Donata Helmrich and her husband Eberhard rejected the Nazi regime and supported their Jewish friends wherever they could. In the summer of 1941, Eberhard Helmrich was drafted as an agricultural expert to the German-occupied Polish town of Drohobycz. In 1942 he was placed in charge of Hyrawka labor camp. He used his influence to protect the approximately 200 Jewish women and men forced to work there.
During the fall of 1942, Helmrich smuggled several Jewish women out of Drohobycz, having obtained forged papers for them, and sent them to his wife in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Despite her concerns for her own children, Donata Helmrich took the young women into her home. When neighbors became suspicious, she placed the sisters with families looking for low-priced domestic workers, who thought they were Ukrainian Christians.
She also “lost” her identity papers on several occasions and gave them to people at risk, for example Herta Pineas, who was living underground and used them to escape Berlin for southern Germany.
In 1986 Donata Helmrich was honored posthumously by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.