Berthold Beitz was born
on September 26, 1913, in Pommerania. The son
of a wealthy Nazi-sympathizing family, civil engineer
Beitz was a junior executive at Royal Dutch
Shell's Hamburg office when World War 2 broke out.
One evening
in 1941, his grandfather, a Nazi notable, took him to
dinner at the German munitions magnate
Alfried Krupp. Among the guests was Reinhard Heydrich,
head of the Nazi Security Police and the architect of the
Holocaust. Germany had just attacked the
Soviet Union, and the Wehrmacht, Heydrich noted, was
taking over oil refineries in western Poland.
Enthusiastically, the young Beitz offered his services and
was named a director of the Beskidian Oil Company - later
renamed the Carpathian Oil Company - in Boryslaw, Poland.
The region had a large Jewish
population and Berthold Beitz soon witnessed first hand
brutal pogroms and death trains
running to Auschwitz and
Treblinka. During
the so-called 'Invaliden-Aktion' on August 7, 1942, the
Nazis raided the Jewish orphanage of Boryslaw in an
indescribably brutal manner. Beitz watched as the children
were dragged out of their beds, thrown out of windows and
driven barefoot in the middle of the night to the railway
station.
His conscience was
stirred and he decided to help the victims. He later
recalled: 'It was those
children sitting in the station, with those enormous eyes,
looking at you ...'
[ Home ] [ Early Years ] [ The Rescuer ] [ Aftermath ] [ Photos ] [ Books ] [ F.A.Q. ]
