Ernst Hochstaedter
1872 - 1943

Ernst Hochstaedter was born on September 18, 1872 in Frankfurt am Main, the son of David Hochstaedter and Dora Hochstaedter, née Cahn. His father was a merchant and, together with Bernhard Bergmann, the owner of a portfolio factory in Töngesgasse. Ernst Hochstaedter had a sister, whose daughter Disy Kahn, née Rosenberger, emigrated to Great Britain (London). On July 30, 1926, he married Mathilde Hamm, a non-Jewish woman born on July 5, 1884. According to the National Socialist interpretation, the couple lived in a "mixed marriage". The marriage was childless.
Ernst and Mathilde Hochstaedter had to move several times in Frankfurt: According to the address book of the city of Frankfurt am Main, the Hochstaedter family lived at Beethovenstraße 3a, while his law office was located at Goethestraße 27. From 1938 they lived in Voelckerstraße and from July 1940 in Neuhaußstraße. Here they had to sublet a room in the apartment to supplement their living expenses. From March 1942, the couple lived in Liebigstrasse and finally, from December 1942, in Ostendstrasse.

Dr. Ernst Hochstaedter worked as a lawyer and notary in Frankfurt am Main. He received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1896 with a thesis on "The legal nature of disciplinary punishment, in particular disciplinary punishment against civil servants". At that time he was a trainee court clerk. He was registered as a lawyer at the Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main from May 2, 1899. Before and after the First World War, Dr. Ernst Hochstaedter was also active in the Weimar Cartel, an association of organizations that advocated, among other things, the complete separation of school and church. Around 1911, he was the first treasurer of the executive committee in Frankfurt am Main and spoke at a meeting of this cartel in 1914 alongside Max Henning (1861-1927) on the "Establishment of a program for the separation of church and state". Together with Ludwig Wahrmund, he published an essay "Zur "Akademie des freien Gedankens"" in the journal Das freie Wort in 1914. He was also one of the signatories of a petition submitted by the Weimar Cartel to the German Reich government and the Prussian government in November 1918 to put all freethinking communities on an equal footing with the churches.
In August 1920, Dr. Hochstaedter was also appointed notary public.

As early as June 29, 1933, he was struck off the list of lawyers and thus banned from practising, although as a "former lawyer", i.e. a lawyer admitted before 1914, he would still have been able to practice even under Nazi law. On January 20, 1943, the Frankfurt Gestapo summoned him "for questioning" and arrested him, then imprisoned him in the court prison. On March 15, 1943, he was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp and murdered there on March 24, 1943. His non-Jewish wife Mathilde Hochstaedter survived the Nazi era. She died on March 21, 1971 in a nursing home in Meerholz, a district of Gelnhausen (Main-Kinzig district).
Heinrich Baab, an officer of the Secret State Police, was found guilty of murder for the death of Dr. Ernst Hochstaedter in 1950 and received a life sentence in prison

Ernst Hochstaedter joined the Frankfurt Alpine Club section in 1901. We do not yet know which mountain tours he undertook. However, we found him listed in the Meraner Zeitung newspaper in August 1902 as a guest at the Hotel Graf von Meran, so he was probably out and about in the South Tyrolean Alps at the time. In 1912, he donated 10 marks for the extension of the Gepatschhaus. It is unclear whether he was still a member of the Frankfurt am Main section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club on his 25th anniversary, as he was not mentioned in the list of jubilarians in the 1926 newsletter. However, he is still listed in the list of members for 1925. Due to a lack of sources, we currently know nothing about his activities in the section.