Hans Beimler

Who was Hans Beimler?

Hans Beimler was an active member of the German Communist Party and a deputy in the Reichstag.

Beimler was born in Munich and served in the Kaiserliche Marine during the First World War. A fervent anti-Nazi, he had been detained in Dachau concentration camp in April 1933, but managed to escape in May 1933 by strangling his SA guard and escaping in his uniform. He went to Spain as commissar of the first contingent of the International Brigades volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and helped to defend Madrid from the Nationalists in November 1936, during the Battle of Madrid. He was killed during the battle. There were later speculations, which accused the NKVD, the secret service of the USSR, of responsibility for his death.

He wrote an account of his experiences at Dachau which appeared in the Soviet Union in August 1933: Im Mörderlager Dachau: Vier Wochen unter den braunen Banditen, Verlagsgenossenschaft ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, Moscow and Leningrad, 1933. It was one of the very first published accounts of life inside a Nazi concentration camp and was translated into several languages, including English, Spanish and French.