Hugo Rothschild was born on February 15, 1875, in Munich to the Jewish private tutor Gustav Rothschild and his wife Bertha, née Fleischmann. After the early death of his father, he grew up with a cattle trader in the Franconian town of Baiersdorf. He graduated from secondary school, studied law in Erlangen and Munich and established himself as a lawyer in Munich. In 1910 Hugo Rothschild married Ida Boltshauser, a Catholic. The couple had two children: Erna, born in 1911, and Fritz, born in 1916. During the First World War Hugo Rothschild was a military court counsel in the mobile zone garrison and awarded a number of honors, including the King Ludwig Cross. After Hugo and Ida Rothschild divorced in 1921, the children Erna and Fritz grew up with their father.
Upon the Nazis taking power, the revenue generated by Hugo Rothschild’s law office began to dwindle. As a veteran of the First World War he was permitted to continue working as a lawyer. However, many “Aryan” clients now shied away from hiring a Jewish lawyer. During the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, he was taken into custody and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After his release on December 1, 1938 he was still able to work as one of the few Jewish “consultants” and advise only Jewish clients. In early 1941 he represented Sylvia Klar in court, an opponent of the Nazi regime imprisoned in the concentration camp Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Hugo Rothschild was close to his family. The death of his son Fritz, who died while serving in the Wehrmacht during the invasion of Poland in 1939, was a severe blow. In 1942, after his daughter Erna had divorced, she and her son Heinz moved into his apartment in Johann-von-Werth-Straße, with Hugo fondly caring for his grandson.
In 1944 Hugo Rothschild began to support a Jewish friend, Edioth Schülein, who had gone underground, providing her with food and money. Just a few months before the end of the war, in January 1945, they were betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. Hugo Rothschild was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died on February 13, 1945. (text Ingrid Reuther, editor C. Fritsche, translation P.Bowman)
