Maria and Albert Meier lived with their daughter Käthe in Lohmar, around 15 miles (25 km) southeast of Cologne. After 1933 Maria Meier maintained her contact to the Bernauer family, for whom she had previously worked as a nursemaid. In September 1944, the Jewish Nanny Bernauer and her daughter Karola had to report to the Cologne-Müngersdorf assembly camp. Her husband Erwin accompanied them, although he was not Jewish.
Karola Bernauer was given the task of looking after the sick in the camp. When she was sent out to obtain medication, she fled to Maria Meier. Meier’s daughter Käthe flirted with one of the guards the next day and managed to get Erwin and Nanny Bernauer out of the camp and take them to Lohmar as well.
The Meiers hid the family in the basement of their house for about four months, until neighbors grew suspicious. Around the turn of 1944 to 1945, friends of the Meiers’, the farmers Ludwig and Elisabeth Weeg, took in the endangered family. The Bernauers returned to Troisdorf after the end of the war.
In 1990 Albert and Maria Meier, their daughter Käthe Overath, and Ludwig and Elisabeth Weeg were honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem.