NEVER ENOUGH

In novelistic form, Garibaldi reconstructs the persecution of her family member, a German Holocaust survivor, by former Nazis following World War II.

Like so many Jewish people in Germany, Carl Katz struggled under the tyranny of Adolf Hitler’s rule. He was arrested by SS officers in 1938 and spent time in concentration camps, first at Sachsenhausen and then at Theresienstadt with his family. He was desperate to keep his loved ones together and alive—a task made possible when he was appointed as a kind of camp manager, a precarious position that gave him a very small measure of influence over his family’s fate. Katz survived the camps, as did his wife and daughter, but his mother-in-law did not. However, after the war, former Nazis who remained in power continued to pursue him, and he was accused of collaboration and crimes against humanity for decades, based on the testimony of discredited witnesses, according to Garibaldi, Katz’s great-granddaughter. In these pages, she rigorously reconstructs the case against him, built on charges conjured from what she calls “fantasies of retribution” of former Nazis. She composes three narrative lines: the plight of the Katz family during the war, Katz’s dedication to rebuilding Germany in its aftermath, and the criminal charges that followed him until his death. Over the course of this work, the author makes her case for his great-grandfather’s innocence with journalistic scrupulousness, basing it on judicial records and personal documents, and she presents a literary, engaging account of events in Katz’s life. She also carefully explores the continued presence and surprising power of ex-Nazis following the war, which, she says, ensured that Carl’s trial would be unfair. Overall, Garibaldi’s work is a useful contribution to the historical record, as it provides an astute look at the intractable challenges to Germany’s denazification.

A compelling account informed by German postwar history.