Alfred Rosenberg

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Alfred Rosenberg : biography

1893-1-12 – 16 October 1946

Diary

Rosenberg’s handwritten diary, which had been used in evidence during the Nuremberg trials went missing after the war along with other material which had been given to the prosecutor Robert Kempner. It was recovered in Lewiston, New York on June 13th, 2013. It is written on loose-leaf pages with entries dating from 1936 through 1944, and is expected to provide new insights into the decision to exterminate the Jews, infighting among top Nazi officials and the plunder of Europe’s art. It is now property of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. While some parts of the manuscript had been previously published, the majority had been lost for decades. The New York Times said of the search for the missing manuscript that, "the tangled journey of the diary could itself be the subject of a television mini-series".

Early life

Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Reval (today’s Tallinn, in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire) to a family of Baltic Germans: his father, Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, was a wealthy merchant from Latvia, his mother, Elfriede, was from Estonia. (Tallinn archivist J. Rajandi claimed in the 1930s that Rosenberg’s family had Estonian origins.)Jüri Remmelgas. Kolm kuuske. Tallinn 2004, p. 50

The young Rosenberg studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute and engineering at Moscow’s Highest Technical School completing his PhD studies in 1917. While in Riga, he was a member of the Baltic German student fraternity "Rubonia". During the Russian Revolution of 1917 Rosenberg supported the counter-revolutionaries; following their failure he emigrated to Germany in 1918 along with Max Scheubner-Richter who served as something of a mentor to Rosenberg and to his ideology. Arriving in Munich, he contributed to Dietrich Eckart’s publication, the Völkischer Beobachter (Ethnic/Nationalist Observer). By this time, he was both an antisemite – influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (one of the key proto-Nazi books of racial theory) – and an anti-bolshevik (as a result of his family’s exile). Rosenberg became one of the earliest members of the German Workers’ Party (later the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazi Party), joining in January 1919; Adolf Hitler did not join until October 1919. Rosenberg had also been a member of the Thule Society, with Eckart. After the Völkischer Beobachter became the Nazi party newspaper (December 1920), Rosenberg became its editor in 1923.Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology p. 34. ISBN 0-396-06577-5 Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung, Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial organisation of White Russian émigrés which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy.Kellogg 227–228

In 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, who had been imprisoned for treason, appointed Rosenberg as a leader of the Nazi movement, a position he held until Hitler’s release. Hitler remarked privately in later years that his choice of Rosenberg, whom he regarded as weak and lazy, was strategic; Hitler did not want the temporary leader of the Nazis to become overly popular or hungry for power, because a person with either of those two qualities might not want to cede the party leadership after Hitler’s release. However, at the time of the appointment Hitler had no reason to believe that he would soon be released, and Rosenberg had not appeared weak, so this may have been Hitler reading back into history his dissatisfaction with Rosenberg for the job he did.Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, pp. 42–3. ISBN 0-396-06577-5

In 1929 Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He later formed the "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question", dedicated to identifying and attacking Jewish influence in German culture and to recording the history of Judaism from an antisemitic perspective. He became a Reichstag Deputy in 1930 and published his book on racial theory The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts) which deals with key issues in the national socialist ideology, such as the "Jewish question". Rosenberg intended his book as a sequel to Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s above-cited book. Despite selling more than a million copies by 1945, its influence within Nazism (beyond providing specious intellectual cover for unintellectual governance) remains doubtful. It is often said to have been a book that was officially venerated within Nazism, but one that few had actually read beyond the first chapter or even found comprehensible.