Josef Korbel

Josef Korbel (; September 20, 1909 – July 18, 1977) was a Czech-born American diplomat and political scientist. He married Anna Spiegelová on April 20, 1935. They had met in secondary school around 1928. Anna was born in 1910 to Alfred Spiegel and Růžena Spiegelová, assimilated Jews. Her parents gave her the common Czech nickname of Andula. Korbel called her Mandula, a portmanteau of "Má Andula" (Czech for "My Andula"), while Anna called him Jozka.

At the time of their daughter Madeleine's birth, Josef was serving as press-attaché at the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgrade. During their time in England the Korbels converted to Catholicism and dropped the umlaut from the family name, resulting in the second syllable of "Korbel" being stressed.

Korbel returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, receiving a luxurious Prague apartment expropriated from Karl Nebrich, an ethnic-Bohemian German industrialist expelled under the Beneš decrees.

Korbel died in 1977. Yashina Tarr sees that Korbel has succeeded in providing an objective assessment of the United Nations' work and recommends it to readers. Birdwood labels the content on the United Nations Commission involvement "authoritative" due to Korbel's own membership in the Commission. He also observes that the huge number of footnotes and quotations testify to Korbel's vast research put into this "valuable contribution" on the Kashmir dispute. Werner Levi observes that Korbel tends to abstain from giving his own judgements and evaluations. Levi states that Korbel's book is a "comprehensive and balanced statement" of a contested topic.

Artwork ownership controversy Philipp Harmer, an Austrian citizen, filed a lawsuit claiming that Josef Korbel's family is in inappropriate possession of artwork belonging to his great-grandfather, the German entrepreneur Karl Nebrich. Like most other ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia, Nebrich and his family were expelled from the country under the postwar "Beneš decrees", and left behind artwork and furniture in an apartment subsequently given to Korbel's family, before they also were forced to flee the country.