Born in rural Rock Township in Mitchell County, Iowa, May 20, 1910, Beyer attended school in St. Ansgar until the eighth grade. His parents were Luxembourgers of German extraction. After his father died when he was a child, Beyer became a farm hand to help support his family. He also worked in a garage in St. Ansgar and developed a mechanical aptitude that helped him end up in a tank destroyer unit during the war. He lived part of his youth and adulthood around Buffalo, North Dakota, where relatives also lived, and southern Minnesota. He resided mostly in North Dakota after the war, farming a small acreage there.
Beyer entered service at his hometown, St. Ansgar, Mitchell County, Iowa. Writing for a newspaper years later he remembered, “The best years I ever had were spent in the army.” To “get it over with,” he volunteered in February, 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor. But once America entered the war, Beyer’s plans changed drastically, and he had to stay in the service.
“My experience with tools and machines had shown up in my army records,” he wrote, “and I was just the kind of man they wanted for tanks. So I got the call.” Like tens of thousands of other American soldiers, after he finished basic and advanced training, he was shipped to England to await orders. He made his overseas crossing on the Queen Mary which had been converted in wartime as a troop carrier.
Eights days after D-day, Beyer’s tank destroyer unit splashed ashore in France. He experienced both the euphoria of grateful French citizens overjoyed with liberation, and the horror of total war. “In some places, not a building, not a wall was left intact. The stench of death was everywhere. Dead horses, dead cows, dead Germans were rotting in the summer sun.”
After Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945, four months after Beyer’s Medal of Honor heroism, he remained in Germany as part of the occupational force. During this time he saw the Buchenwald concentration camp: “Now and again, I run into somebody who doesn’t quite believe there were such places as Buchenwald and Dachau. But Buchenwald I saw….It was all true—every word of it—the gas chambers and the crematories…And the gaunt, hollow-eyed, walking skeletons…I saw them too.”
He then received word to report to Washington, D.C. to receive the Medal of Honor. He was flown back on top priority flights. “At the Pentagon building…they were awfully nice to me.” Officials asked him about his relatives because they wanted to invite them to Washington for the presentation ceremony. He was surprised when they arrived. When he told them where his relatives lived, they said “Get St. Ansgar on the phone. Just like that.” His family arrived at government expense, toured the city for four days and attended the ceremony hosted by President Truman. Beyer received his Medal of Honor from the president at a White House on August 27, 1945.
He married in 1962, three years before his death, in 1965, at age 55.