Delwin Katz

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Theodor Delwin Katz , also Theodor Delvin Katz (born August 3, 1887 in Korbach , † October 17, 1933 in Dachau concentration camp ) was a German doctor.

Live and act

Empire and Weimar Republic

Katz grew up as the son of a Jewish family. After attending school, he studied medicine . Katz received his doctorate in Bonn in 1912 with a thesis on a case of liver syphilis with severe narrowing of the inferior vena cava along with remarks on the histological evidence of salvarsan for Dr. med. Then he settled as a general practitioner in Nuremberg .

As a participant in the First World War , Katz was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. During the Weimar Republic , Katz belonged politically to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) without performing any functions in the party. However, he repeatedly made his practice rooms available to the KPD secretariat for meetings.

Time of National Socialism and murder

A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power , Katz - who was doubly unpopular with the new rulers due to his characteristics as a left-wing intellectual and a Jew - was taken into protective custody. On April 13, 1933, he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp on the second transport of prisoners from Nuremberg. In Dachau, Katz volunteered as a prisoner paramedic in the infirmary , where he cared for sick and abused fellow prisoners.

In the summer of 1933, Katz was locked in the arrest wing known as the bunker in Dachau after he and his fellow inmates Johann Altmann, Albert Rosenfelder and Willi Franz were caught trying to get cashiers with records of the events in the camp and especially of the mistreatment of Smuggling prisoners sewn into hats from the camp. Katz was killed together with Franz on October 17, 1933 by members of the Dachau guard in the bunker. The deaths were officially declared as suicides .

However, during their investigation in November 1933, the public prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that suicide was practically impossible:

“The opening of the corpses revealed justified suspicions of violence by someone else's hand in both bodies. According to the preliminary opinion of both forensic doctors, […] stands in both cases. Suffocation by strangulation and strangulation. The course of the strangulation marks found on the neck does not correspond to the findings observed in the hanged man. "

At the instigation of Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm , the proceedings against the SS men involved in the murders were finally put down for "political reasons". Katz's wife, who had tried to get his release in the meantime, had received a promise from the Gestapo that her husband would be released as soon as she could show him an emigration certificate for Palestine. Although she managed to get the requested document, on the day she expected her husband back, a police officer appeared at her place and informed her of his suicide.

When the concentration camp commandant of Dachau, Theodor Eicke , had two thousand five hundred prisoners line up on October 22, 1933 to give a speech in which he spoke about the “villains” who spread “horror news” about his camp abroad he also explicitly mentioned Altmann, Katz, Franz and Rosenfelder and their "attempt at sabotage". He stated that the four evildoers had been arrested for their act and further stated:

“Two of the traitors arrested have already been promoted to the afterlife. The Jew Doctor Katz and his helper Willi Franz. We still have enough German oaks to hang anyone who opposes us. There are no atrocities and there is no Cheka cellar in Dachau. Anyone who is beaten is right to receive it. "

Today Delvin-Katz-Strasse in Nuremberg commemorates him.

Fonts

  • About a case of liver syphilis with severe narrowing of the inferior vena cava, along with remarks about the histological evidence of Salvarsan , 1912. (Dissertation)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Egon Fein: Hitler's Way to Nuremberg , 2002, p. 257.
  2. ↑ Richardi: School of Violence, 1983, p. 210.
  3. ^ Raul Hilberg: The Destruction of European Jews , 1990, p. 40.
  4. ↑ Baruch Z. Ophir: The Jewish communities in Bavaria 1918-1945 , 1979, p. 208.
  5. ↑ Die Weltbühne , Vol. 30, Issues 27–52, p. 1347.
  6. ↑ [1]
personal data
SURNAME Katz, Delwin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Katz, Theodor Delvin; Katz, Theodor Delwin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and concentration camp prisoner
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Korbach
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 1933
Place of death Dachau concentration camp