Max Maurer, the son of a farmer, became a police officer like two of his brothers. In 1935 he moved to Ergoldsbach, a village in the Lower Bavarian district of Landshut. On April 27, 1945, his friend the police officer Josef Kimmerling entrusted him with thirteen Jewish prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp, who were on a death march to Dachau concentration camp.
Maurer was told to take the prisoners to Landshut prison, where they were likely to be shot dead. He decided not to deliver the exhausted men. Instead, he took them to his friend Anna Gnadl’s farm, where she hid the prisoners in her barn and provided them with food. They were liberated the next day by the invading U.S. Army.
On the initiative of two survivors, John (Jancsi) Weiner and Andrew (Bandi) Rauchwerk, Max Maurer was posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 1997. A street was named after him in the town of his birth, Regenstauf, in 2013.