Wilhelm Cornides

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Wilhelm Cornides (born July 28, 1920 in Munich ; † July 15, 1966 ) was a German publicist. He was the author of the “Cornides Report”, a well-known and frequently cited source on knowledge about the Holocaust in the German population during the war, and after 1945 co-founder of the German Society for Foreign Policy .

The Cornides Report

On August 31, 1942, as an uninvolved NCO, Cornides saw an arriving deportation train with 35 cattle wagons , crammed with Jews on the way to the Belzec extermination camp, passing through a train stop in Rawa-Ruska in the General Government . When asked, a police officer on duty at the station casually confirmed to Cornides that the inmates of the transport would be murdered. Later that day, Cornides saw several empty trains returning from Belzec. Cornides spoke one of these trains to the police escorting them: “With a grin, someone says: 'You know where we come from? Well, we don't run out of work. '”In the evening Cornides drove from Rawa-Ruska towards Lublin . After a few kilometers the train passed the extermination camp, which was covered by trees, but the fellow travelers informed Cornides about the purpose of the facility and mentioned the fact of the gassing and the smoking crematoria . With his own eyes, Cornides finally saw a storage shed “filled with bundles of clothes to the ceiling”.

In 1959 the historian Hans Rothfels published the report for the first time and commented in the introduction that it proves that “the knowledge of the events - which one might assume in itself - was quite widespread in the Generalgouvernement and that it took relatively little effort to address them Track to come. Of course, only a few will have had the will or even the wish to put down what they saw and heard in writing ”(Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, issue 3, 1959, p. 333).

Co-founder of the DGAP

In 1945 Cornides, who came from the well-known Oldenbourg publishing family on his mother's side, founded the journal Europa-Archiv , the first foreign policy journal in Germany after the Second World War (since 1995 it has been published under the title " Internationale Politik "). In 1955, with his significant participation, the German Society for Foreign Policy was founded, which is the German equivalent of the US Council on Foreign Relations . It was initially based in Frankfurt / Main , and from 1960 onwards in Bonn . Cornides was executive deputy president and director of the DGAP research institute until his death in 1966.

Publications (selection)

  • (together with Hermann Volle): About peace with Germany. Documents on the problem of the German peace order 1941-1948 with a report on the London Foreign Ministers' Conference from November 25 to December 15, 1947 . Publishing house Europa-Archiv, Oberursel 1948.
  • The world powers and Germany. History of the recent past 1945 - 1955 . Wunderlich, Tübingen 1957 (3rd edition 1965).
  • (as editor): Encounter with the atomic age . Oldenbourg, Munich 1961.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tilmann Wesolowski: Publishers and publishing policy. Social Philosophical Studies, Volume 1 (The Science Publishing House R. Oldenbourg between the Empire and National Socialism)
personal data
SURNAME Cornides, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist, author of the Cornides Report and after 1945 co-founder of the "German Society for Foreign Policy"
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH July 15, 1966