Introduction
Max Corden was born in August 1927 in what was then the German city of Breslau, capital of Silesia. It is now a Polish city called Wroclaw after it was ceded to Poland after the Second World War.
His birth name was Werner Max Cohn. His parents, Rudolf and Katia Cohn, were Jewish but were not practising, unlike Rudolf's older brother Willy. The Jewish community in Breslau at the time of Corden's birth was the third largest in Germany after Berlin and Frankfurt.Rudolf's father Louis and his brother Moritz had built a successful business in Breslau. They owned a significant building close to the central square of Breslau, part of which was occupied by a clothing store called Trautner. The building was not damaged during the war and still exists today. Rudolf took over the management of Trautner in 1932, but after the Nazis came to power, he was obliged to relinquish this position in 1937 and sell the business.
The advent of the Nazis to power in Breslau had a huge effect on Corden's family, as it did on all Jewish families in that terrible epoch. Corden's older brother, Gerhart, was a teenager and at risk of anti-semitic violence. His
I am very grateful to John Creedy, Vijay Joshi, Dermot McAleese and Peter Oppenheimer for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors.
J. Martin (*)
Ville D’Avary, France
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R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_22
parents decided to send Gerhart abroad to England in 1937 where their mother had a sister, Aunt Elli, who played a major role in getting the rest of the family out of Germany and to safety.
1.1