Paul Spiegel, who fled the Nazis as a child during World War II and returned to Germany to become the influential and at times contentious head of its main Jewish organization, died Saturday night at a hospital in Dusseldorf. He was 68 and had cancer.

In 2003, Spiegel, chairman of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, and then-Chancellor Schroeder sealed a historic agreement that put the Jewish community on a legal par with Germany’s main Christian churches, including providing the council with government funding.

Spiegel was born in the northwestern town of Warendorf in 1937. To escape persecution under the Nazis, his family fled to Belgium, where Spiegel was hidden by Catholic farmers. His father, a cattle dealer, was captured but managed to survive Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Dachau. Other family members were less lucky. After the war, Spiegel and his parents were reunited in Warendorf.

He worked as a journalist with the weekly Jewish newspaper, the Allgemeine Juedische Wochenzeitung. He later worked in public relations and founded a talent agency.

After years of work with the Jewish community in Dusseldorf, Spiegel was named president of the council in 2000.

He was outspoken during his presidency, in 2001 criticizing attorneys who represented former Jewish slave laborers for taking “immoral” fees for their work in winning reparations.

At the 2005 dedication of the national Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Spiegel said the abstract monument failed to address a key question: “Why were members of a civilized people in the heart of Europe capable of planning and carrying out mass murder?” He said the memorial and a wrenching debate that delayed its erection showed that it was less a place for Jews to recall the Holocaust than for Germans.

Spiegel was on hand in Cologne in 2005, when German-born Pope Benedict XVI chose to visit a synagogue in the city, calling it “an event that is not just significant to Germany and the Catholic community, but also for the Jewish community in Germany and around the world.”