Else Hochheim met Berthold Beitz in 1938 while they were both working for Deutscher Shell AG in Hamburg, and they married in 1939. Two years later, Else Beitz and her one-year-old daughter Barbara joined her husband in Borysław, Eastern Galicia, where they moved into a small house outside the town. Else Beitz and her daughter stayed there until moving in with her parents-in-law in Greifswald at the end of 1943.
Beitz was shocked by the brutal persecution of Jews taking place before her eyes in Borysław. She was her husband’s only ally there.
Else Beitz stopped Jewish workers who were carrying out repairs in her house from returning to the ghetto during the “operations.” She hid them in her home until the immediate danger of murder or deportation passed, and gave them food.
On frequent occasions, Jewish people waited on her staircase to ask for help. Else and Berthold Beitz also hid several children in their house during the dangerous “operations.”
Else Beitz was recognized by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006; her husband had been honored in 1973.