Thomas Urban

[2] Urban spent his school days in the industrial district of Bergheim, near Cologne, in the brown coal mining area on the left bank of the Rhine.

[6] In 1983 Urban left the civil service to attend the School of Journalism in Hamburg (Henri-Nannen-Schule), then worked for the news agencies Associated Press and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

From 1992 to 1997, he was head of the Moscow office; he analysed the major changes under Boris Yeltsin and also wrote reports on the theatres of war in Abkhazia and Chechnya.

[15] In a book series edited by former chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former president Richard von Weizsäcker on the relations of the Germans with their neighbours, he took over the volume on Poland.

His book on the murder of thousands of Polish officers by Stalin's secret police NKVD in the forest of Katyn was translated into English in an extended version.

He published a book on the instrumentalisation of football players of the German and Polish national teams by their governments' propaganda.

[26] During the Euro 2012 a trilingual exhibition (Polish, English, German) co-designed by Urban on the basis of the book was shown in the open air in the centre of Warsaw.

[28] On the occasion of Euro 2012, whose final was held in Kiev, he analysed Russian and Ukrainian publications on the alleged Death Match of 1942.

[32] In a book published in 2022, he criticised Germany's Ostpolitik, which had made the politicians of the Federal Republic "blind to the black sides" of first the Soviet Union, then Vladimir Putin's Russia.