Otto Katz

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Otto Katz (born May 27, 1895 in Jistebnitz , Tabor district , Austria-Hungary ; † December 3, 1952 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovakian author and agent in the service of the Stalinist Soviet Union . His numerous aliases included Rudolf Breda and Franz Spielhagen , later André Simone . He was sentenced to death in the show trial of Rudolf Slansky .

Residence permit for Otto Katz in Great Britain, issued in 1946.

Life

youth

Otto Katz was the son of the owner of a leather factory and later a grocery store. His mother died when he was five years old. The family spoke German, he started school in Czech . When the father was married, he moved from Jistebnitz to Prague . Around 1900 the Jewish population in Prague was in a peculiar intermediate position between the bourgeois-oriented, Habsburg- friendly Germans and the Czechs, who for the most part wanted to break away from Austria-Hungarians . In the industrial city of Pilsen , where he graduated from school in 1913, he became a supporter of socialism through information material from the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907 . Then he began in Vienna to study at the k. k. Export Academy , but was after failed examinations expelled . He was drafted at the beginning of the First World War and wounded after four months. During convalescence , he decided to desert at first unsuccessfully , was apprehended and imprisoned for seven months.

Of his two brothers, the next elder, Robert Katz, fell in 1915. Otto Katz survived the war by deserting again and hiding with his father in Pilsen. At Vogel Verlag in Pößneck / Thuringia , Katz became head of the shipping department in January 1919, but was soon dismissed after organizing a strike . Back in Prague he worked for the metal goods manufacturer Meva . Encouraged by Rudolf Fuchs , Katz wanted to become a writer in the cultural scene at the time , used his father's money to publish a volume of rather weak poems and garnered the flattery of a literary circle that otherwise enjoyed Katz's never-ending bohemian party. In the Prague district he frequented the writers Max Brod , Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel . Egon Erwin Kisch developed into his friend and lifelong companion. Otto Katz put the actress Sonya Bogsová, who was about to get married, out of her fiancé and was married to her until 1928, when their daughter Petra emerged. In autumn 1921 he moved to Berlin .

Professional establishment in Berlin

Katz became a communist and joined the KPD in 1922 . He made his living as an art critic and met, apparently in Max Reinhardt's German Theater , Marlene Dietrich , with whom he claims to have had a connection. As the publishing director of the left-liberal political weekly Das Tage-Buch , he became administrative director of the theater on Nollendorfplatz , which was run by Erwin Piscator . According to Franz Jung , who professionally “had to do with the Katz- Lania clique ”, Piscator had “neither the patience nor the ability to develop actors”. Instead, the experienced actors from the Berlin theaters were loaned out at high fees. When the theater ran out financially and closed in September 1929, Piscator Otto Katz got a job with the communist publisher Willi Munzenberg , who, thanks to his organizational skills, soon became the right-hand man in Berlin. He cultivated relationships with intellectuals well into the bourgeois camp who, although sympathetic to the Soviet Union , never published in a party publisher. As managing director of Universum-Bücherei für alle , a book club for workers, he helped to gain popularity and was also very successful as a writer with Nine Men in Ice .

Change to Comintern agent

While he was working in Piscator's theater he was suspected of an unpaid tax debt of 16,000 marks and imprisonment was threatened. At the end of 1930, Munzenberg got him a job as managing director of the German department in his Moscow film production company Meschrabpom . In contact with the Soviet espionage service, Otto Katz transformed from a person with middle-class habits into a loyal Moscow official. In December 1931 he married Ilse Klagemann, who was seven years his junior from Wilhelmshaven , and who had turned her back on her parents 'bourgeois milieu after the Kiel sailors' uprising and joined the KPD. Katz learned Russian and wrote articles for Munzenberg's newspapers Berlin am Morgen and Welt am Abend . The position at Meschrabpom brought him together with old friends like Piscator - The Fishermen's Uprising was his first film project - and new ones like Joris Ivens , who three years later worked for the Comintern on the Spanish Civil War . Most of the time, however, was spent visiting the International Lenin School , which had a branch in Kunzewo for teaching espionage techniques . Katz was prepared for the work as an “illegal” who does not meet with the local KP at the scene and cannot take advantage of the protective shield of immunity of an embassy member. Originally, the Soviets had advised Munzenberg against taking in the “bourgeois” Otto Katz, and they took their time until they entrusted him with an important job in reorganizing the Comintern in Paris.

Braunbuch editor in Paris

Assigned to France by Munzenberg in 1933, he worked in Paris on the two sensational brown books that were published in several languages. In this context, he was given the position of secretary of the so-called Marley Committee ("Aid Committee for the Victims of German Fascism").

During the Spanish Civil War he was the head of the Spanish news agency “ Agence Espagne ” on behalf of the Popular Front government and was now using the pseudonym André Simone. His book Hitler in Spanien , published by Denoël in Paris , was based on material collected by the NKVD in Franco's sphere of influence . Victor Gollancz ' British Left Book Club selected Katz' The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain in January 1937 for the start of a special series that touched on particularly pressing issues. Katz organized an international campaign for the liberation of Arthur Koestler , who was imprisoned by Franco and threatened with death , which - according to Koestler's own assessment - was out of all proportion to his significance for the party. In Hollywood he founded the Anti-Nazi League with numerous celebrities from the film world as figureheads.

Mexican exile

When Munzenberg began to doubt Stalin's wisdom during the Moscow trials , the German communists in Paris were asked to turn away from him. André Simone came into contact with Czech communists more often when he worked for Hubert Ripka in the Paris office of the refugee Czech government. After the start of the war, he was interned a few hours on December 30, 1939 and then expelled together with his second wife Ilse Katz. He traveled to the USA, where he spent a year in New York and tried to obtain a Mexico visa for people locked in France, in cooperation with Bodo Uhse , who was already there , a difficult undertaking after the assassination attempt on Trotsky . After his visa expired, he was given a new mission as " Politruk " in Mexico. It was there that the telegrams and correspondence of communist emigrants including Katz were recorded by the J. Edgar Hoovers Special Intelligence Service during the war . At the emigrant publisher El libro libre , he continued the fight against Hitler's Germany and for the Soviet Union and was able to disguise his work as a consultant for the Moscow-based union leader Toledano . He was soon perceived as the initiator of a Stalinist campaign against intellectuals who were not loyal to the line (“ Fifth Column ”), which earned him the committed opposition of Gustav Regulator , who openly broke with the KPD over Katz. In contrast to Regulator and Munzenberg, Katz accepted the Hitler-Stalin Pact .

Regulator described how Katz-Simon climbed the podium in the great arena of Mexico City in July 1941 , “delivered the 'fiery greetings from his fighting comrades' and promised' to report on this memorable event on his return to the underground of France ... 'But he stayed in Mexico, where he and the well-known film actress Dolores del Río founded an aid committee for the victims of fascism. ”In January 1942, Regulator portrayed Katz as an unscrupulous agent in Análisis magazine , whereupon the conflict among the politically exiles in Mexico escalated until the liberal US newspaper The Nation intervened on February 7, 1942 and urged Katz to exercise caution.

In the internal party factions, André Simone joined the group around Paul Merker , who in turn worked with Noel Field on humanitarian issues. The fact that Merker was receptive to the idea of Zionism in 1944 was not a “superficial tactical alliance-political calculation”, as Fritz Pohle suspects, but the result of pressure mainly from André Simone, who was the co-founder and first secretary of the “ Movement Free Germany in Mexico "With the organization" Logia Spinoza No. 1176 de Bené Berith ”worked together. Apparently he was also the anonymous editor-in-chief of the Spanish-language monthly Tribuna Israelita , which appeared for the first time in late 1944 . In Europe, Katz's father did not survive the horror of Hitler's troops marching into Bohemia and the oldest brother Leopold was a victim of the Holocaust .

Career highlight and victim of a show trial in Prague

At the beginning of 1946 he returned to Czechoslovakia and was initially editor-in-chief of the communist central organ Rudé Právo . After the February coup in 1948 he became head of the press department of the Foreign Ministry. As a Jew, Münzenberg staff, West Emigrant and friend of Noel Field , he was a victim of being in imitation of Stalin's actions in the Soviet Union against Rootless cosmopolitans carried out show trial in which an ostensible Trotskyist - titoistisch - Zionist conspiracy in Czechoslovakia should be uncovered .

Together with 13 comrades, eleven of them of Jewish origin, he was indicted in the Slansky trial before the newly established State Court in November 1952 and sentenced to death . Knowing that he was lost, he willingly confessed to the most absurd crimes, drawn from the torture.

The ashes of the executed were mixed with the gravel during the winter service and distributed on a street near Prague. In connection with the Prague Spring 1968 he was rehabilitated and posthumously awarded the Order of the Republic by President Ludvík Svoboda on April 30, 1968 . His past life as Otto Katz was kept secret in the ČSSR until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The newly printed brown books were attributed to Alexander Abusch in the GDR .

Works and translations

  • Otto Katz: Nine men in the ice. Documents of a polar tragedy . Neuer Deutscher Verlag , Berlin 1929, Aufbau, Berlin 1951 (About Colonel Umberto Nobile's failed attempt to conquer the North Pole with the airship “Italia” and the rescue of part of the expedition by a Soviet icebreaker)
  • Ivan Olbracht : Anna, the country girl . With a foreword by Franz Carl Weiskopf . Translated from the Czech by Otto Katz. Universum Library for All, Berlin 1929.
  • Otto Katz (Ed.): Volksbuch 1930. Universum-Bücherei für alle, Berlin 1930. (With contributions by Egon Erwin Kisch , Willi Münzenberg , Max Hodann , Bert Brecht , Kurt Kersten , Kurt Tucholsky , Upton Sinclair and many others. With numerous illustrations by George Grosz , Heinrich Zille , Honoré Daumier , Käthe Kollwitz and others)
  • Bereshnij, Mesheritscher, Sasslawski, Otto Katz a. a. (Editor): 15 iron steps. A book of facts from the Soviet Union. Universum library for everyone, Berlin 1932.
  • Brown book about the Reichstag fire and Hitler terror . Paris 1933.
  • Brown Book II - Dimitrov versus Goering . Revelations about the real arsonists . Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1934.
  • White paper on June 30, 1934. Édition du Carrefour, Paris 1934.
  • Franz Spielhagen (pseudonym): Spies and conspirators in Spain. According to official National Socialist documents. Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1936.
  • André Simone: J'accuse! The Men Who Betrayed France. The Dial Press, New York 1940.
    • German edition: The fall of the third republic. Berlin, set up in 1948.
    • Czech edition: J'Accuse! O těch, kdo zradili Francii . Nakladatelství politické literatury, Praha 1965
  • André Simone: Men of Europe. (From the confidential notes of an International Correspondent). Modern Age, New York 1941.
  • Black book on Nazi terror. El libro libre , Mexico 1943. (co-author)
  • André Simone: La Batalla de Rusia. El libro libre, Mexico 1943.

literature

  • Trial of the leadership of the anti-state conspiracy center headed by Rudolf Slánský . Ministry of Justice of Czechoslovakia, Prague 1953 (published in several languages)
  • Jan Gerber: A trial in Prague. The people against Rudolf Slánský and comrades , Göttingen / Bristol 2016, ISBN 978-3-525-37047-6 .
  • Anson Rabinbach : From Hollywood to the gallows. The persecution and murder of Otto Katz . In: Journal for the History of Ideas , Issue II / 1 Spring 2008 Online PDF
  • Hans-Albert Walter : A victim of himself. Otto Katz: Traces of life of an extraordinary average functionary . In: The plateau. Die Zeitschrift im Radius-Verlag , No. 36, August 1996, pp. 4-24
  • Stephen Koch: Double Lives. Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West . The Free Press, New York et al. a. 1994, pp. 75-95 and 321 f.
  • Wolfgang Kießling : He hoped in vain for loyalty to be retaliated: André Simone, in dsb., Partner in the fool's paradise. The circle of friends around Paul Merker and Noel Field . Dietz, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-320-01857-4 , pp. 240–250 (with photo from 1950)
  • Jonathan Miles: The Nine Lives of Otto Katz. The Remarkable True Story of a Communist Super-Spy , Bantam Press, London a. a. 2010
  • The gods thirst . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1953 ( online - contemporary document about the Slansky trial).
  • Katz, Otto . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  • 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. 352f.

Web links

Commons : André Simone  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jonathan Miles: The Nine Lives of Otto Katz. London et al. 2010, pp. 26-58
  2. ↑ Alain Dugrand et al. Frédéric Laurent: Willi Munzenberg. Artiste en révolution (1889–1940) , Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris 2008, p. 347
  3. ↑ a b Franz Jung: The way down. Notes from a great time , (Neuwied 1961), reprinted in Uwe Nettelbeck (ed.): Die Republik , Salzhausen 1979, p. 326 u. 324
  4. ^ Heinz Lorenz: The Universum Library 1926-1939. History and bibliography of a proletarian book club , Verlag Elvira Tasbach, Berlin 1996, p. 22 u. 173
  5. ^ "The fascist general Umberto Nobile climbed Lundborgs Fokker." (O. Katz: Nine men in the ice. Berlin 1929, p. 145). Ironically, the "fascist" Nobile entered the service of the Soviet Union in 1931. The heroization of the Soviet citizens involved in the rescue operation appears less problematic than the devaluation of the crew of the “ Italia ” (“..., the Pope's blessing accompanies them.” Ibid .: p. 61) down to the lowest level: “Zappi forced Malmgreen in the cold death and then ate it. ”(ibid .: p. 182) On this also the article“ Finn Malmgren ”in the English language Wikipedia.
  6. ↑ H.-A. Walter: A victim of himself . In: Das Plateau, No. 36, August 1996, p. 8
  7. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography , Stuttgart 1967, pp. 319-320
  8. ^ Margarete Buber-Neumann : From Potsdam to Moscow. Stations of an Errweges , Stuttgart 1957 (2nd edition 1958), p. 204
  9. ↑ Jonathan Miles: The Nine Lives of Otto Katz. London et al. 2010, pp. 92-103
  10. ↑ a b c Babette Gross: Willi Münzenberg. A Political Biography , Stuttgart 1967, p. 321
  11. ↑ Katz, Otto . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
  12. ^ John Lewis: The Left Book Club. An Historical Record , Victor Gollancz Ltd, London 1970, p. 30
  13. ↑ Arthur Koestler: The Secret Script. Report of a life. 1932–1940 , Munich a. a. 1955, p. 218
  14. ↑ Alain Dugrand, Frédéric Laurent: Willi Münzenberg. Artiste en révolution (1889–1940) . Paris 2008, p. 566. The departure date of June 16, 1940, published by himself, is a legend. (Ibid.)
  15. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. A contribution to the history of political and cultural emigration from Germany (1937–1946) . Stuttgart 1986, pp. 23, 28
  16. ↑ Alain Dugrand et al. Frédéric Laurent: Willi Munzenberg. Artiste en révolution (1889–1940) . Paris 2008, p. 568
  17. ^ Anson Rabinbach: Otto Katz. Man on Ice . In: Raphael Gross and Yfaat Weiss (eds.): Jewish history as general history. Festschrift for Dan Diner 's 60th birthday. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, p. 329
  18. ^ Babette Gross: Willi Munzenberg. A political biography . Stuttgart 1967, p. 322
  19. ^ Gustav Regulator: Son from No Man's Land. Diaries 1940–1943 . In: Günter Scholdt, Hermann Gätje (Ed.): Gustav Regulator , (Works; Vol. 6). Stroemfeld Verlag, Basel u. a. 1994, p. 637 f.
  20. ^ Margarete Buber-Neumann : From Potsdam to Moscow. Stations on a wrong path . Stuttgart 1957 (2nd edition 1958), p. 205. MB-N. erroneously writes July 14, 1940 instead of July 14, 1941.
  21. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, pp. 470-475
  22. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, p. 156
  23. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, p. 74. In Mexico they were among the six leading personalities of the German-speaking communist exile group. Bruno Frei claimed that Otto Katz was Merker's “real advisor”. (ibid .: p. 416)
  24. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, p. 320
  25. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, p. 317
  26. ^ Fritz Pohle: The Mexican Exile. Stuttgart 1986, p. 328
  27. ↑ The gods thirst . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1953 ( online ).
  28. ↑ Arthur Koestler: The Secret Script. Report of a life. 1932-1940 . Munich u. a. 1955, p. 431
  29. ↑ Jaroslav Hojdar: Otto Katz - André Simone očima své manželky Ilsy . Grada Publishing, Prague 2017, ISBN 978-80-271-0172-6 , p. 247.
personal data
SURNAME Katz, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simone, André
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak author and agent
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Jistebnitz , Okres Tábor
DATE OF DEATH 3rd December 1952
Place of death Prague