Provenance and early years Iwan Katz was born in
Hannover, son of the Jewish businessman Gustav Katz and his wife, born Johanna Magnus. Anna was the daughter of a former army officer who had been dismissed from the
Imperial Army on account of his political activities. Anna Kerwel's father was another member of the
Social Democratic Party. and Theodor Gohr.
Prussian Parliament (Landtag) In February 1921 Katz was elected to membership of the
Prussian parliament. The
(United) Communist Party won 31 of the 421 seats in the
"Landtag" (assembly). Iwan Katz occupied
one of them, representing
the party in the parliament till 1924, when he made the switch to national politics. The arrest came about in the context of
a wave of strikes across the country, triggered by intensifying economic hardship. Iwan Katz delivered a speech in
Hannover which was believed by the authorities to have caused or contributed to serious street disturbances. It is not clear how long he was detained. More serious and sustained street disturbances erupted in
Hamburg a couple of months later, over three days towards the end of October 1923. The so-called
Hamburg Uprising was deemed a failure for the
Communist Party. It frightened the government, which outlawed
the party (to little obvious effect) for several months. But a spontaneous German re-run of Russia's 1917 "
October Revolution", after which many of the more radical comrades yearned, failed to materialise. Political divisions on the political left, most obviously between the
Communist Party and the centre-left
SPD were intensified, and among the Communist party leaders the more extreme pro-Moscow factions strengthened their position following the fall from favour of the party leadership team of
Heinrich Brandler and
August Thalheimer, both of whom found themselves invited to relocate to Moscow in January 1924. A new leadership collective emerged for the party in Germany, which included the charismatic
Ernst Thälmann, a staunch Stalin ally. Iwan Katz also found himself a member of the party leadership team at a national level. At the 9th party congress, which took place in April 1924, and was held that year in
Frankfurt am Main, Iwan Katz was elected to the fifteen member
Central Committee. Within it, he also joined the
party politburo. As a member of the
German party's fractious leadership team, towards the end of 1924 or early in 1925 he was sent to
Moscow to as party delegate to
the Comintern. He used his networking skills to establish closer relations with leadership comrades in the
Soviet party, although his networking seems to have been conducted chiefly on behalf of left-wing comrades in
Germany, including the future party leader
Ernst Thälmann. As factional rivalries within the leadership of the German party intensified during 1925
Ruth Fischer, formally the party leader, recalled Katz from Moscow and removed him from his
Comintern role during the summer. Other soubriquets would follow. On 26 June 1926 Katz teamed up with
Franz Pfemfert and the
AAUE - itself a breakaway organisation from the Communist Party - to form the "Spartakusbund der linkskommunistischen Organisationen" (
"Spartakus League of left-communist organisations"), which presented itself as the extreme left-wing of the communist movement. 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. He had never been a particularly active parliamentarian, however, and after the dissolution of the Spartakusbund der linkskommunistischen Organisationen" during the first part of early 1927, he was hardly ever to be seen in the
Reichstag building. 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"). Following a report by a Gestapo spy he was found and arrested by the
security services in May 1944 and taken to the
Auschwitz concentration camp. 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. She was taken to the women's
concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Irwin Katz himself was at some stage transferred from Auschwitz to the
Mauthausen concentration camp near
Linz. At the beginning of April 1945, a few weeks before the
war ended, and struggling with a desperate shortage of skilled labour thanks to the slaughter of war, the
army authorities conscripted Iwan Katz out of the concentration camp to work as an army doctor for the units in
the town. 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. On 20 April 1945, he was promoted to the post of Chief Physician to the German units stationed in Mauthausen. 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. After securing the agreement of
Hermann Matern, a leading figure in the
SED, Iwan Katz entered into negotiations with
Franz Neumann (Politiker) and
Kurt Mattick, two leaders of the
SPD in Berlin, about a possible recognition of
Reuter's election by both the SPD and SED. It appears that Katz was one of those inclined to over-estimate the freedom of manoeuvre in constitutional matters that the
SED leadership enjoyed between 1945 and 1949
under the Soviet military; is not clear what impact, if any, his involvement could have had on the unstable compromise that emerged over the Berlin mayoralty, which marked a further step along the path towards the physical division of Berlin into Eastern and Western sectors. In any case, for Iwan Katz personal tragedy intervened on 10 January 1947 when Anna Katz died as a result of the treatment she had sustained
at Ravensbrück. Iwan Katz was able to publish a suitable obituary in the recently launched mass-circulation party newspaper,
Neues Deutschland. By the time of its launch Katz was already a member of the UAPD, having joined it, according to at least one source, during 1950.
Final years 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. It was at Castagnola that he died of heart failure on 20 September 1956. == References ==