Iwan Katz (1 February 1889 - 20 September 1956) was a German politician (SPD, USPD, KPD, AAUE, SED and UAPD).
He nevertheless survived became a post-war force in the politics both of Berlin and, until serious heart disease caused his retirement in 1954, in East and West Germany more broadly.
[5] He attended "Gymnasia" (secondary schools) successively in Osnabrück, Dortmund and Linden,[5] before moving on to a broadly based university-level education.
[4][6] As the end of the war approached, two months before the signing of the armistice, Iwan Katz assumed a leading position, as "Geschäftsführer", of the Demobilisation Committee for Hannover in September 1918.
Iwan Katz was part of the majority that stayed with what became known, briefly, as the USPD (Linke / Left) and then, in December 1920, merged with the recently formed Communist Party.
He continued to be an activist city councillor in Hannover, where he was viewed as a left-wing member of his party, working closely with comrades such as Berthold Karwane[7] and Theodor Gohr.
[2] During the early 1920s Katz established himself as one of the Communist Party's most popular and most effective public speakers, and as a comrade with a tendency to advocate radical solutions.
[1][4] In May 1924 and again in December 1924 Iwan Katz was elected a Communist member of the national parliament ("Reichstag"), representing Electoral District 16 (South Hannover & Braunschweig).
[1][2] Applying his oratorical skills, and with the support on his friends and political allies Berthold Karwane[7] and Theodor Gohr,[8] he sustained his support among a majority party comrades in the Hannover, despite causing annoyance in some quarters by imputing depravity to Paul Grobis, a Central Committee loyalist, whom he characterised as "ein verkommenes Subjekt".
It was widely assumed to be at Katz's instigation that a group of his supporters invaded and occupied the editorial offices of the "Niedersächsische Arbeiterzeitung", the party's regional newspaper.
A series of fights broke out, and eventually it was only after calling in the local police that the editorial management (who were Central Committee loyalists) got their newspaper back.
[12] Katz also came under pressure to resign his seat in the "Reichstag", given that he had secured his election as a leading member of the Communist Party, from which he was now excluded.
Despite his increasingly open anti-parliamentarianism, Katz resisted such pressure, and remained a member of the German parliament as a "Left Communist" till the 1928 election.
[4][13] He frequented anti-fascist intellectual circles and was actively engaged during this period with the "Society of the friends of the new Russia" ("Gesellschaft der Freunde des neuen Rußland").
Both on account of his high-profile record as a Communist leader and because of his Jewish provenance, Iwan Katz was high on the list of those at risk.
The two men had worked together during 1924/25 as members of the Amnesty Commission which had dealt with political detainees from the Communist and National Socialist movements who had been arrested in the context of the street violence of the early 1920s.
[4] Although Wilhelm Frick retained his position as Interior Minister till 1943, he became increasingly semi-detached from the true believers surrounding Adolf Hitler, and it is unlikely that by 1941 he would have enjoyed sufficient influence to protect Katz.
By that time most politically engaged Germans who had presented a pro-Soviet high profile before 1933, especially if identified by the regime as Jewish, had either escaped abroad or been taken out of circulation by the authorities.
Anna Katz protested against the inhuman treatment to which her husband was subjected while being transported to the camp, and was herself arrested, apparently as a result of this.
It is not clear whether he had ever acquired any practical medical experience up to this point, but Medicine had been one of the subjects he had studied at university three and a half decades earlier.
Sources pay tribute to his role in ensuring that when U.S. troops arrived early in May 1945 the Fortress of Mauthausen was handed over without a shot being fired from either side.
Katz stayed on as a physician between 6 May and 7 June 1945, attending to his fellow-survivors from the vast concentration camp, now employed not by the German military but by the American army of occupation.
(In the western occupation zones the political merger that created the SED was widely seen as a proxy for Soviet imperial ambitions, and never gained significant traction with voters.)
[2] Katz believed he was particularly well equipped to act as a mediator, both between members of the much diminished (in the Soviet zone) SPD and the SED, and between representatives of the four occupying powers.
Iwan Katz was able to publish a suitable obituary in the recently launched mass-circulation party newspaper, Neues Deutschland.
What is known is that he greeted with enthusiasm the launch of the short-lived "Titoist" Independent Workers' Party ("Unabhängige Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / UAPD) which had its formal founding congress at Worms (in West Germany) on 25 March 1951.
[20] During 1954 his cardiac cindition began to deteriorate rapidly and Iwan Katz retired to Castagnola by the lake at Lugano in order to try and preserve his health.