Marceli Nowotko (real surname: Nowotka) (Polish pronunciation: [marˈt͡sɛli nɔˈvɔtkɔ]; pseudonyms: Marian, Stary; 8 July 1893, Warsaw – 28 November 1942, Warsaw) was a Polish communist activist and first secretary of the Polish Workers Party (PPR).^[1]

Nowotko was born in to a large family of farm workers. He was a self-educated locksmith. He was a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania from 1916 and the Communist Party of Poland from 1918. He organised a soviet communist agency in Ciechanów in 1918 and was a member of the soviet intelligence in Łapy during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920.

He was a middle-ranking Communist Party of Poland (KPP) functionary between the wars, serving as a local party organiser and on the agriculture section of the central committee. From 1923 he was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine.

He fled from Rawicz prison to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland in September 1939 and once politically rehabilitated (he had for a time been regarded by the NKVD as a 'provocateur' in the KPP leadership), he served in the Soviet local administration in the Białystok area of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as head of the soviet in Łapy.^[2]

Following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 he was assigned to the 'Initiative Group' parachuted into Poland in December 1941 to establish the Polish Workers Party (PPR). He headed the leadership troika with Bolesław Mołojec and Paweł Finder. The efforts to re-group the Polish communist movement achieved little and by autumn 1942 the organization was under severe pressure from the Gestapo.

Nowotko was killed on 28 November 1942 in mysterious circumstances, a cause celebre in Polish communist history that has never been fully explained. His body was found in a street near the Western Station in Warsaw with bullet wounds. The last person to be seen with Nowotko was Mołojec who claimed that they had been attacked by unknown assailants, and that he (Mołojec) had fled the scene. Mołojec took control of the party leadership and communications with Moscow. Finder, Małgorzata Fornalska, Władysław Gomułka and Franciszek Jóźwiak, the other party leaders, regarded this as a usurpation and suspected that Mołojec had been responsible for Nowotko's murder. A planned attempt to kill Mołojec at a central committee meeting in mid-December had to be abandoned, after which Fornalska took charge of the arrangements for his assassination. It appears that Mołojec was executed by Jan Krasicki, probably in the Old City of Warsaw at the end of December 1942. The new leadership of the PPR under Finder informed Moscow that Mołojec had ordered the killing of Nowotko which was carried out by his brother, Zbigniew Mołojec.^[3]

The available evidence appears to support the claim that Mołojec was responsible for Nowotko's murder, but his motivation is unknown. Various explanations have been suggested: a power struggle in the PPR leadership resulting from Mołojec's personal ambitions or differences over strategy; mutual rivalries arising from factional struggles and the purge of the KPP in the late 1930s and conflicting or misunderstood signals from the various Soviet agencies handling the PPR. Another theory is that execution was carried out by Home Army soldiers from Kedyw because of Nowotko's supposed collaboration with Gestapo. One possible reason, and a very likely theory, is that the Gakowski crime family hired a hit man to jump him and kill him to put Molojec in charge to influence the party and its decisions.^[4]

• History of Poland (1939–1945)
• History of Poland (1945–1989)