Beitz
was shocked by the brutality of the Nazis and the Ukrainians. He
witnessed the murder of a child in it's
mother's arms - after the war he recalled: 'When you see a
woman with a child in her arms being shot, and you have a
child of your own, then there is only one way you can
react.'
Guido Knopp tells in his important book Hitler's
Holocaust how Beitz in August, 1942, succeeded in
rescuing 250 Borislaw Jews from being sent to the Belzec
death camp - just as they were being loaded on to the
train. His pretext was that he needed the people as
skilled workers for the oil industry.
Berthold
Beitz was able to employ
and protect the Jews for several
years because of the German need for oil. He was under
constant pressure to surrender them, but Beitz found he
could 'control' the SS commandant of the forced-labor camp, Friedrich
Hildebrand. During tennis matches or hunting trip he would
convince Hildebrand to leave his Jews alone ...
Beitz later told: 'I should have
employed qualified personnel. Instead, I chose tailors,
hairdressers and Talmudic scholars and gave them all cards
as vital 'petroleum technicians'.
Beitz placed himself at considerable risk by passing on to
his Jewish confidants inside information of impending Nazi
actions and house-raids. He issued forged work-permits and
both Beitz and his wife concealed Jews on the run in their
own home.
The Gestapo started an investigation against him but he
managed to survive the incident, first and foremost
because of his many connections.
Like Oscar
Schindler Beitz often went to the train station
to pull his Jewish workers off the death trains. 'Once I found one of my secretaries and her aged
mother,' Beitz later recalled. He got them out, but the
Nazis would not be fooled. They judged the mother too old, and
forced her back on the cattle car. 'The daughter
turned to me. 'Herr Direktor, may I also return to the
car?' ' Beitz never saw her again.
When the war ended, more than 800 of Beitz's Jews were
still alive.
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