Theodor Kordt

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Theodor Kordt , also Theo (born October 8, 1893 in Düsseldorf ; † January 27, 1962 in Bad Godesberg ), was a German diplomat during the Nazi era and ambassador of the Federal Republic in Greece .

Life

Kordt, son of the Düsseldorf architect Wilhelm Kordt († 1931), attended high school in Düsseldorf and began studying in 1912. Since he did military service in the First World War from 1914 to 1920, most recently as a lieutenant , he did not pass the legal trainee examination until 1921 and did his doctorate at the University of Bonn . In December 1921 he joined the Foreign Service . After training positions in Naples and Bern , he worked in Berlin between 1931 and 1934 and then in Athens. In March 1938 he was counselor with Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen in London . There he joined the NSDAP on August 1, 1939 . During the Second World War he was employed at the embassy in Bern and returned to Germany in May 1946.

In 1947 he was given a lectureship in international law at the University of Bonn. In July 1948 he witnessed the defense of Ernst von Weizsäcker in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in Nuremberg . Nothing is known about its denazification . As an authorized representative of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia , Kordt took part in the constitutional convention on Herrenchiemsee in August 1948 .

In May 1950 he was reinstated in the Foreign Affairs Office at the Federal Chancellery and then taken over as Head of Department III ("State Department") in the newly established Foreign Office. Kordt had forgotten to indicate his NSDAP membership. Kordt became German ambassador in Athens on November 23, 1953 and retired in September 1958. From December 1955 to March 1956, he led the German delegation in the German-Belgian settlement negotiations.

Resistance to National Socialism

Theodor Kordt had a secret conversation with the British Foreign Minister Lord Halifax on September 6, 1938 , in which he announced a general sputsch in the event of a German attack on Czechoslovakia . Foreign Office State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and Kordt's brother Erich Kordt , who had worked before him in the London embassy and who had gone to Berlin with the now Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in February 1938 , had him on behalf of a group of military men around Hans Oster authorized the interview. British foreign policy did not want to rely on these vague indications and tried to solve the Sudeten crisis with the appeasement policy in the Munich Agreement .

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Kordt brothers made further advances and revealed the advanced status of the negotiations on the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , without meeting British foreign policy advisor Robert Vansittart's understanding. At the Nuremberg Trial in 1948, Vansittart still doubted the seriousness of the conspiracy of the expelled NSDAP and SS members, who, as has been proven, had not offered any active resistance in the following six years.

Of the acts of resistance of the Berlin AA employee Fritz Kolbe , who provided the American secret service officer Allen Welsh Dulles in Bern with information from the ambassador's desk for special use Karl Ritter , the liaison officer from the AA to the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), Kordt had in his Swiss time noticed nothing. Kolbe's reinstatement in the German Foreign Service after 1949 was actively prevented by Theodor Kordt's negative comments.

Honors

literature

  • Kordt, Theodor . In: Wilhelm Kosch : Biographisches Staats Handbuch . Lexicon of politics, press and journalism . Continued by Eugen Kuri. Second volume. A. Francke Verlag, Bern and Munich 1963, p. 693.
  • Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 2: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: G – K. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2005, ISBN 3-506-71841-X .
  • Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
  • Erich Kordt, Not from the files ...: Wilhelmstrasse in peace and war. Experiences, encounters and impressions 1928 - 1945 , Stuttgart: Union 1950.

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Terry M. Parssinen, The forgotten conspiracy: Hans Oster and the military resistance against Hitler , Munich: Siedler 2008 (first English 2001) ISBN 978-3-88680-910-3 .
  2. ^ Theo Kordt, We wanted to save peace , in: Stuttgarter Rundschau, 3 (1948), no. 8, pp. 11-13 DNB
  3. ↑ Conze u. a., The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Munich 2010, p. 422ff.
  4. ↑ Conze u. a., The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Munich 2010, p. 553ff.
personal data
SURNAME Kordt, Theodor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kordt, Theo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1962
Place of death bad Godesberg