Hermann Langbein was born in Vienna on 18 May 1912. His parental home was conservative and orientated towards Greater Germany; his father came from a Jewish family. After graduating from high school, he worked as an actor and joined the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) in 1933 in the wake of the transfer of power to the National Socialists in Germany.

Fighter against Franco
As the KPÖ was banned that same year, he was subsequently arrested several times. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria, he fled to Spain and joined the international brigades fighting against Franco's fascists. When Franco's victory became apparent, he fled to France and was interned in various camps there.

Dachau, Auschwitz, Neuengamme
In 1941, he was extradited to Germany and initially sent to Dachau concentration camp. From Dachau, he was transferred to Auschwitz in 1942, where he remained until 1944 and worked as a camp scribe in Eduard Wirths' medical department, among other things. He used his position to obtain relief for his fellow prisoners and also to organise a resistance movement in the camp. At the end of the summer of 1944, he was transferred from Auschwitz to Neuengamme, where he initially had to perform forced labour in the satellite camp at the Bremen Borgwardwerke.

As a camp clerk in Lerbeck
After the bombing of the Borgward works, he returned to the main Neuengamme camp a short time later and worked there in the typing pool. In December, he was transferred to the subcamp in Lerbeck. Here, too, Langbein became a camp clerk. He remained there for just under four months in total, until the camps at Porta Westfalica were evacuated on 1 April 1945.

Escape on a bicycle
The evacuation transport initially took him to the Laagberg satellite camp, and after this camp was also evacuated, he took the opportunity to escape when the train stopped in Salzwedel on 11 April 1945. He then spent several weeks in Hanover, which had been liberated in the meantime, before deciding to return to Austria on 5 May 1945, a few days before the German surrender. He travelled the distance to the German-Austrian border on a bicycle in nine days, reaching Vienna after four more days.

Activist of the reappraisal
As early as 1947, Hermann Langbein became one of the most important witnesses in the trials against leading National Socialists, testifying as a witness in the trial against Rudolf Höss in Warsaw, among others. In 1954, he was elected the first Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee. Due to his attitude towards the Stalin regime, he was expelled from the Austrian Communist Party at the end of the 1950s and subsequently lost his position on the International Auschwitz Committee. In 1963, he was an observer at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Langbein played a decisive role in the preparation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. In addition to his countless contacts with former prisoners, he also provided the investigating authorities with documents that would later be used in the trial. In the years that followed, he worked as a journalist and historian and published several books on the trials, Auschwitz and resistance in concentration camps. In 1967, Yad Vashem honoured him as "Righteous Among the Nations". He continued his remembrance and educational work until his death in Vienna on 24 October 1995.

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