[1] He was a member of the Ackermann Group[2] that arrived in Saxony from Moscow in 1945 to prepare the way for Soviet Military Administration in the parts of Germany destined to be transformed into the German Democratic Republic.
[4] Hofmann was born in Plauen, a mid-sized town in central southern Germany approximately 100 miles (160 km) south-west of Dresden.
In March 1931 he set off from Kiel in a kayak and succeeded in getting himself via Denmark, Sweden and Finland to Kronstadt, the principal port adjacent to Leningrad (as it was then called).
He stayed in the country for many years, resuming his work as a machinist and later in 1933 moving on to the Urals region where he became a foreman in a heavy machinery plant[3] in Nadeschinsk (in 1939 renamed Serov).
[1] In 1943 and 1944 Hofmann underwent a period of special training at the Communist Party Academy in Pushkino, a short distance to the north-east of Moscow.
After that he was sent initially to the Prisoner of War camps at Uman in Ukraine as a representative of the Soviet backed National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD / Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland).
[3] In August 1944 Hofmann was parachuted into the Częstochowa region, after which he served as a member of the "Andreas Hofer" reconnaissance group in Poland, but by March 1945 he had been recalled to Moscow, probably at the instigation of Anton Ackermann.
During the closing days of the war, right at the end of April 1945, thirty men divided into three teams of ten German Communist Party members arrived by air from Moscow in what was shortly to become the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.
[1] However, the regional tier of government was suspended in July 1952 as part of a larger administrative reform which saw powers redistributed to the centre or to more local bodies.
In pursuance of this objective Hofmann, in March 1957, acquired the title Officer on Special Assignment, which essentially involved a senior liaison function with the Security Department of Party's Central Committee.
In 1960 Hofmann was badly ill and away from work for some time, but he survived and in October 1960 became the executive assistant head of the important Dresden district Ministry for State Security.