Max Hofmann is the brother of Trude Therese Hofmann, who is also recorded in this Memorial Book.

Max and Trude Hofmann were six and five years old when her mother brought them to the Home of the Jewish Women’s Association to Neu-Isenburg in late June 1941. The parents of the two children, Herbert and Thekla Hofmann, got married in Frankfurt on June 19, 1925. Max and Trude were the two youngest children of the total 7 members of the family (see Memorial Book Karlsruhe).

Herbert Hofmann obtained a long-term lease contract for the butcher's shop and a lease for the first floor House, where the family could stay. At the same time, an agreement to supply the Jewish community with kosher meat was also one of the reasons for the transfer. Thus, a steady income and the family seemed guaranteed.

Shortly after the takeover, the Nazi Government prohibited bribery in 1933. They pushed for animal welfare reasons, but in reality, they wanted to vilify the Jewish faith as a cruel.

The sale of kosher meat was the livelihood of the Hofmann family. After the ban on Shechita, Herbert Hofmann could no longer keep its Jewish clientele and also could not fulfill his contract with the Jewish community. He tried, through the sale of fish and poultry to be financially afloat, but abandoned the butcher's shop in 1935. On the morning of August 14, 1937 he unexpectedly died only 43 years old.

After the death of her husband, the widow returned to her hometown of Frankfurt with their five children, some of them still young. She lived in the Uhlandstraße 46 in Frankfurt, Ostend, in a House of the “Reichsvereinigung” of Jews in Germany. Probably, Thekla Hansen was penniless and the “Reichsvereinigung” came up for the livelihood of the family.

Thekla Hansen lived in the Uhlandstraße until 1941 when she was deported. Her two oldest sons, Alfred, and Semi were given to Isidore Marx, the head of the Jewish orphanage in the Röderbergweg 87 in Frankfurt. To save as many children from the sphere of influence of the Nazis, Isidore Marx and his wife Rosa organized children transportation to various European countries, the United States and Palestine. Alfred and Semi were sent to Netherlands in November 1938, but after the invasion of the German Wehrmacht on the neutral country they fell into the catch of the Gestapo. In February 1943, they were 18 and 14 years old, and were deported to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork. On of March 2 of the same year, Alfred was deported to the Sobibór extermination camp, where he arrived on March 5, 1943 and was murdered on the same day. Semi Hofmann probably suffered the same fate.

The third son of the family, Manfred, lived in Frankfurt in the House of the "Jewish teachers and student homes in the Rückertstraße 53. The two youngest children, Max and Trude, are known to be among others housed in the children's home of “Weibliche Fürsorge” in Frankfurter Hans-Thoma Straße 24. The timing is unclear. As mentioned in the beginning, they lived in the Home of the Jewish Women’s Association in Neu-Isenburg in the summer of 1941.

In detail, it can no be clarified why the children could not stay with their mother. Probably, Thekla Hofmann lived in extremely cramped living conditions. Probably she did not have the necessary resources, to feed their children. Presumably, she had to do forced labor and could not, therefore, take care of her children. Maybe, she hoped that the children in community facilities of Jewish carrier would be safe from prosecution, protected from Nazis who threatened Jewish children, and Hitler boys who ambushed them on the way to school and beat them up. Or she hoped that their children from community institutions would have a better chance to be saved abroad.

For whatever the reasons, the children didn’t live with their mother, the mother certainly acted out of desperate need.

Max and Trude Therese stayed in “Heim Isenburg” for one month. On July 23, 1941, they were again deported off to Frankfurt. The sign-in or reported address in Frankfurt was the mother. Probably Max and Trude were taken to the home of “Weibliche Fürsorge” in Frankfurter Hans-Thoma Straße 24.

On November 11, 1941, Thekla Hofmann (39 years old), her two sons, Manfred and Max (8 and seven years old), as well as the daughter Trude Therese (5 years old) were deported along with over 1000 other people from Frankfurt. In this second large transport that left Frankfurt, families with several children were kidnapped. The goal was the Minsk ghetto in Belarus. The trip in a livestock transport took six torturing days and nights.

Many people died of hunger and weakness during the journey. It is uncertain whether Thekla Hofmann and her children survived the torture of transport or what they suffered in Minsk. If the children Manfred, Max and Trude were still alive, they might be murdered immediately, and the mother was forced to work.

Perhaps the children were also sent with their mother to the small wooden huts in the special ghetto for German Jews and lived there for some time together with other families.

The fate of people who have been displaced from Frankfurt can only be reconstructed in a few isolated cases. Even the statistical data remained fragmented:

In the first few months, about 100 died because of disease, hunger, and despair, at least another 100 people died in the following time. Around 400 people in the ghetto were killed by criminals or other things, or were killed in gas vans or not returned by their work commands. In the elimination of the ghetto, 270 people were killed. About 110 men and 30 women were deported to other camps in 1943. Only ten men experienced liberation in 1945 (Kingreen, Gewaltsam verschleppt, p. 362 et seqq.).

Thekla Hofmann and her children were declared dead after the Second World War. Their death date was officially set on November 11, 1941, on the day of their deportation to the Minsk ghetto.

The biography of family Hofmann was researched by Tatjana Becker and released in the "Memorial to the Jews of Karlsruhe" in 2008.: