Rudolf Katz

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Rudolf Katz (1951), photo from the Federal Archives

Rudolf Katz (born November 23, 1895 in Falkenburg , Pomerania ; † July 23, 1961 in Baden-Baden ) was a German politician ( SPD ).

He was Minister of Justice from 1947 to 1950 and also Minister of Education of Schleswig-Holstein from 1948 to 1949 .

education and profession

Katz, who was originally of Jewish faith, attended the reform high school in Kiel . Subsequently, he studied from 1913 to 1919, interrupted by military service in the First World War , Law , wrote a thesis on the position of the German Reich President and received his doctorate in this subject. The doctoral supervisor was Walter Jellinek . From 1924 to 1933 he worked as a lawyer and (since 1929) notary in Altona . In 1930 he resigned from the Jewish community because he had distanced himself from religion as a socialist. When he was threatened with arrest for racist and political reasons in 1933, he fled to France on March 31. The notary's office was withdrawn from him on June 9, 1933 his license to practice law. In October 1933 he became a delegate of the League of Nations in Nanjing (China), where he was an advisor to the government on local issues. From 1935 he stayed in the United States , where he worked as a scientist at Columbia University and was editor of the New Yorker Neue Volkszeitung . This was the newspaper of the German Labor Delegation , an organization of German social democratic emigrants. He was also secretary of the “German Labor Delegation in USA”, director of the “Rand School of Social Science” in New York and director of the magazine The New Leader .

In July 1946 Katz returned to Schleswig-Holstein. In 1951 he became a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court and its vice-president.

Political party

Katz was already a member of the SPD during the Weimar Republic and again after 1945.

MP

From 1929 to 1933 Katz was a city councilor in Altona and from 1932/33 also city councilor.

Katz was a member of the State Council of the Bizone and the Parliamentary Council . Katz was a member of the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein from 1950 to September 1951 .

Public offices

On December 1, 1947, he was appointed Minister of Justice to the state government of Schleswig-Holstein led by Prime Minister Hermann Lüdemann . In this position, he advocated the reinstatement of judges and public prosecutors who had been burdened by the Nazis, because he hoped to be able to integrate them into the democratic system. On January 24, 1949, he also took over the management of the Ministry of Popular Education. He then belonged to the cabinet formed by Prime Minister Bruno Diekmann on August 29, 1949, exclusively as Minister of Justice. After the state elections in 1950, in which the SPD lost its absolute majority , Katz resigned from the state government on September 5, 1950.

See also

literature

  • Hans Rupp:  Katz, Rudolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 334 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Rudolf Katz , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 39/1961 of September 18, 1961, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely accessible).
  • Federal Bar Association (Hrsg.): Lawyer without law. Fate of Jewish lawyers in Germany after 1933. Berlin 2007, pp. 221/222.
  • Gerhard Paul: “Mr. K. is only a politician and has come back from America as such.” The successful remigration of Dr. Rudolf Katz. In: Gerhard Paul, Miriam Gillis-Carlebach (ed.): Menora and swastika. On the history of the Jews in and from Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck and Altona (1918–1998). Neumünster 1998, pp. 699-711; reprinted in: Rainer Hering (Ed.): The "Reichskristallnacht" in Schleswig-Holstein. The November pogrom in a historical context. (Publications of the Schleswig-Holstein State Archives 109), Hamburg 2016, pp. 295–316.
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 353

Web links

Commons : Rudolf Katz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus-Detlev Godau-Schüttke: From denazification to renazification of the judiciary in West Germany. In: forum historiae iuris , June 6, 2001, p. 15, Rn. 61.
personal data
SURNAME Katz, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD), Member of the Parliament, constitutional judge
DATE OF BIRTH November 23, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Falkenburg , Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1961
Place of death Baden-Baden