fought for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He also established a committee to provide aid to the Republican refugees who were held at Gurs internment camp at the end of the Civil War. Death In June 1940, Münzenberg fled from Paris, where he had been making anti-Nazi broadcasts, to escape the advance of German forces. While in the south of France, he was imprisoned by the Daladier government at Camp militaire de Chambaran, an internment camp located in the great Forêt des Chambarans (Chambaran Forest) near the commune of Roybon, in southeastern France. There, another camp inmate, unknown to Münzenberg and his colleagues, befriended Münzenberg and proposed that the two of them escape in the chaos of the Armistice.Willi Münzenberg, Un Homme Contre: Actes, Colloque International, La Bibliothèque Méjanes, Institut de l'image, Aix-en-Provence (March 1992), pp. 179–181 Some sources believe the unknown communist was actually an agent of Lavrentiy Beria's NKVD. Münzenberg agreed, and he, the stranger, and several of Münzenberg's colleagues (including Valentin Hartig, a former SPD official, and Hans Siemsen, Münzenberg's Brown Books collaborator) fled southward, in the direction of the Swiss border . Münzenberg disappeared a few days later; on 21 June he left his travelling companions to look for a car which would take him to the Gurs internment camp, where his partner was being held. It was the last anyone saw of him alive. On October 17, 1940, in the Bois de Caugnet between Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye and Montagne, near Saint Marcellin, French hunters discovered Münzenberg's partially decomposed corpse at the foot of an oak tree.Koch, Stephen.Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, Revised edition. New York: Enigma Books, 2004; p. 362 The initial newspaper report stated that the cause of death was strangulation caused by a "knotted cord"Gross, Babette. Willi Münzenberg: A Political Biography. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press (1974), p. 4 but other sources state that the cause of death was a garrote (a weapon usually formed from a knotted rope or cord). The body was found resting upright on the knees, with a knotted cord draped over the skull. The knotted cord had apparently snapped soon after the body had been suspended from an overhead branch. The police investigation of the circumstances of his death, including the brief coroner's report, did not interrogate Münzenberg's fellow camp inmates, and cause of death was listed officially as suicide.