Rosenberg, Alfred

Rosenberg, Alfred (1893–1946),Estonian-born member of the Nazi Party whose anti-Semitism, and anti-Christian theories, made him one of the principal contributors to Nazi ideology.

Rosenberg obtained an architectural diploma in Moscow in March 1918, and witnessed the revolution there. In November 1918 he went to Germany where he wrote anti-Semitic articles, met Hitler, joined the Nazi Party, became the editor of its newspaper (Völkischer Beobachter), then its managing editor, and, as a Russian speaker, was the Nazis' expert on east European matters.

At first his influence over Hitler was all-pervading and he led the party when Hitler was imprisoned after the Munich putsch. But opponents soon forced him to resign and Hitler—who found Rosenberg's principal opus, Myth of the Twentieth Century, incomprehensible when it was published in 1930—later froze him out of his inner circle.

However, Rosenberg's early influence on Nazi ideology ensured his survival and a succession of party posts. In 1927 he became head of the new National Socialist Society for Culture and Learning (Combat League for German Culture from 1929); in 1933, after Hitler came to power, he formed the party's foreign policy office; and in 1934 he was made responsible, in his own words, for the party's ‘intellectual and ideological education and training’. His foreign policy office was soon eclipsed by Ribbentrop—though he did ensure Hitler's limited backing for Quisling (see also Norway, 3)—and in striving to achieve a cultural policy he again lost out to more determined rivals such as Ley. Once Germany was at war he also became the titular head of an organization which bore his name to purloin paintings, books, furniture, and objets d'art from occupied territories (see loot).

Though Hitler remained distant, in July 1941 he appointed Rosenberg Reich Minister of Eastern Occupied Territories (Ukraine and Ostland). Rosenberg abjured genocide and expulsion, preferring to co-opt the territories to fight Stalin, but he proved quite unequal to the machinations of such power-hungry rivals as Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring, and in October 1944 he intimated in a letter to Hitler, which was never answered, that he wanted to resign. He was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials and executed.

Bibliography

Cecil, R. , The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London, 1972).