International Auschwitz Committee

The Internationale Auschwitz Komitee (IAK) was founded in 1952 by former inmates of the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the following aims: to bear witness to the crimes of the Nazis in the camp; to fight for compensation for former inmates and their families; to work with the Auschwitz Museum to preserve the site of the camp as a permanent memorial. The IAK became involved in the gathering of statements and testimony against former camp guards and other Nazi personnel. Many of the witnesses who provided testimony later took part in the 'Frankfurt Trial' of perpetrators at Auschwitz.

Hermann Langbein (1912-1995), secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee was an Austrian who fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades for the Spanish Republicans against the Nationalists under Francisco Franco. He was interned in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and then sent to German concentration camps after the fall of France in 1940. Over the next few years he was imprisoned in several different camps (Dachau, Auschwitz and others). He was among the leadership of the International Resistance groups in the camps he was held in. After 1945 he was General Secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee, and later Secretary of the 'Comite' Internationale des Camps'. Hermann Langbein was among those awarded the Righteous Among the Nations status by Yad Vashem.