Cornelius Rost
| Cornelius Rost | |
|---|---|
Rost at a London press conference in 1958
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|
| Born |
27 March 1919 Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria |
| Died | 18 October 1983 (aged 64) Munich, Bavaria, West Germany |
| Occupation | Printer |
Cornelius Rost (27 March 1919, Kufstein, Austria - 18 October 1983, Munich, Germany) was a German World War II soldier who allegedly escaped from a Soviet Gulag camp in Siberia. The experiences he described were the basis for a book, a television series, and a film.
Rost was born on 27 March 1919 in Kufstein, Tyrol, Austria. He was living in Munich when the Second World War broke out, and during the war, he was captured by the Soviet Army. By his own admission, made in 1942, he held the rank of private, although Clemens Forell, his alias in his novel, was depicted as a Wehrmacht officer.
According to the Munich registration office, Rost returned from war imprisonment in Russia on 28 October 1947. In 1953, he started working in the in-house printing division of the Franz Ehrenwirth publishing house in Munich. He ruined numerous book covers because he had been made color blind in Soviet lead mines, where he was forced to work during his imprisonment. Ehrenwirth sought an explanation for this and thus learned about Rost's war experiences. Sensing a good story, Ehrenwirth asked Rost to write down his recollections. Rost's script was of very poor quality, but Ehrenwirth was keen on the story and hired professional writer Josef Martin Bauer to get the material into shape.
Fearing a possible backlash by the post-war Allied authorities, Rost agreed to an oral interview only after being granted the use of the alias Clemens Forell. Bauer then processed the eight hours of taped material into his famous 1955 novel So weit die Füße tragen (As far as my feet will carry me).
In the 1960s, Rost used some of his recollections in his own paperback, Unternehmen Konterbande (Mission Contraband), but it was never printed or published. Bauer’s novel, however, was translated into at least 15 languages and is still being re-published.
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