Estate Richard Korherr Nachlass Richard Korherr

Copyright Holder: Generaldirektion der Staatliche Archive Bayerns Dr. Richard Korherr (1903-1989) was born October 30, 1903. Editions of his dissertation on declining birth rates in Germany were published with forwards by Oswald Spengler, Heinrich Himmler, and Benito Mussolini. During the Weimar Republic, he worked as a professional statistician briefly for the Reich Statistical Office before becoming managing director of the "Reich and Heimat" working committee, which had been set up by the Bavarian Prime Minister Heinrich Held as a workplace for federalism.Under the Nazi regime, Korherr worked for the Bavarian Statistical Office, but in 1935 he moved to the city of Würzburg, where he was Director of the Statistical Office until 1940 and also had a teaching assignment at the University of Würzburg. In December 9, 1940, Korherr was appointed to head the statistical department in the SS main office. In 1943 Heinrich Himmler commissioned Korherr to write a comprehensive report entitled “The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question”, which today mostly trades under the name “Korherr Report”. This report is considered one of the most important documents on Nazi genocide. Korherr completed his report in January 1943 and delivered it to SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Dr. Rudolf Brandt in March. Himmler asked Korherr to replace the term “Sonderbehandlung” (special handling) with a different word, and Korherr chose “Durchgeschleust” to imply transit camps. Brandt delivered a summary of this report to Adolf Hitler. After World War II, Korherr claimed not to know about the exterminations. From 1945 to 1946 Korherr was interned in Darmstadt. In the proceedings before the Regensburg-Land tribunal, Korherr was included in the group of followers. From 1950 Korherr was taken over by the Federal Ministry of Finance and reinstated in 1952 as Ministerialrat. He was retired in 1958 after Gerald Reitlinger’s book on the Final Solution brought Korherr’s report into the public eye. He then lectured for a few years at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He died November 24 1989. The Nachlass Richard Korherr comprises the personal papers of Richard Korherr (1903-1989), Chief Inspector for Statistics at the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police and at the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German ‘Volkstum’. The collection contains two copies of the Korherr report, created as part of the post-war confrontation with it. In addition to personal documents, the estate consists predominantly of correspondence with individuals and institutions such as H. G. Adler, the Leo Baeck Institute in London, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg and his wife, Hermann Höcherl, the Federal Ministers of the Interior and of Agriculture, Oswald Spengler and his niece Hildegard Kornhardt, Fritz Schäffer, and Prof. Father Erhard Schlund OFM. Most of the correspondence dates from the post-war period, but the estate also includes correspondence from before May 1945. Richard Korherr’s main concern, especially after 1956, was to rehabilitate himself, as he felt he had been wrongly condemned by the state and society.