ERICH KORDT
Kordt spoke perfect
English after gaining a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He joined the
German Foreign Office in 1928, and was posted to Geneva and Bern in
Switzerland. He then served as Legationsrat(counsellor) in the London Embassy under
Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, for whom he developed both a personal
dislike and a professional disdain. Despite this, he became a member of the
Nazi Party in November 1937, and in February 1938, when Ribbentrop became
Foreign Minister, he was appointed head of the Foreign Office's
"Ministerial Bureau".
Both Erich Kordt and
his brother, Theodor, played a part in the Oster Conspiracy of 1938, which was
a proposed plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler if Germany went to war with
Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland.
Theodor Kordt, who
acted as Chargé d'Affaires at the London embassy, was considered a vital
contact with the British on whom the success of the plot depended; the
conspirators needed strong British opposition to Hitler's seizure of the
Sudetenland. Erich used his brother as an envoy to urge the British government
to stand up to Hitler over the Czechoslovakia crisis, in the hope that Army
officers would stage a coup against Hitler.
However, in the event,
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, apprehensive of the possibility of
war, negotiated interminably with Hitler and eventually conceded to him. This
destroyed any chance of the plot succeeding since Hitler was then seen in
Germany as the "greatest statesman of all times at the moment of his
greatest triumph".
In June 1939, Kordt
went to London to warn Robert Vansittart, the diplomatic advisor to the British
government, of the secret negotiations between Germany and the Soviet Union
which were to lead to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He was dismayed that all approaches
made by the German resistance movement within the German Foreign Office were
ignored by the British.
In April 1941, Kordt
was posted to Tokyo as German embassy First Secretary and later to Nanking as
German Consul, where he worked as an agent for the Soviet spy Richard Sorge
until 1944. He narrowly avoided being killed by a Japanese hitman when Japanese
Intelligence discovered his espionage activities.
In June 1948, at the
Nuremberg Trials, Kordt testified on behalf of Ernst von Weizsäcker, State
Secretary of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany, and later German ambassador
to the Vatican. Weizsäcker was on trial for his role in Hitler's aggressive
foreign policy. Partly as a result of Kordt's testimony, Weizsäcker was
acquitted. This aroused the hostility of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer,
who blocked Kordt's return to a career at the Foreign Office. From 1951, Kordt
was a professor of international law at the University of Cologne.
