German businessman saved Jews during war
Berthold Beitz, German industrialist: b Zemmin, Germany, September 26, 1913; m Else Hochheim, 3d; d Sylt, Germany, July 30, 2013, aged 99.
BERTHOLD BEITZ was a leading German industrialist who was credited with saving hundreds of Jews during World War II by employing them at the oil fields he managed in Nazi-occupied Poland, a rescue operation similar to the more popularly known deeds of Oskar Schindler.
After the war, Mr Beitz was a leading figure in Germany’s industrial revival as head of the steel giant Krupp, now ThyssenKrupp, for several decades. At the peak of his career, he was among the most influential businessmen in Europe.
During the Cold War, he made news by meeting with business leaders on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including automotive executives in Detroit and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Little publicised at that time were his efforts on behalf of his Jewish workers in Poland during World War II. When Mr Beitz returned to the country as an unofficial West German ambassador in 1960, a New York Times reporter noted simply – and in retrospect, poignantly – that he had ‘‘left behind a favourable reputation for good treatment of his Polish employees’’.
Mr Beitz did not set out to join the Gentile rescuers who became known as the ‘‘Righteous Among the Nations’’, a designation conferred on him by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, in 1973. He came from a family of Nazi sympathisers, according to accounts of his life, and at the outbreak of the war was working for Royal Dutch Shell in Hamburg as an oil executive.
In 1941, Mr Beitz accompanied his grandfather to a dinner at the home of Alfried Krupp, the steel titan whose weaponry concern had armed German kaisers with cannons and Adolf Hitler with tanks. There he met Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi SS special police and a principal designer of the ‘‘final solution’’ to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
Mr Beitz heard Heydrich discussing the strategically important oil fields in what was then Poland and expressed interest in the work.
Then in his late 20s, Mr Beitz soon received a military commission to serve as business manager of the Carpathian Oil company in Boryslaw, now located in Ukraine. Many of the company’s workers were Jews.
Mr Beitz once told the Times that he began his rescue work not out of political conviction but rather with ‘‘purely humane, moral motives’’.
In 1942, according to Yad Vashem, he saw babies tossed from windows during the liquidation of a Jewish orphanage, an experience that left him deeply scarred.
Mr Beitz used his connections with Nazi officials – as well as what he described as ‘‘self- assurance’’ and ‘‘incredible luck’’ – to carry out a daring and risky rescue effort. Permitted to review transports of Jews before they left for the Nazi death camps, he pulled from the trains his employees and others. In August 1942, Mr Beitz removed 250 Jews from a transport to the Belzec camp by calling them ‘‘professional workers’’.
Meanwhile, Mr Beitz secretly relayed to his Jewish acquaintances information about impending roundups and deportations. He and his wife, Else, risked their own security to hide Jews in their home.
In March 1944, Mr Beitz was drafted by the German army, leaving the Jews in his workforce unprotected. Many were deported to Auschwitz, but others escaped. Some found work at a munitions factory run by Oskar Schindler, the industrialist made famous in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List.
Mr Beitz resumed his business career after the war. In 1953, he was hired by Mr Krupp, who was convicted at the Nuremberg trials of using slave labour during the war and had recently been released from prison.
Mr Krupp swore off arms production and embarked on an effort to diversify the company. With Mr Beitz as general manager, it became one of the most powerful businesses in the world.
After Mr Krupp’s death in 1967, Mr Beitz became executor of his will and head of the foundation that effectively controlled the company. He reportedly kept 1000 ties in his office wardrobe.
ThyssenKrupp was formed in a merger in 1999. Mr Beitz had retired in 1990 but was associated with the company until his death.
Mr Beitz was the son of a bank teller, and initially worked in banking before joining Royal Dutch Shell.
Mr Krupp’s decision to hire him was part of an overarching strategy to remake the business. ‘‘I decided we should start looking for a man who did not know steel,’’ Mr Krupp once said.
In the late 1950s, Mr Beitz participated in negotiations with a Jewish organisation that led to an agreement – one of the early settlements of its kind – in which the Krupp firm promised to pay 5000 marks to any worker who could show he or she had been used for slave labour during the war.
In 2006, Else was also recognised by Yad Vashem as ‘‘Righteous Among the Nations’’.
The exact number of Jews saved by Mr Beitz is not easily determined. Some estimates place it as high as 800. But he remained haunted by one person whose life he could not save.
Once, he went to the railway station before a transport and recognised among the deportees one of his secretaries and her elderly mother. Mr Beitz pulled both women from the cattle car. The SS guard, unconvinced of the older woman’s value to the company, ordered her back on to the train.
Unable to bear such a separation, the secretary turned to Mr Beitz. ‘‘Herr Direktor, may I return to the car?’’ she asked. She never came back.