Erich Kordt

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Erich Kordt (born December 10, 1903 in Düsseldorf ; † November 11, 1969 there ) was German envoy in the foreign service.

Life

After studying law and obtaining his doctorate , Kordt, son of the Düsseldorf architect Wilhelm Kordt († 1931), joined the Foreign Office in May 1928 .

Various assignments abroad followed, including in Geneva and Bern , before he became Legation Council II class under Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop in London in October 1936 . On November 1, 1937, Kordt joined the NSDAP (membership number 4,679,244) and the SS (membership number 293,223). In 1940 he was promoted to Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

In the course of the promotion wave of February 4, 1938, Ribbentrop became Reich Foreign Minister and Kordt became head of his ministerial office.

Via his brother Theodor Kordt , who was chargé d'affaires at the German Embassy in London , he tried in vain on September 6th and 7th, 1938, to induce the British government to issue a radio declaration, which in the German Reich was the triggering moment for one of Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster planned coup against Hitler . The tightening of security regulations following the attack by Georg Elser on November 8, 1939, prevented a planned attack by Kordt on Hitler on behalf of the conspiratorial group at the army headquarters in Zossen.

In mid-June 1939, Kordt traveled to London to warn the first diplomatic advisor to the British government, Robert Gilbert Vansittart , of the secret German-Soviet negotiations that would eventually lead to the German-Soviet nonaggression pact .

It is possible that Kordt is hiding behind a speaker from the Foreign Office who is not known by name, who formulated a note in the margin on a letter from the RSHA to the AA, in which he said the “well-known and bad major campaign by Gauleiter Wagner (s) (6,000–7,000) from Baden and der Pfalz ”mentioned. This remark was signed with the abbreviation "K.", which the historian Peter Steinbach interprets as a reference to one of the Kordt brothers who had met the opponents of the regime in 1938.

In April 1941 Kordt became envoy 1st class in Tokyo under Ambassador Eugen Ott and from October 1943 in Nanjing under Ambassador Ernst Woermann .

In the Wilhelmstrasse Trial in Nuremberg in June 1948, Kordt presented his anti-regime activities as initiatives of the accused State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker . He retained this presentation in the 1950 memoir, Not from the files .

Kordt completed his habilitation in 1948 and has been a private lecturer in international law, constitutional law and diplomatic history at the University of Cologne since 1951 . From 1951 he was a ministerial advisor to the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Allegedly due to the personal intervention of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer , he was denied a renewed use in the Foreign Service of the Federal Republic of Germany .

Works

  • Not from the files ...: Wilhelmstrasse in peace and war. Experiences, encounters and impressions 1928 - 1945 , Stuttgart: Union 1950.
  • Delusion and Reality (with Karl Heinz Abshagen ), Stuttgart: Union 1947.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Steinbach: The suffering - too heavy and too much. On the significance of the mass deportation of Southwest German Jews. In: Tribüne - magazine for the understanding of Judaism . 49th volume 195. 3rd quarter 2010, p. 3. on the Internet (PDF; 81 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Kordt, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1969
Place of death Dusseldorf