Iwan Katz (1 February 1889 - 20 September 1956) was a German politician (SPD, USPD, KPD, AAUE, SED and UAPD). In many ways, the period of his greatest influence - within the Communist Party and after his expulsion from it in 1926 - came between 1924 and approximately 1927. Between 1924 and 1928 he served as a member of parliament (Reichstags Mitglied). On account of his record of activism he was subject to persecution during the twelve Hitler years, spending the years from 19411944 in concentration camps. 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.
Life Provenance and early years Iwan Katz was born in Hannover, son of the Jewish businessman Gustav Katz and his wife, born Johanna Magnus. He himself identified his confessional status as "without religion". He attended "Gymnasia" (secondary schools) successively in Osnabrück, Dortmund and Linden, before moving on to a broadly based university-level education. Katz attended universities at Berlin, Würzburg and Hannover. During 1909 he broke off his university studies and spent a year working in the Metals Industry. Subjects he studied included Jurisprudence, Applied Economics, Statistics and Medicine. His own curriculum vitae refers to his having obtained a doctorate, but it has not been possible to find any details or corroboration for his having obtained the degree. In 1911 Katz took a position as a research assistant at the Statistical Office in Hannover. The next year he undertook and completed his military service.
Politics and Marriage Katz had become active in the labour movement while still at school, in 1906. In 1907 he was elected chairman of the SPD-affiliated Young Workers' Association ("Arbeiterjugendverein") for North-West Germany. By 1913, despite his young age, he had emerged as an activist member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
During 1913 Iwan Katz married Anna Kerwel (1879–1947). 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.
War During the First World War, which broke out at the end of July 1914, Iwan Katz served on the frontline as a Leutnant (junior officer) and company commander with the Second Machine-gun Company of the 74th Infantry Regiment. (It seems likely that he had been listed as part of the military reserve ever since undergoing his Military Service in 1912.) He also became a staff officer.
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.
Politics, and ructions on the left
Three months after the outbreak of the rash of revolutionary outbreaks that swept across the cities and towns of Germany following the abdication, Katz became a Hannover city councillor in February 1919. Unlike many of those who would come to prominence as leading figures of the political extreme left in Germany during the 1920s, Katz had not at this stage switched his party allegiance to the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party. It was as a member of the SPD that in June 1919 he attended the party's party congress at Weimar, a small town which had acquired a hitherto implausible degree of political significance earlier in the year.
At the end of 1919, however, Iwan Katz did indeed move across to the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The USPD was by this stage rapidly approaching its own moment of truth, however. In October 1920 Katz and his wife attended the party conference in Halle as delegates. it turned out to be the conference at which the party effectively broke apart. Following a crucial vote, a minority of the members returned to the mainstream Social Democratic Party (SPD). 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. (The merged party was briefly rebranded as the "United Communist Party ..." / "Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei ...".) 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 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. 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. He thereby came to the attention of the national party leadership and in 1922 was appointed to take over at the "Kommunalabteilung", the national department with responsibility for oversight of the party's regional and municipal organisations. At the party's 8th congress, held in Leipzig between 29 January and 1 February 1923, he was able to report back to comrades and present his programme for the party's first housing policy. Katz himself was no longer responsible for the department by the end of the year, however: this may have been in some way connected with his arrest in August 1923.
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.
German parliament (Reichstag) 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). 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. Soon after Katz returned Fischer was ordered to travel to Moscow, which effectively ended her role as party leader, though it can be hard to pin down a precise date on which her leadership ended. Thälmann very quickly emerged as the strong man of the party.
Communist dissenter When the 10th party congress, held in Berlin during July 1925, elected a new Party Central Committee, Iwan Katz was no longer included on the list. He was nevertheless still a member of the "Reichstag". Katz by now had little time for parliamentary government, however. Of greater significance than his seat in the Reichstag was the strong support he enjoyed from his local party in the Hannover region. He now emerged as a highly effective critic and organiser from the anti-parliamentarian ultra-leftist wing within the party. He also began to criticise the Soviet Union on account of its perceived commitment to "state capitalism". Applying his oratorical skills, and with the support on his friends and political allies Berthold Karwane and Theodor Gohr, 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". Matters came to a head on 11 January 1926. 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. Iwan Katz was expelled from the Communist Party on 12 January 1926. Between January and November 1926 he sat in the "Reichstag" as an independent "fraktionslos" member.
Katz now launched his own Newssheet in Hannover. He enhanced his reputation within the party hierarchy as a trouble maker by using it to publish internal communications produced by the party. The newssheet appeared between March and December during 1926, with a print-run in March of 1,500, which was doubled in April to 3,000 copies. Katz and his group of noisy supporters in the Hannover area quickly came to be known as a "Linke KPD" (loosely, "Communist Party of the left"), or simply as the "Katz Group". 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. This organisation was quietly dissolved during 1927, although extreme left-wing political organisations with names that referenced the Spartacus League of 1914-1919 continued to surface from time to time.