Paul Spiegel

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Paul Spiegel

Paul Spiegel (December 31, 1937 in Warendorf, Germany - April 30, 2006 in Düsseldorf, Germany) was leader of the Zentralrat der Juden (Central Council of Jews) in Germany and the main spokesman of the German Jews. He was widely praised for his leadership of the German Jewish community, which had grown from the remnants left by the Nazis into the third largest Jewish community in western Europe.

Paul Spiegel was born into a Westphalian family of cattle dealers, originating from the small town Versmold. After the Nazi rise to power, the family fled at first to Brussels. Spiegel survived the Holocaust in Flanders where he was hidden by a family of farmers. Prior to that, his sister Rosa had been arrested during a police raid in Brussels; she was later killed in Bergen-Belsen. His father was arrested and held in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Dachau, but survived to reunite with Spiegel and his mother in Warendorf after the war. Spiegel described these events in his book At home again? (Wieder zu Hause?).

In 1958, he began practical training as a journalist with the Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, now the Judische Allgemeine, in Düsseldorf. He was also active as an editor at this newspaper until 1965, when he became editor of the Jewish Press Service and assistant to the secretary-general of the Zentralrat der Juden. During the 1960s he worked for various other newspapers as well.

In 1993 he became a member of the executive committee of the Zentralrat der Juden, first as vice president and later (as of January 9, 2000, following the death of Ignatz Bubis) as president. On February 11, 2004 Paul Spiegel received an honorary doctorate from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and was made an honorary citizen of Warendorf, the city of his birth. Since 1986 he ran an agency for artists and media in Düsseldorf.

On the 58th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2003, Spiegel and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder signed an agreement that granted Germany's Jewish community the same legal status as the country's Christian religions, thereby tripling annual government funding of the Zentralrat der Juden to $3.8 million.

Spiegel was an outspoken critic of lawyers who took what he felt were overly large fees to represent Jews who had been slave laborers during World War II, saying "Earning money should not come before moralistic intentions." He also criticized the national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, stating at its dedication in 2005 that it failed to address the basic question, "Why were members of a civilized people in the heart of Europe capable of planning and carrying out mass murder?"

Paul Spiegel died in the morning hours of April 30, 2006, in Düsseldorf, following a heart attack which he had suffered on February 3, along with a pulmonary inflammation, as a result of which his doctors had put him into an artificial coma in the hospital. He is survived by his wife, Gisèle Spatz, whom he married in 1964, and their two daughters.