A Question of Accountability

By Steve Rodan

Sixty years ago, the Jewish leadership in West Germany was confronted by one of the most basic and least explored questions that echoed from the Holocaust: Should Jews who collaborated with Hitler remain in positions of prominence?

Why it took nearly 20 years to address this question can be attributed mostly to efforts by Jewish organizations and the State of Israel to bury the issue of accountability. In Israel, cooperation with the Nazis was excused by everybody from judges to historians as marking the desperate attempt to save Jews. The survivors responded that the only ones saved were those who served the Third Reich.

In February 1964, the Central Council of the Jews in Germany reluctantly agreed to examine the issue of collaboration by those who remained leaders of the community after World War II. Since its inception in 1950, the council had refused to deal with the demands of numerous Jews inside and outside West Germany to remove from leadership anybody who worked with Hitler. But the issue would not go away. In other European countries, suspected collaborators had been investigated by so-called Jewish honor courts or authorities.

Now, the German Jewish leadership was forced to deal with the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, or Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, established in July 1939, less than two months before Germany invaded Poland. RV, under the purview of the Gestapo, was meant to facilitate the Final Solution. The quisling association was assigned to implement official persecution that ran from the absurd -- such as the 1940 decree that banned Jews from purchasing new clothes or shoes -- to that of genocide a year later.

Although Nazi Germany, in an effort to improve its image abroad, presented Jewish welfare as the key task of RV, its main assignment was deportation. In Bremen, an economic hub along the Weser River which until World War II contained about 1,300 Jews, RV worked with the Gestapo to compile lists of Jews that would be sent to the ghettos of Poland and Soviet Union. In 1942, Bremen transferred more than 400,000 Reichmarks, or nearly all of the Jewish community's assets to RV.

Block elder

From 1941 through much of the following year, the RV office in Bremen was headed by Carl Katz, for years a wholesaler allowed to maintain his profitable business until the end of November 1938. During the war, Katz worked with the Gestapo regarding the Jewish community. He was seen helping in the deportation of the Jews to Minsk. When almost all of Bremen's Jews were gone, Katz and his family were taken to the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt, reserved for Jews deemed as having served the Reich. In Theresienstadt, he was appointed "block elder," where he worked with the Nazi administration. [1]

Unlike many of his colleagues, Katz and his family survived the war and returned to Bremen, where he restarted his scrap metal and textile business and regained his fortune. [2] From August 1945 he headed the tiny Jewish community. The U.S. military's Counter-Intelligence Corps investigated Katz on suspicion that he was a Nazi collaborator. In the end, Katz was not prosecuted.

But the Jewish survivors in Bremen were not satisfied. As the years passed, more of them saw Katz as a Jew who aided in the death of their loved ones. From 1957, the survivors demanded that the Central Council remove Katz from any position and brand him a collaborator. Many of the complaints reached council chairman Heinz Galinski, who had spent the war in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.

By the late 1950s, all of the RV chiefs in Berlin had died. They included Leo Baeck, Germany's de facto chief rabbi, accused of helping in the deportation of German Jews. His family vigorously defended the rabbi and threatened to sue critics for defamation. Moritz Henschel, the last chairman of the Berlin Jewish community, survived the war, claiming he had never heard that Jews were being slaughtered until 1945. He died in Palestine two years later.

The accuser

Katz, however, was very much alive and a member of the board of directors on the Central Council. His most vociferous accuser was Max Plaut, a banker and attorney who had been active in the Jewish community of Hamburg until 1942. Plaut was Katz's superior at RV. In 1944, he was arrested together with his mother and released in an exchange arranged through the Zionist movement. He was allowed to immigrate to Palestine but returned to Germany soon after the war.

Plaut claimed that as an RV functionary Katz spent much of his time at Gestapo headquarters. He said Katz was instrumental in selecting Jews for deportation, including former rivals. Katz was even said to have denounced his predecessor, Joseph Platzer, to the Gestapo. Plaut said Katz set up an illicit bank account, which gave him considerable power over the rest of the Jewish community.

The subject of the accusations against Katz struck many as ludicrous. Plaut and Katz had been close friends and business associates after the war. They also shared similar experiences under Hitler. Plaut maintained many of the same Gestapo contacts as Katz. Plaut also benefited from an illicit bank account, which he said was used to purchase food and heaters for the deportees.

During the Central Council's investigation, Katz played down his relationship with the Gestapo. He helped obtain a record of transactions from his former account in the Bremen bank, which in 1942 was transferred to his successor in RV, Karl Bruck. [3]

In the end, the Central Council's board of directors decided that collaborators could not continue in public service. The board passed a resolution that any Jewish community leadership that defends an accused collaborator must resign. The council appointed a five-member body to investigate any charges of wartime collaboration.

"In the view of the board of directors of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, individuals who in the period of National Socialism, supported or participated in measures of persecution, even if under compulsion, cannot -- as a matter of basic principle -- be allowed to hold any leading or representative position in the Jewish community." [4]

All a secret

Katz abstained in the Central Council resolution. But he had the last laugh. He remained as head of the Bremen Jewish community without any objection from the German Jewish leadership. Indeed, the council did not even publicize its resolution.

But the feud between Katz and Plaut continued. In 1966, Katz sued Plaut for slander in a trial filled with accusations and counter-accusations. A year later the case was closed.

Plaut was the one who emerged bloodied. He was banned from the Jewish community of Bremen and returned to Hamburg. In contrast, Katz remained as head of the community in Bremen until his death in 1972. Plaut died two years later.

Notes

1. Judenhaus as the headquarters of the Israelite community of Bremen and the Bremen office of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, July 1939" Judenhaus als Sitz der Israelitischen Gemeinde Bremen und des Bremer Büros der Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland | Spurensuche-Bremen

2. "Mr. Katz and His Enemies: The Story of Carl Katz. Taz. Book "The Story of Carl Katz": Mr. Katz and His Enemies - taz.de

3. A Fatal Balancing Act. Beate Meyer. Page 390. Berghahn, 2013

4. ibid. Page 388

Below: In happer times: Katz with his wife, Marianne and daughter, Inge and her daughter, Hanna, in 1950. [Katz Family archives]