Ivan Katz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iwan Katz (born February 1, 1889 in Hanover , † September 20, 1956 in Castagnola ) was a communist politician.

Life

Katz, who came from a Jewish merchant family, attended high schools in Osnabrück, Dortmund and Linden and, after graduating from high school, began studying law and political science , economics and medicine in Berlin, Würzburg and Hanover , which was interrupted by one year of work in the metal industry . Since 1906 a member of the socialist youth movement, in 1907 he was elected chairman of the workers' youth associations of Northern Germany, and a little later he also joined the SPD . Professionally, he worked temporarily as an assistant at the TH Hannover and from 1911 at the statistical office of the city of Hannover and completed his military service in 1912. In 1913 he married Anna Kerwel, also a member of the SPD.

In the First World War he was an officer with the rank of lieutenant , from September 1918 he headed the demobilization committee of his hometown and became a city councilor here after the November Revolution in early 1919. At the end of 1919, Katz joined the USPD and belonged to the left majority, which merged with the KPD at the end of 1920 . Elected to the Prussian state parliament for the KPD in 1921 , Katz belonged to the “left” wing of the party and was one of the party's most popular speakers at this time (with a strong tendency towards verbal radicalism). From 1922 to 1923 he headed the communal political department of the KPD. After the failed Hamburg uprising in 1923 and the dismissal of the previous party leadership for the "party rights" Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, Katz moved up to the party leadership , was elected to the Reichstag in May and again in December 1924 and represented the KPD on the executive committee of the Communist International (EKKI).

When factional struggles broke out again in 1925, the party leadership led by Ruth Fischer removed him from his position at the EKKI. Katz, who at that time had the majority of the Hanoverian party behind him, was one of the most important spokesmen for the “ultra-left”, anti-parliamentary wing of the party, which began to criticize the Soviet Union as state capitalist . On January 11, 1926, Katz and his followers occupied the house of the Lower Saxony Workers' Newspaper , which was controlled by the party now led by Ernst Thälmann , whereupon the Thälmann-loyal organization management under Paul Grobis had the building cleared by the police. This “ squatting ” meant that Katz and his supporters were expelled from the party a few days later. The group led by Katz now called itself KPD-Linke , represented councilist communist positions and in the summer of 1926 joined forces with the AAUE led by Franz Pfemfert and the industrial association for the transport industry to form the short-lived Spartakusbund of left-communist organizations . Despite his anti-parliamentary positions, Katz retained his mandate in the Reichstag until 1928 and was a member of the parliamentary group Left Communists .

From 1927 onwards, Katz gradually withdrew from day-to-day politics and held a leading position at the social welfare office in Berlin-Wedding. After the seizure of power of the NSDAP Katz lost his position in March 1933 and was briefly in a concentration camp imprisoned, but was following the intervention of Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick , which Katz from the Amnesty Commission of the Reichstag 1924-25 knew released. In 1941 Katz was again imprisoned in a forced labor camp , from which he was able to flee a little later and later go into hiding with Bettina Encke von Arnim in Schloss Wiepersdorf in Berlin . Katz was discovered in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz and then to Mauthausen . Due to his medical knowledge, he was used as a doctor by the Wehrmacht units stationed in Mauthausen and was involved in the handover of Mauthausen Fortress to the US Army in early May 1945 without a fight . After the liberation he initially took care of the medical care of the liberated concentration camp inmates and then returned to Berlin.

Here he rejoined the KPD and, after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD in 1946, the SED . In spite of Walter Ulbricht's intervention, Katz was recruited into the Berlin city administration due to the ruling on the reinstatement of officials who had been reprimanded by the Nazis. In the years that followed, Katz tried to act as an intermediary between the SPD and SED and between the various occupying powers , but came under increasing fire in the SED, especially since he rejected the Berlin blockade . At the end of 1948 he was released from civil service again, a little later he resigned from the SED and shortly afterwards joined the SPD. In 1950 Katz supported the short-lived “ Titoist ” Independent Workers' Party of Germany (UAPD), and for health reasons he moved to Ticino in 1954, where he spent the last years of his life.

Works

  • The settlement, construction and housing program of the Communist Party of Germany . Berlin 1922
  • The Haarmann case. Hanover 1924.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Katz, Ivan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politicians (SPD, USPD, KPD, SED), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH 20th September 1956
Place of death Castagnola (now part of Lugano )