Carlo Mierendorff

Carlo Mierendorff (24 March 1897 – 4 December 1943) was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. An intellectual activist and regional politician in the People's State of Hesse, he played a major role in the propaganda of the SPD and the anti-fascist Iron Front during the last years of the republic. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1930. After the Nazi rise to power, he was arrested and spent several years in concentration camps before being released in 1938. He then helped organise the underground resistance to the Nazi regime until his death in December 1943 in an Allied air raid on Leipzig.

Military service and activism After the outbreak of the First World War, at age 17, Mierendorff enlisted and was sent to the eastern front near Łódź. He was awarded the Iron Cross second class for his service, but became ill and was hospitalised in March 1915 with an inner-ear infection which caused him to become deaf in his left ear. He returned to active duty in November 1917 and served on the western front; the next year, he was personally awarded the Iron Cross first class in a ceremony by Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was also psychologically mistreated: for days, Mierendorff had to straighten nails that other prisoners had to bend. After being transferred to various other concentration camps, he was released in 1938. Afterwards, despite surveillance by Nazi authorities, he made contact with numerous underground opposition groups and wrote for the resistance under the pseudonym "Willemer". In 1941, he joined the Kreisau Circle. In the shadow cabinet of Ludwig Beck, Mierendorff was proposed as a senior member of the propaganda department.

Mierendorff was killed in an Allied air raid on Leipzig on 4 December 1943. He was buried in the Darmstadt forest cemetery.

Mierendorffplatz in Charlottenburg, Berlin, is named in his honour, as are numerous streets in towns and cities across Hesse.