Korff
family name
The Korff family or Korff-Schmising family is an ancient German noble family, known since the first half of the 13th century that originated in the County of Mark, Westphalia.
History
The family first appears in a document from 1241 with knight Henricus von Kersekorff. Since 1354, part of the family has been called Korff-Schmising (also Schmysing or Schmysingk). Members of the family distinguished themselves mostly as politicians and diplomats. They held the title of Count in the Kingdom of Prussia granted to them on 17 January 1816 by Frederick William III of Prussia and Count in the Russian Empire, granted to them on 1 January 1872 by Alexander II of Russia. Apart from being incorporated into the Russian nobility, the family was also part of the Baltic German nobility and Polish nobility. Until 1615, the original ancestral seat of the Korff family was Harkotten Castle in the Bishopric of Münster, later acquired by Ketteler family.
Surname
Korff is also a surname.
Notable people
Arnold Korff (1870–1944), Hollywood actor and director
André Korff (born 1973), German bicycle racer
Baruch Korff, (1914–1995), Jewish community activist
Hans-Peter Korff (1942–2025), German actor
Johann Albrecht von Korff (1697–1766), diplomat, president of the St.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Korff” is family name. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Korff, family and name, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16273652. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1241, 1354, 1816 and 1872.
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This entry incorporates text from “Korff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.