the political bureau of the pro-Soviet Ludowe Wojsko Polskie.