Paweł Finder

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Paweł Finder (born 19 September 1904 in Bielsko-Biala, Poland - shot 26 July 1944 in Warsaw) (pseudonyms included Paweł, Paul, Paul Reynot) was a Polish communist leader and First secretary of the PPR from 1943 to 1944.

Finder came from an affluent Jewish shopkeeping family in Bielsko-Biala, where he was educated. He briefly flirted with Zionism while still at school and visited Palestine. He studied chemistry in Vienna, Mulhouse and Paris, where he was a researcher at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and an assistant to Frédéric Joliot-Curie. A highly able scientist and linguist, he graduated as a Chemical Engineer. From 1922 to 1924 he was a member of the Austrian Communist Party, and from 1924 to 1928 of the French Communist Party, serving in the Central Committee apparatus and writing articles for l'Humanité. He was expelled from France for Communist activity in 1928 and returned to Poland. He completed military service in officer school. He was active in the underground KPP until his arrest in 1934, serving as secretary in Silesia, Łódź, Warsaw, Zaglebia Dabrowska and Kraków, and as a member of the National Secretariat in 1933.

He was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment. During the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939 he was able to flee Rawicz prison and went to the USSR. He worked in the planning commission of the local authority established in Soviet-occupied Białystok, becoming its chairman early in 1941.

Finder fled to Moscow when the Germans invaded and directed to the Comintern training school as a leader of the 'initiative group' formed to re-establish the Communist movement in Poland. On 27 December 1941 he parachuted into Poland. In the troika that formed and led the Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPR) (with Marceli Nowotko and Bolesław Mołojec), he provided intellectual and ideological support for Nowotko. He succeeded him as secretary in January 1943 following the murder of Nowotko, apparently at Molojec's behest, and the subsequent execution of Molojec on orders of Finder, Małgorzata Fornalska, Władysław Gomułka and Jozwiak.

Finder was arrested by the Gestapo with Fornalska on 14 December 1943 and imprisoned in Pawiak prison. He was identified and tortured. Finder was shot by the Nazis in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto as they evacuated and demolished Pawiak in July 1944.

His second wife, Gertruda Finder, was also an activist of the KPP and worked in the Polish security apparatus after 1945. His first wife, by whom he had a daughter, died in France in the 1920s.