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.
His father, also called Vinzent Porombka, was a miner who would end his life as a murder victim in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp.
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.
[1] In 1927 he joined the Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB / Red Front Fighters' League) and in 1930, the year of his twentieth birthday, the Young Communists.
In August 1935 his political activities in Upper Silesia came to an end when he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he based himself just across the border, in Steinau, and supported himself as a stone worker.
In July 1936 he was arrested, but he managed to escape, while being deported to Germany, and ended up spending a further three months working illegally in Czechoslovakia.
Porombka used this training on 27 April 1943 when he was the designated radio operator in a three-man team parachuted into Germany, landing near Insterburg (then in East Prussia).
Relations with the large resistance group in Ruda, headed up by a Communist called Rudolf Krzyszczyk, were close, and involved a particular focus on disrupting German army transport.
[7] 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.
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.
In 1946 he returned to the Soviet occupation zone and joined the newly formed Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).
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.