Vasily Ivanovich (Joseph-Friedrich-Wilhelm) Cornel ( German: Josef Friedrich Wilhelm Cornel , 1866, St. Petersburg - 1936, Berlin ) is a Moscow businessman and public figure of German origin.
Born in 1866 in St. Petersburg in a family of immigrants from Prussia, he himself had Prussian citizenship. He studied at the Russian gymnasium. He moved to Moscow, where he founded an electromechanical plant (corner of Nikolo-Yamskaya and Bernikova per . - the building at Bernikov per. 1 was not preserved), which supplied parts and devices, including military ones, to telegraphs and railways. By 1915, the plant had about 200 (according to V. Denninghouse, 10 according to N. Ivanova) workers and employees. In 1891, he filed a petition for transfer to Russian citizenship, but he was refused on formal grounds.
He was actively involved in charity work, in 1912 he opened a shelter for homeless children in Sokolniki, and at the beginning of the war he took the initiative to found another shelter. He kept at his own expense an infirmary for prisoners of war and a hospital for Russian servicemen.
Cornel’s activities in helping prisoners of war (in particular, raising funds for their benefit among the German-speaking community) made him a victim of a campaign to identify “German spies” in Moscow at the very height of World War I. Despite the intercession of the Moscow mayor M.V. Chelnokov , the American Consul General and several other prominent figures in Moscow, Prince F.F. Yusupov (Sumarokov-Elston), with the support of General E. Klimovich, decided to expel him outside Moscow, as a result where Cornel lost his factory and was forced to move with his wife through neutral countries to Germany.
In 1916 he founded the “Society for Assisting Russian Citizens in Berlin”.
Wife Margarita Aleksandrovna (nee Margit Spira, b. 1884) was from a Jewish family who moved to Russia from Hungary. She was deported to the Lodz Ghetto in 1941 and died in Chelmno in May 1942.
Literature
- Denninghouse V. Germans in the public life of Moscow: symbiosis and conflict (1491-1941). M., 2004. 504 p.
- Denninghouse V. Spymania, or “Witch Hunt”, in Moscow and Moscow Province during the First World War // “Questions of German History”, Dnepropetrovsk, 2004, p. 103-118.
- Ivanova, Natalia Anatolyevna. “The Industrial Center of Russia, 1907-1914: Statistical and Economic Research”, Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995. P. 163.
- Moscow during the First World War of 1914-1917. Documents and materials of the State Budgetary Institution “TsGA of Moscow”. Moscow, 2014, p.135-136