Mirko Beer

Mirko Beer (20 February 1905 – 4 August 1942) was a surgeon, a military physician and a political activist originally from what is now Serbia. He attracted attention in Spain as a leading military physician between 1936 and 1939, during the Civil War. By 1941 he was living in the Soviet Union. Suspected by the security services of espionage, he was arrested and jailed on 9 July 1941. Still in jail, he was probably shot dead just over a year later.

Biography Mirko Beer was born into an impoverished Jewish (by religion) family in Senta, a small border town, notable of its ethnic diversity, a short distance from Subotica and roughly equidistant between Budapest and Timișoara. At around the same time he joined Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH / "Workers International Relief" / "Международная рабочая помощь"), a Berlin-based welfare organisation with close ties to Moscow. ) of the International Brigades, wrote in his (at the time strictly confidential) reports that "Goryan" had "wilfully taken to himself control of the internationalists' medical services" and so removed them from "party control". Sources that focus on "Goryan" are content to set aside such criticism, however. After the Spanish fighters were moved to Gurs he headed up the medical support and the "surgical consultancy". In June 1939 he was able to return to Moscow. "Our favourite person was back with us" ("Unser liebster Mensch war wieder bei uns"), his wife, Gerda, later wrote. He returned to his work as a physician, working in an accident clinic, and he also resumed his academic work. It was, perhaps, too good to last.

The German invasion in June 1941 came as a major shock to most Muscovites. Mirko Beer had spent his first nine years in a multi-lingual border town in a multi-cultural empire. From the perspective of Moscow-based colleagues, that made him a brilliant linguist. A few days after the German invasion a comrade-librarian overheard him discussing "with foreigners, in different languages, some of them incomprehensible". That led to his arrest by the security services on 9 July 1941 on account of "allegedly espionage-linked relationships". According to some sources he was then shot, still in jail, on 4 August 1942. His sister Margit had written letters to Rubén Ruiz Ibárruri and Joseph Stalin pleading his case. It seems unlikely that this letters ever reached their intended addressees. An alternative account of his death surfaced only in June 1990, after several years of Glasnost had led to the opening up of previously secret Soviet records. According to this version, which was passed to his daughter through the German Red Cross, Mirko Beer did actually face a trial at which he received a five year prison sentence, but he died on 11 August 1942, not as a result of being shot, but from Dysentery.