German industrialist Berthold Beitz, the “grand old man of steel,” died on July 30 at 99 years of age. Beitz turned the privately run Krupp Steel company into a publically traded corporation that is now ThyssenKrupp Steel . 

Beitz was born in 1913 in Zemmin , Hither Pomerania. He began his career as a banker at the "Pommersche Bank" in Stralsund and started to work for Shell Oil Company in Hamburg in 1938. When World War II began in 1939, he was not recruited by the German army, but remained in the employ of Shell Oil. In October 1939, he was sent by his employer, the Rhenania-Ossag , to the Southern Polish towns of Jasło and Krosno , in order to work at the Beskiden-Erdöl-Gewinnungs-GmbH , a subsidiary of Rhenania-Ossag, as a leading commercial clerk. Beitz married in December 1939, and after the birth of their twin-daughters Barbara und Inge, his wife Else followed her husband to the 'Generalgouvernement' .

In 1941 his grandfather, who was a devout Nazi, took him to a dinner at the home of Gustav Krupp , head of a major munitions company, where Reinhard Heydrich , chief of the Nazi Security Police, was a guest. When Heydrich mentioned oil refineries had been taken over in Western Ukraine, and were to be subsidiaries of Royal Dutch Shell, an enthusiastic Berthold Beitz (27 years old) put himself forward, and was given a commercial directorship of the 'Karpathen-Öl AG' in Boryslaw . There, according to his narrative, he went to Gestapo headquarters and received authorization to supplement the refinery workforce with Jews scheduled for deportation. Every day he recruited from the train station “tailors, hairdressers, students from Talmudic colleges, etc.” as “petroleum technicians”. In Boryslaw, Beitz remained until March 1944, when he was drafted into the German army. 

At the end of the war, he became a Russian war prisoner, but escaped after a short time. In August 1946, 32 years old Beitz was nominated by the British occupation forces Vice-President of their Insurence Control Authority. Thereafter, he was building a successful career in insurance, when a meeting in 1952 with the heir to the Krupp dynasty, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach , the son of the man Beitz had met in 1941, was to change his life. 

In 1953, Krupp owner Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach appointed 
Beitz chief executive officer of his company. He revived its steel base and traveled outside Germany to enter foreign markets for building industrial plants, using Beitz’s reputation to win orders from the eastern bloc. Krupp became the first German company to pay reparations to Jewish concentration-camp survivors. 

In 1973, Yad Vashem named him to its 'Righteous Among the Nations'.  

Mr. Beitz is survived by his wife of more than 70 years, Else; three daughters, Barbara Ziff , Susanne Henle and Bettina Poullain ; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In 2009, his grandsons Robert Ziff, Dirk Ziff and Daniel Ziff - whose father, William Bernard Ziff, was an heir to and longtime CEO of the Ziff-Davis magazine publishing company who married Barbara Beitz before divorcing - established the 'Berthold Beitz professor in human rights and international affairs' at 'Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government'.

Weitere Infos: