Background
A son of Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrants, Max Tschornicki was born in 1903 in Rüsselsheim.
A son of Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrants, Max Tschornicki was born in 1903 in Rüsselsheim.
After attending high school in Mainz, he studied law and practiced as an attorney in Mainz, defending principally Social Democrats and Reichsbanner members.
He and Wilhelm Vogel were the only two inmates who succeeded in escaping the Osthofen concentration camp. As a student, he belonged to several Jewish youth associations and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. On 24 May 1933 he was arrested on the basis of the Reichstag Fire Decree and imprisoned at Osthofen, one of the first Nazi concentration camps.
With the aid of his fiancée and two other inmates, Philipp Wahl and Christoph Weitz, he succeeded in escaping the camp on 3 July 1933.
As a result of his escape, security at the camp was significantly tightened, several inmates were severely punished and his family was taken into "protective custody". He escaped to the Saar, then a League of Nations Mandate, and later to Toulouse and Lyon.
After the German occupation of France in 1940 he joined the French Résistance. He was arrested in 1944 and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp on 11 August 1944.
Subsequently he was moved to other camps.
On 20 April 1945, he died of dysentery in Allach-Untermenzing, at a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp, nine days before the camp was liberated by Allied forces.
Tschornicki was active in the opposition to Nazism.
Later he became a member of the Social Democratic Party and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold.