Dr. Paul Hofmann and his son Peter

Paul und Peter (1926/27) - Paul, Peter und Hans (1930) - Die Geschwister Hofmann mit dem Familienhund (1930)

From the first day of the war until the end of December 1918, Paul Hofmann served in the Prussian army, first as an assistant doctor and then as a senior doctor in the infantry. He was wounded in 1914 and fell ill with dysentery in 1918. He was awarded the Iron Cross I and II Class for his leadership of a medical company and his personal commitment to saving his comrades. He was also awarded the Wounded Badge and the Saxe-Meining Cross of Honor for services in the war: Honors that obviously meant a lot to him later on. His wife Margarete raised the two children born during the war alone in Berlin during this time. 

Paul Hofmann and wife right after marriage 1914 - in uniform and with his horse

Paul Hofmann was one of around 9,000 Jewish doctors in Germany who, with the transfer of power to the National Socialists, were increasingly subjected to marginalization, disenfranchisement and persecution regardless of their patients, so that a significant number of them emigrated. In the course of the “Gleichschaltung”, medical professional organizations removed Paul Hofmann from all relevant offices he held in the spring of 1933. We do not know whether an early boycott in March and the boycott of Jewish doctors on April 1, 1933 also targeted his practice and that of his brother-in-law Alsberg (as reported by the Kassel doctor Dr. Strauss). However, Paul Hofmann wrote in his application for compensation: “At the same time, the underground struggle began among the population, who were deterred from visiting Jewish doctors by incitement and terror.”

The former military doctor was exempt from some discriminatory regulations and laws as a “front-line fighter” of the First World War, so that he was apparently still registered with the health insurance companies, which had no longer applied to many Jewish doctors since April 1933 and at least threatened their economic existence. The city of Kassel took part in the anti-Semitic measures against doctors. It stopped covering the costs of back exercises for poor children in the gymnasium of the practice in Spohrstraße, so that its operation had to be discontinued. The Red Cross Hospital prohibited him, as well as other Jewish doctors, from continuing to use operating rooms there and from occupying beds for his patients.

When his brother-in-law Adolf Alsberg died at the end of 1933, Paul Hofmann took over the practice and clinic as agreed with him, but was unable to continue operating them to the same extent as before. For the reasons mentioned above and others, this was due to the decline in patients, but also to the political pressure on qualified staff to stop working for him, which meant that he was no longer able to offer some medical services. With the “Fourth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act” of July 25, 1938, Paul Hofmann's license to practice medicine was finally revoked, as was that of all Jewish doctors. Only a few of them were allowed to treat Jewish patients exclusively as “Krankenbehandler” (medical practitioners). Paul Hofmann was not one of them and had to close his practice.

On November 10, 1938, he was arrested together with more than 250 Jewish men in Kassel in connection with the November pogroms and subsequently imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. Within the first few days there, the prisoners were forced to witness the deaths of fellow sufferers in a special camp set up for this purpose, a “special zone” separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire. All the extremes of the concentration camp came together here: Cramped conditions, water shortages, completely inadequate sanitary facilities and food, the terror of the SS, “sleeping shelves” without blankets or straw mattresses that were only 50 cm high. Murders were also part of it. The main motive for the arrests was to create pressure to force Jews to sell their property (if they still had any) and, above all, to emigrate. Paul Hofmann was released after one month. But even this short period of imprisonment was enough for his son to say of his return: “I didn't recognize my father.” After Paul Hofmann also had to pay the so-called “Jewish property levy” of a quarter of his assets, and the Villa Strupp, of which he was co-owner, had also been forcibly sold, he began to think seriously about emigrating, which the Gestapo, who kept him under constant surveillance, urged him to do. However, this did not happen. 

Jewish “Aktionshäftinge” November 1938 - Paul Hofmann's money card in Buchenwald concentration camp

Due to his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, Paul Hofmann was protected from deportation, but not from forced labor, which Jews could be subjected to from 1938. From September 1, 1941, he was forced to work (together with Poles and Russians) at the Gollup raw products store at Unterstadtbahnhof and wrote about it in the compensation proceedings: “Physically the hardest and dirtiest work, mainly pressing and loading waste paper and rags into 2-centner bales, loading and unloading scrap iron into and out of railroad wagons; once unloading 20 tons of heavy iron parts within 8 hours, loading and unloading rotten bones in a shed swarming with rats.” He tells of working in temperatures as low as 25° and, above all, of harassment and torture. “We were ranked below the Polish prisoners.” After the war, the camp officer at the time attested: “What wore Dr. Hofmann down the most was the miserable harassment by the camp master at the time, a fanatical Nazi named Brix. As a Jew and a doctor, Dr. Hofmann was a particular thorn in his side, so he was put to the hardest and dirtiest work and harassed according to all the rules. (...) No consideration was given to his weakened body.” Under these circumstances, it was no wonder that Paul Hofmann contracted two severe bouts of pneumonia within five months in 1942 and was unable to work from October 1942 to January 1943. Siegfried Samson, who did forced labor there together with Paul Hofmann and had the same experience, wrote: “If you called in sick, this monster Brix threatened: If your doctor writes you off sick, I'll report you two Jewish pigs to the Gestapo immediately.”

From January 1943, Paul Hofmann was then employed at the Polish sales outlet in Kasernenstraße, where he had the “opportunity for lighter work”. His attempt to look for another job even after the owner's death led to him being denounced for bribing officials and summoned to the Gestapo. He wrote after the war that it was probably thanks to Gestapo officer Hoppach that he was not sent to a concentration camp.

His last station of forced labor was the Jakob laundry on Bleichenweg, where he was generally treated kindly, but sometimes also spitefully. He and his fateful comrade Julius Schuster were not allowed into the air-raid shelters, but they were assigned to the air-raid watch. Initially employed in the laundry doing light work, the heavy laundry work then exceeded his capacity and led to heart failure and, from mid-February, to a renewed inability to work. Only a few days before the end of the war in Kassel, he saw his house destroyed in a bombing raid and was only able to move back in in 1948, after he had resumed his practice in 1947, this time with the help of his wife.

Peter Hofmann

Peter, the youngest child in the family, initially attended the Bürgerschule 13 for boys (now the Herkulesschule) and transferred to the Wilhelmschule at Easter 1935, where he was accepted as a so-called “half-Jew” and was able to take his Abitur at Easter 1943. During this time, he witnessed the family home being hit and damaged several times during air raids. He does not report on his experiences at school in his memoirs. His school leaving certificate shows that his inclinations and talents were clearly in the field of natural sciences and physics in particular, where he also took part in a study group with very good results.

After leaving school, Peter began an apprenticeship as a radio repairman at Adolf Leopold Mayer's radio wholesaler at Hohenzollernstraße 87 (Friedrich-Ebert-Straße), which was interrupted in November 1944 when he was called up for forced labour for the Organization Todt (OT). This was the result of a project begun in 1943, but only slowly progressing, to deploy “first-degree half-breeds”, which the Gestapo only completed in October 1944 on Heinrich Himmler's orders by pulling all the men affected out of the factories that had previously been unwilling to hand over their workers. On the orders of the Gestapo, Peter Hofmann was sent to the Bähr camp of the OT, a paramilitary construction group that had been involved in the construction of air raid shelters in the Reich since 1943 and used forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates on a large scale. The Bähr camp was set up in the building of the Salzmann factory in Bettenhausen, which he later described as burnt out and recalled a plague of fleas that he could barely control. “There were about 40 half-Jewish men with us - I think I was the youngest - men from Holland, Polish girls and former Italian soldiers on the floor below us. (...) Opposite us were Russian prisoners of war who were guarded by German soldiers.” Unguarded, the forced laborers - as Peter's “Life Story” says - took the streetcar to the west of the city, where they worked on the construction of an air-raid shelter. The forced labor ended for him in March 1945: shortly before the end of the war in Kassel, the head of the Bähr camp sent him back to his employer, who had meanwhile reopened a business in a neighboring community after the bombing in Kassel. In the same month, air raids targeting the neighboring railroad lines destroyed the family home on Tannenwäldchen. In his “Life Story”, Peter Hofmann expresses the probably correct conviction that only the timely military defeat of Germany prevented people of his origin from being deported and murdered, so that his father and he were allowed to survive.  

Wolfgang Matthäus

June 2025

Quellen und Literatur

HHStAW: Bestand 518 7521 (Entschädigungsakte Paul Hofmann)

StadtA Kassel: Einwohnermeldekartei, Hausstandsbücher, Adressbücher

Arolsen Archives: Dokumente zu Peter und Paul Hofmann

Dokumente, Fotos, Lebenserinnerungen und Informationen aus der Familie, zur Verfügung gestellt von Ken Hofmann

Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Landesärztekammer Hessen

Hessisches Ärzteblatt 5/2015, Sonderdruck zur Geschichte der Landesärztekammer Hessen

Benno Hafeneger / Marcus Velke / Lucas Frings, Geschichte der hessischen Ärztekammern 1887-1956, 2016

Jüdische Ärztinnen und Ärzte im Nationalsozialismus: Ausgrenzung, Entrechtung, Verfolgung. Dokumentation des Wissenschaftlichen Dienstes des Deutschen Bundestages (Dokumentation WD 1 - 3000 - 035/18)