Helmrich Eberhard

Helmrich, Eberhard Wehrmacht Major Eberhard Helmrich was born in Hamburg in 1899. During the war, he served in Drohobycz in Galicia in occupied eastern Poland. First he was head of the department for food and agriculture; and later he became Kreislandwirt, or chief economic officer, of the occupied district. Tall and blond, Helmrich looked the model Aryan. The German agricultural expert had, however, nothing but contempt for Nazi racial doctrines and distinguished himself by his decent and humane treatment of the local Jewish population. As the German official in charge, Helmrich regularly supplied the Jewish hospital with foodstuffs at a time of acute food shortages, thus saving many patients from death by malnutrition. He set up a closed agricultural labor camp, with a work force consisting of some 130 young Jewish men and women. He was able to gain the consent of the SS by claiming that “Hyrawka,” as the agricultural camp was called, would ensure the fresh supply of vegetables to the German personnel in the vicinity. By this means, the young Jewish inmates were shielded for a while from the Aktionen in which thousands of helpless Jews were brutally rounded up by the German SS and their Ukrainian henchmen and dispatched to the death camps. His own subordinates were instructed to treat the Jewish workers humanely. When the employment of Jews in agriculture was no longer permitted, and the Hyrawka agricultural camp had to be dissolved, Helmrich saw to it that the Jewish inmates be admitted to other labor camps in the vicinity, thus protecting them from outright deportation and giving them another opportunity to escape. In some particular instances, Helmrich would instruct his Polish driver, Janek, to drive Jews in his official car past SS blockades and guards. He often lodged such Jewish fugitives in his villa for several days until it became safe for them to drive out of town. Among those who were aided by him in this way were the Jewish medical doctor,Leon Miszel, and his daughter Irene Feit, whom he employed for several weeks in his villa in defiance of the strict racial regulations. Helmrich risked himself even further by providing forged papers for several Jewish girls and sending them to work in Germany, ostensibly as Ukrainian maids. Among the attested cases were those of Anita Birnbach, Melania Reifler, Susi Bezalel and her sister, and two sisters from the Werner family. Even during the darkest hours of the Nazi victories and harshest atrocities toward the Jews, Helmrich would treat all the Jews that came his way with consideration and kindness, and with words of constant encouragement. After the war, Helmrich, who had divorced his German wife, Donata*, married one of the Jewish girls whom he had saved and settled with her in the United States. On December 14, 1965, Yad Vashem recognized Eberhard Helmrich as Righteous Among the Nations.