Hans
Beimer was
born in Germany in 1895. A member of the
German Communist Party, Beimer was elected
to the Reichstag but was arrested when
Adolf Hitler took power. He was sent to
a Concentration Camp but managed
to escape.
On the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War Beimer joined the International
Brigades. Beimer was political commissioner of the Thaelmann
Battalion when he was killed defending Madrid
in December 1936.
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Last updated: 12th April, 2002
(1)
Esmond
Romilly, Boadilla (1937)
I
put him (Hans Beimler) immediately in my mind into the category of
Real Communists.
This was a purely personal definition I applied instinctively ; to
fit it you had to be a serious person, a rigid disciplinarian, a member
of the Communist Party, interested in all the technical aspects of
warfare, and lacking in any such selfish motive as fear or reckless
courage.
(2)
Claude
Cockburn, The
Daily Worker (5th December, 1936)
I
see by the papers that Hans Beimler was killed in Madrid on Tuesday.
Eighteen days ago we were
sitting in a front line position on the Casa de Campo front outside
the city, and he eased himself up to pull a map or something out of
his pocket, and a bullet missed his head by millimetres.
I remarked it was a narrow
shave.
He said he had seen narrower.
For instance, he was arrested
by the Nazis in Munich in 1934, and after being savagely beaten at
the Brown House, was taken up to the Dachau concentration camp.
What happened to him there
he has told in his remarkable book, In the Hands of Hitler's Hell
Hounds.
It is sad for us that
Hans Beimler has been killed.
It is not possible for
us ever to express fully our sadness and our respect for the men who
have lost their lives - Englishmen, Germans,
Frenchmen and a dozen other nationalities - fighting for
the peace and the progress of the world in one of the greatest movements
of genuine international solidarity the world has ever seen.
It is sadder still for
the Nazis, for international Fascism, for the enemies of the people
everywhere, that they should have been up against a man like Hans
Beimler, who, when they thought they had him for sure, with five hours
to decide between forced suicide and murder, yet had the willpower,
the training, the
discipline, the knowledge, to break out and to insist that he should
live to fight new battles against them.
You often read in the
papers that someone's death has produced
an 'irreplaceable loss'.
In our movement it is
not so.
Nobody would have been
more disgusted than Hans Beimler if you had told him that his place
could not be filled. He knew
and we know that his place can and must be filled.
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