Elisabeth Behnke was a German hotelier who ran a boarding house at 25 Bayreuther Street in Berlin during the Weimar era. Her husband Helmut Behnke was killed in action on the Eastern Front of World War I, leaving her to run her boarding house by herself. In 1929, she had an affair with a drunken Gereon Rath, one of her boarders, but he went on to spurn her advances over the next several years. Behnke also sheltered the writer Samuel Katelbach from the Nazi Sturmabteilung.