Else Eberle lived with her non-Jewish husband Josef Eberle, a writer, in Stuttgart. He was dismissed from his radio broadcasting job in 1933 and banned from writing in 1936. The couple had no children and according to Nazi regulations, their marriage was considered a “privileged mixed marriage,” so Else Eberle did not have to wear the yellow star and was initially spared deportation.
Ultimately, however, she was required to report to the Bietigheim pre-deportation assembly camp near Stuttgart on February 12, 1945, for a “foreign work detail,” as the deportation of Jews in mixed marriages to Theresienstadt was euphemistically called.
The Eberles asked Sebastian Imhof, stationmaster at the Wildpark Station in Stuttgart, for a place to hide. He had previously given them access to an air raid shelter although it was prohibited for Else Eberle, since she was Jewish.
Imhof and his wife Klara gave the couple refuge in the railway station attic and later in their home. That is where the Eberles were in April 1945, when the area was liberated by the French army. A few months later, Josef Eberle helped found the Stuttgarter Zeitung and remained the publisher of the newspaper for decades.