Jakub Berman

Jakub Berman
Jakub Berman
Born	26 December 1901 Warsaw, Warsaw Governorate, Congress Poland, Russian Empire
Died	10 April 1984(1984-04-10) (aged 82) Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	Politician
Known for	Head of State Security Services (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa)

Jakub Berman (26 December 1901 – 10 April 1984) was a prominent communist in prewar Poland. Toward the end of World War II he joined the Politburo of the 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 Ministry of Public Security – the largest secret police in Polish history and one of its most repressive institutions.

Jakub Berman was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw in on 26 December 1901. His younger brother was Adolf Berman. He 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.