Colonial-era government and police official who later served as deputy military police commander and lawyer; listed in the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators
| Life | 1910 ~ 1998 |
| Era | 일제강점기~현대 |
| Clan | 담양 전씨 |
Jeon Bong-deok (1910-1998) worked as a police official in the colonial period and after liberation was active in the military and the legal profession. Namuwiki introduces him as Damyang Jeon, and he was the father of the writer Jeon Hye-rin. According to Wikipedia he was born in Gangseo County, South Pyongan, in 1910, graduated from Gyeongseong Normal School in 1932 and the law faculty of Keijo Imperial University in 1940, and passed Japan's higher civil service examination in 1939.
He worked in the Home Affairs Bureau of the Government-General and held police posts in North Pyongan and Gyeonggi; at liberation he was one of eight Korean police officials of gyeongsi rank. He kept police posts under the US military government, and after the 1948 Act to Punish Anti-National Collaborators graduated from the first class of the Korea Military Academy, becoming a major and deputy commander of the military police in 1949. Wikipedia says he led the investigation of the 1949 National Assembly "spy" case, arresting and torturing suspects, and that in the Kim Gu assassination case he steered the investigation toward minimizing it and shielding the assassin An Du-hui.
He afterward served as secretary-general to the Prime Minister and then worked as a lawyer, was the 18th president of the Korean Bar Association in 1969-1970, founded the Korean Legal History Society in 1973 and lived in the United States from the 1980s. He appears on the 2002 list of 708 pro-Japanese collaborators and the 2008 Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators.
Wikipedia only states that he is on the 2002 list of 708 pro-Japanese collaborators and the 2008 list for the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators, with no wider overall assessment. The account of his role in the Kim Gu assassination case is Wikipedia's summary and mixes in rumor and suspicion, so facts should be checked against primary sources and scholarship. Family details beyond his eldest daughter Jeon Hye-rin could not be confirmed.
He is often cited as a case of a senior colonial-era police official who continued in important posts in the military and the legal profession after liberation. This entry only lays out the facts; Jokbo World does not substitute for the reader's own moral judgment.