Siegfried Katz was a member of the SCHUFA Administrative Committee. Here we present his biography as documented in the report “An Institution Under the Radar? A Report on the SCHUFA During the Nazi Era”:

What was Siegfried Katz's role at SCHUFA?

“Siegfried Katz was born on August 12, 1887, in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Kętrzyn). His family belonged to the small Jewish community there. He studied law in Königsberg and began his legal clerkship there in 1909. In 1910, he was sworn in as an attorney in Augsburg. What Katz had in common with Kauffmann was their military experience: as early as the second day of mobilization, on August 2, 1914, he went to the front and fought until the end of the war on November 11, 1918, ultimately holding the rank of noncommissioned officer. He remained in the military afterward; until November 10, 1919, he was stationed with the East Prussian Foot Artillery Regiment No. 1 “von Linger.” Beginning in December 1919, he resumed his civilian career as a lawyer and practiced at various courts in Berlin. Eventually, he became director of the Berlin subsidiary of the Zurich-based “Kaufkredit A.G.,” which was established in 1927. Katz was one of the pioneers of consumer credit and wrote numerous articles on the subject during the 1920s. In 1928, he presented an assessment of the two-year history of this financing model and noted that “consumer financing has not yet reached ‘American proportions,’ but that the coming years will in all likelihood bring the scale—and thus the increase in revenue—that the system’s founders had calculated.”

What happened to Siegfried Katz after the Nazis seized power in 1933?

“Unlike his colleagues on the Administrative Committee, Katz did not flee Germany; instead, as a distinguished front-line soldier, he sought to regain his license to practice law after April 1933. Although the process was protracted and at times humiliating, Katz did in fact regain his license. After the “Nuremberg Laws” went into effect, he lost his license to practice as a notary in 1935. His efforts to regain it failed in 1936. He ultimately practiced law from his private residence until 1938, when a comprehensive professional ban on Jews made any kind of work impossible. Katz was unable to flee the Reich in time. On October 26, 1942, he was deported by the Nazis to Riga along with other Jewish women, men, and children, and was murdered there shortly after arrival."