Wilhelm Cornides

Who was Wilhelm Cornides?

Wilhelm Cornides was a Wehrmacht sergeant in World War II known as the author of the Cornides Report, a report concerning his first hand experience of the extermination of Jews at the Belzec concentration camp. He was the founder of Europa-Archiv, the first post-war publication in Occupied Germany in Dec. 1946. In 1955 he was instrumental along with Theodor Steltzer, Minister-President of Schleswig Holstein and former member of the Kreisau Circle with founding the German Council on Foreign Relations, known by the acronym DGAP, for its German spelling. Cornides was a member of the Oldenbourg family, owners of R. Oldenbourg Verlag. A German publishing house started in 1858 by Rudolf Oldenbourg.

On August 30, 1942 Cornides, was in the Rzeszów rail station, on his way to Chełm by train. In his journal he wrote that a railway policeman had told him that ‘a marble plaque with golden letters will be erected on 1 September, because then the city will be "Judenfrei". The policeman also told him that trains filled with Jews "pass almost daily through the shunting yards, are dispatched immediately on their way, and return swept clean, most often the same evening." Some 6,000 Jews from Jarosław, were recently killed in one day."