From the beginning of the war, Josephine Odenthal lived with her husband and their daughter in Cologne. Heinz Odenthal worked as a Catholic teacher in the public school system. Although he rejected the regime, he joined the NSDAP in 1944.
The elderly Jewish Jacobys and their daughter Hildegard Schott also lived in the Odenthals’ building at Bismarckstraße 52. At the start of 1942 they were sent to Fort V assembly camp in Cologne-Müngersdorf, from where they were to be deported. With the Odenthals’ help, they managed to escape from the camp. They found refuge in Bonn with Sibylla Cronenberg, an elderly relative of Josephine Odenthal. The Odenthals visited them there and took food for them. They continued to do so even after having to leave Cologne, due to losing their apartment in an air raid in 1942.
After 1945 the Jacoby family confirmed Heinz Odenthal’s help, making it easier for him to be denazified. The two families stayed in regular contact. Heinz and Josephine Odenthal were posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2005.