The rector of one of Germany’s leading universities has apologized for what he called “the university’s shameful past and the many injustices and unspeakable crimes committed” during the Nazi era and for the fact that Jews and others who had their university titles revoked during the Nazi era were not informed in the decades following World War II that they had been reinstated in 1946.
Bernhard Eitel, head of Heidelberg University, said in a letter to former New York Assemblyman and Senator Franz Leichter that the doctoral title of Leichter’s mother Käthe of 1918, which was revoked in 1939 by a Vienna court because she had attempted to procure forged papers in order to flee Austria in 1938 to save her life, had been reinstated by virtue of decisions of 1946 and 1948. According to legislation adopted by the Nazis, a conviction by a criminal court automatically led to the revocation of a doctoral degree. After the war, Heidelberg University’s Senate declared those revocations “null and void”.
“As far as our university is concerned, your mother Dr. Käthe Leichter was entirely justified in carrying the title of “doctor”, and her name will be forever linked to the degree she earned at Heidelberg University,” Eitel wrote to Leichter’s son Franz, adding: “We are at a loss to understand why our university and the faculties and bodies concerned did not attempt, either in 1946 or in subsequent years, to inform those concerned about the Senate’s decision of 20 December 1946 or, if the graduates had been murdered in Nazi Germany, to notify their families and ask their forgiveness. Today, in 2013, we are, whether we like it or not, the successors of those who committed this injustice, those who let it happen and hushed it up. We are deeply sorry that our university has failed until now to ask your family’s forgiveness for the dishonor that was brought upon your mother’s name by our predecessors.
“We can no longer ask your mother’s forgiveness, or at the very least show her that the injustice she suffered is regarded as intolerable by the university at which she earned her degree. We are also aware that it is nothing short of an imposition to ask forgiveness of you, who have lived your whole life with the memory of your mother’s defamation,” Eitel wrote.
Käthe Leichter, née Pick, was one of the leading sociologists and feminists of her time. Her doctoral thesis in Heidelberg was prepared under the supervision of the famous sociologist Max Weber. As a Jew and active member of Austria's Socialist Party, Leichter was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938, following the country’s annexation by Nazi Germany. She was then imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp and murdered at the Bernburg euthanasia center in 1942.
The government of Austria has conferred an annual Käthe Leichter Prize in her honor since 1992. The Federal Chancellery’s website calls her “one of the leading women of the political scene during the First Republic” (1919-1938). Käthe’s husband Otto, a journalist, escaped together with Franz and his older brother Henry, first to France and later to the United States.
The two brothers both became lawyers. Franz Leichter, today 83, also served in the New York State Assembly from 1969 to 1974 and the New York State Senate from 1975 to 1998. He is currently a member of the Hudson River Park Trust Board of Directors and the New York State Banking Board.