Gad Beck - Telegraph After the war, as Germany adopted an increasingly repressive stance on homosexuality, Beck emigrated to Israel. On his return in 1979, he was appointed director of the Jewish Adult Education Centre in Berlin, where he taught students about the Jewish culture that had once flourished in their country. "I mustered strength from the individual moments of happiness that I was always able to wring out of life," he said, "no matter how dire the straits."He also became a prominent gay activist. His wartime escapades featured in a film, The Life of Gad Beck, and the documentary Paragraph 175, named after the measure in the pre-Hitler German Penal Code that outlawed homosexuality. The diminutive Beck once remarked: "The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no ... I'm really a little hero. Gerhard Beck was born in Berlin on June 30 1923. Because his father was an Austrian Jew and his mother a Jewish convert, he was categorised as mischling (half-breed), which afforded him at least temporary protection from the wartime Nazi regime. When he first came out to his parents as homosexual, they were both surprised and supportive. They said: 'Oh my God, he's Jewish and he's gay. Either way, he'll be persecuted. This cannot end well,"" Beck recalled. Although he and his father were briefly held in wartime Berlin, Gerhard - always known as Gad - was released after widespread street protests by the non-Jewish wives of detainees. There were "thousands of women who stood for days ... my aunts demanded 'Give us our children and men,"" he remembered. Following his release, Beck joined Chug Chaluzi, an underground Zionist resistance group, and played a vital role in securing the survival of Jews in Berlin. According to records in Washington, he noted: "As a homosexual, I was able to turn to my trusted non-Jewish, homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places." But three months before the war ended in 1945, Beck and some of his fellow resistance fighters were betrayed by a Jewish spy working for the Gestapo, and he was incarcerated in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin. Eventually a Red Army soldier liberated him with the words: "Brother, you are free." His autobiography, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, written with Frank Heibert, was published in 1999. Gad Beck is survived by his partner of 35 years, Julius Laufer. Gad Beck, born June 30 1923, died June 24 2012