Mirko Beer

Mirko Beer (born February 20, 1905 in Senta , † August 4, 1942 in Saratow ) was a surgeon , communist and military doctor with the republican troops during the Spanish Civil War .

Mirko Beer came from Senta in the Serbian province of Vojvodina . From 1923 to 1929 he studied medicine at the University of Vienna , where he came into contact with socialist ideas and in 1927 he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the International Workers Aid .

From October 1936 to May 1939 he was active as a senior military doctor in Spain, where he worked under the pseudonym Dr. Oscar Goryan performed. On Beer's initiative, the medical journal La voz de la sanidad was created in May 1937 , with the aim of generalizing the experience of modern military medicine and thus improving the medical care of the Republican troops. Beer was the magazine's chief editor until January 1938.

After the defeat of the Spanish Republic , Mirko Beer was held in a French internment camp from February to May 1939. He then moved to Moscow , where he had lived and worked for a number of years in the mid-1930s.

After the attack by the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union , he was arrested by the NKVD secret police in the summer of 1941 and suspected of espionage because documents were found on him "in different, sometimes incomprehensible languages". Beer was fluent in Hungarian, German, Russian and Serbian.

Beer was convicted and on August 4, 1942 shot .

literature

• Ulla Plener : Mirko Beer: 1930–1936 surgeon in Berlin and Moscow - 1936–1938 military doctor in Spain - shot by the NKVD in 1942 , in: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Workers' Movement , Volume III / 2006.
• Ulla Plener: Mirko Beer - Biography in Documents , Nora-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86557-182-3 .