Vinzent Porombka

Vinzent Porombka (2 January 1910 – 28 November 1975) was a German Communist political activist who became a party official, a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and an active participant in resistance to Nazism. In his later years he became a party functionary in the German Democratic Republic.

Life

Early years Porombka was born in Zabrze, a substantial conurbation east of Breslau and close to Kattowitz. His father, also called Vinzent Porombka, was a miner who would end his life as a murder victim in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. Long before that, when Vinzent Porombka was aged 4, the First World War broke out. Less than a year after that Zabrze was renamed as "Hindenburg", to honour the German military commander on the Eastern front who had recently received much public adulation following his victory at Tannenberg. Porombka was still a child during the period of revolutionary turmoil that followed German defeat in the war. He later obtained a job as a dairy worker in 1925/26, and then worked as a miner from 1926 till 1930. After 1930 several years of part-time working alternating with unemployment ensued. He was nevertheless interned in France between February and June 1939, after which he succeeded in being relocated to the Soviet Union in a "medical evacuation". It was left to Porombka to report back on the operation. Unfortunately the Gestapo also became aware that he was still alive, and they put his parents in concentration camps. In 1945 his father was murdered in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp.

End of the war By the time the war ended, formally in May 1945, he had been able to return to Upper Silesia and to resume radio contact with Moscow. Of the many agents parachuted into Germany by the Soviets during the war, Vinzent Porombka was unusual in having survived till the end of the fighting. His hometown of Hindenburg being in the east of the country, the Red army arrived on 26 January 1945. By that time Porombka had been back in Upper Silesia for several weeks, working with the illegal regional Communist Party under the leadership of a man called Roman Ligendza. At the end of January he was received by the Soviet military commander and worked with the new municipal administration. A couple of months later, however, in March 1945, Ligendza and Porombka were parachuted into Chemnitz, further to the west in Germany.

The end of the war marked the end of Nazi Germany. Vinzent Porombka made his new life in what had been the central part of Germany and was now the Soviet occupation zone. In mid-1945 he was working for the Red Army General Staff as a simultaneous translator, before relocating to the western occupation zones where for a few months he worked for the (no longer illegal) Communist Party. In 1946 he returned to the Soviet occupation zone and joined the newly formed Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). The SED was the result of a contentious political merger, presented as a consolidation of the previously split political left, but after a couple of years former members of the (more moderately left-wing) SPD had been excluded from positions of influence with varying levels of persuasion. By the time, formally in October 1949, that the Soviet occupation zone became the German Democratic Republic, the new SED had come to be seen by many as the old Communist Party with a new name. From May 1946 Porombka was working as a courier and transport supervisor for the Soviet authorities. In 1950 he started to work in the "General Department" of the Central Secretariat, and was also employed in the new country's important Party Central Committee.