Max Katz

Location 
Dieffenbachstraße 45
Historical name
Dieffenbachstraße 44-45
District
Kreuzberg
Stone was laid
27 March 2010
Born
15 May 1920 in Guxhagen (Hessen-Nassau)
Escape into death
06 May 1941 in Berlin

Max Katz was born on May 15, 1920, in Guxhagen, a community near Kassel, the son of Juda Katz, a merchant, and his wife Ella, née Nußbaum. The following year his sister Sophie was born.

On his registration card in the archives of the Mayor's Office of the municipality of Guxhagen it is noted that Max lived with his parents in Kleine Brückenstraße in Guxhagen during the first fourteen years of his life. At the age of thirteen, he probably noticed that a concentration camp had been set up in the former Breitenau Monastery, a district of Guxhagen, when the Nazis seized power. The building is located in the immediate vicinity of his parents' house. Photographs of Guxhagen show that SA men were already marching through the village in columns at this time.

At the end of 1934, Max signs out for Kirchhain, a small town in central Hesse. Does he want to complete an apprenticeship there?

Two years later he returns to Guxhagen and in 1938 moves to Kassel to Schillerstrasse. A short time later, a collection camp was set up in the neighborhood for Jews who were deported from there to the death camps.

It is not clear from the registration card why he lived in Kirchhain and Kassel and what he did there.

On November 7, 1938, the synagogue in Kassel was desecrated and set on fire. The synagogue was just a ten-minute walk from his home in Kassel. The desecration of the synagogue in Kassel may have been another drastic experience.

In 1939 Max probably lived in Guxhagen again from July to October and then moved to Hamburg according to the 1939 registration card. Why and how long he lived there is also unknown.

In the memorial books, Dieffenbachstrasse 44/45 is noted as his last residential address. On May 6, 1941, shortly before his 21st birthday, he took his own life. Did he want to escape deportation? In the burial register the cause of death is entered as "accident (run over by train)".

His mother Ella was also registered at Dieffenbachstraße 44-45. The house had a Jewish owner. Did the Nazis force them into a "Judenhaus" before the deportation? In any case, there are many more Stolpersteine in front of the house.

Max is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Weißensee. In the registry the grave location could be found: a small unmarked field without a gravestone.

His mother died on December 2, 1941 in the Jewish hospital in Berlin and also has a grave without a headstone in the Jewish cemetery in Weißensee, very close to Max. The registration for burial was made by Juda Katz, who at that time was registered with Sophie in Friedrichshain.

His father Juda Katz and his sister Sophie were deported to Auschwitz at the beginning of 1943 and presumably murdered there.

Students from a neighboring high school discovered Max's Stolperstein, discussed his life story in class and decided to mark Max's grave with a gravestone. They collected donations and successfully asked the Szloma Albam Foundation for funding. The gravestone was consecrated by Rabbi Nachama during a memorial service in December 2018. The school's choir performed Yiddish songs for the occasion. The commemorative hour was covered by a film report in the Berlin evening show.

In November 2019, the students went to Guxhagen as part of a study trip and visited the Breitenau memorial and then presented the life story of Max Katz to citizens of the community of Guxhagen in the former synagogue. It was a worthy commemoration of Max Katz.