The Moorsoldatenlied (Peat Bog Soldiers) is one of the world's most famous resistance songs. It was not only sung by its creators, the prisoners of the Börgermoor concentration camp in Emsland. The text and musical score were smuggled out of the camp, copied multiple times, translated and reinterpreted. This is how the composer Hanns Eisler became acquainted with the song in January 1935. He reworked the original version, which had been orally transmitted to him, for the actor and singer Ernst Busch. For example Eisler made changes to the rhythm and condensed the meter into a two-four time.

Eisler and Busch subsequently made a number of public appearances where they presented the new version of the Peat Bog Soldiers. In 1935, Eisler finally brought the song to the US and Busch to the USSR, and then in 1937 Busch brought it to Spain. The song was performed multiple times and published in various songbooks. It became part of the song repertoire of the international brigades who fought on the side of the Spanish Republic against Franco. The version here comes from this period of time.

The song also found its way into at least one literary work of exile. Bertolt Brecht devoted a scene to the bog soldiers in his play Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich – written from 1935 to 1943), which deals with the German concentration camps. Brecht and Hanns Eisler gave their “reply” in 1938 from exile with the song “An die Kämpfer in den Konzentrationslagern” (To the Fighters in the Concentration Camps).