Johannes Baptist "Hans" Beimler (2 July 1895 – 1 December 1936) was a German trade unionist, Communist Party official, Reichstag deputy, an outspoken opponent of the Nazis and a volunteer in the International Brigades fighting for the Spanish Republic.

In July 1919 Beimler married Magdalene Müller in Hamburg with whom he had a daughter, Rosemarie (1919), and (after moving back to Bavaria) a son, Johann (1921).

[5] In February 1933, during the election campaign for the Reichstag, Beimler addressed the crowd at the last public meeting the KPD were able to hold at Circus Krone in Munich.

he rallied the crowd to resist the growing Nazi threat, referencing one of the few victories the Red Army of the Munich Soviet ("Räterepublik") had over the right-wing Freikorps at Dachau in 1919.

[6][7] Hitler came to power in January 1933 and with the Reichstag Fire Decree for the Protection of People and State, one month later, began interning political rivals, including KPD and SPD members, in concentration camps.

However, with the suspicious deaths of Dachau prisoners[9] already under investigation,[10] Wäckerle decided that, with sufficient physical and mental abuse, Beimler could be encouraged to commit suicide.

[14][7] It was one of the first published accounts of life inside a Nazi concentration camp and was translated into several languages, including English, Spanish, French and Yiddish.

[15] After short periods in France and Switzerland, working for the International Red Aid (Rote Hilfe) organisation, Beimler arrived in Barcelona in August 1936 at the head of the first brigade of German anti-fascist volunteers, fighting alongside the Republican troops under the name "Thälmann's Centurians".

In Ernest Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the American protagonist Robert Jordan meets with a German revolutionary, Hans, who is based on Beimler.

Hans Beimler was granted national hero status in the German Democratic Republic, with military divisions, ships, factories, schools and streets named in his honour.