Alfred Haag

Who was Alfred Haag?

Alfred Haag was a member of the Youth movement of the Communist Party of Germany in the small Württemberg town of Schwäbisch Gmünd in the 1920s, he married another communist; Lina Haag in 1927. He was a volunteer editor for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung workers in Stuttgart, later he was elected a member of the regional parliament for the KPD until Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Both Alfred and Lina were soon arrested, and both spent many years in prisons and concentration camps.

Alfred was first in the Upper Kuhberg Concentration Camp near Ulm until it was dissolved in 1935, then at the Dachau concentration camp until 1939, when he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Lina was released in 1939, and having been reunited with their daughter, she moved to Berlin and obtained work. She visited the HQ of the SS almost daily to petition for her husband's release until 1940, when she finally, and incredibly, obtained permission for an audience with Heinrich Himmler and he secured Alfred's release from Mauthausen. He had survived physical torture whilst detained there and at Dachau.