Katzenberger Trial - The Trial

The Trial

Someone denounced Katzenberger to the authorities and he was arrested on 18 March 1941 under the so-called Rassenschutzgesetz, or Racial Protection Law, one of the Nuremberg Laws, which made it a criminal offence for Jews and non-Jews to have sexual relations. Leo Katzenberger consistently denied the charges, as did Irene Seiler, who claimed the relationship between them was that of a father and daughter. The investigating judge initially concluded there was too little evidence to proceed with the case.

The investigation had however attracted the attention of Oswald Rothaug, a judge known for his severity and fervent support for Nazism, who arranged for the case to be brought to him. He recognised the publicity such a trial would generate and saw it as a way to display his Nazi credentials and further his career. He sent out tickets for the trial to all the prominent Nazis in Nuremberg.

No conclusive evidence was presented during the trial that Katzenberger and Seiler had ever had an affair (Seiler had been Katzenberger's tenant since 1932), let alone that it had continued up until and during the war. The law at the time did not call for the death sentence for breaking the Rassenschutzgesetz. The normal sentence would have been a term of imprisonment of several years. However, the Volkschädlingsgesetz, a wartime law, allowed capital punishment if one made use of wartime regulations such as the black-out to commit a crime. Based on a single eyewitness account that Katzenberger had been seen leaving the Seiler apartment "when it was already dark", Rothaug applied this law to pass a death sentence against Katzenberger.