Max Wittekind came from a long-established Jewish family of Bad Kissingen. He was born in Bad Kissingen on October 9, 1903 as the youngest of four children of the merchant Wilhelm Wittekind and his wife Fanny, née Mendle from Swabian Fischach. The family lived in “Villa Paula” in Promenadestrasse 5a. Between September 1914 and June 1918, Max Wittekind attended Kissingen Realschule.

That Max Wittekind didn’t just endure anti-Semitism at the beginning of the Weimar Republic without any resistance can be seen in an incident of 1923. He damaged “during a walk together with his brothers Simon and Arthur a poster of “Völkischer Beobachter” (Nazi paper) that was attached to an advertising column near “Schweizerhaussteg” (footbridge across the Saale River). The head of the local group of NSDAP in Bad Kissingen – the 26-year-old contract employee Christoph Linhard – filed a criminal complaint against Simon, Arthur and Max Wittekind on May 1 because of property damage. In the public hearing of the District Court of June 21, 1923, Simon Wittekind reported about the procedure and the reason for the property damage: “It was the Friday morning of April 26, a wonderful day for an excursion. I was going for a walk with my brother. On the advertising column, there was a big red poster that was meant to attract people’s attention. I read it with my brother. My youngest brother used his pen knife to erase the one spot which was meant to cause any Jew to feel affected and offended. This spot was bound to violate any Jew. – Let’s skip the poster – the one spot said: Jew-dominated and lying press. I didn’t take part in the action. We couldn’t tell my brother to stop what he was doing because it happened very quickly.”

Max Wittekind was not sentenced by Kissingen District Court because of property damage. But he didn’t owe that to the judges’ political farsightedness or human empathy but only to a juridical formal error. The local group of NSDAP weren’t the people who were allowed to file this criminal complaint but the publishing house of “Völkischer Beobachter” as the actual owner of the poster. As the publishers hadn’t filed a complaint in time, the proceedings had to be closed” (Beck/ Walter, Jüdisches Leben in Bad Kissingen, p. 56).

Max Wittekind became a merchant and factory owner producing manufactured and fashion goods and spent a lot of time away from Bad Kissingen (before 1925 in Neustadt and in 1931 in Neumünster). Only very few facts are known about his further life.

Just like his older brother Simon, he and his wife also managed to escape from Nazi Germany, first to Haifa/ Palestine, where he was a merchant in 1936. Later, he emigrated to South Africa – like his brother Simon - where their mother Fanny also succeed in fleeing at the last moment. Max Wittekind died on July 26 1984 at the age of 80 when visiting Switzerland. He was buried in Johannesburg.