Rosenberg, Alfred (1893–1946)

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ROSENBERG, ALFRED (1893–1946)

German Nazi leader and writer.

In the eyes of posterity Alfred Rosenberg was the main theorist of National Socialism. His life is indeed an object lesson in the nature of Nazism as a historical phenomenon, as a belief system, and as a set of state policies.

Rosenberg was born in Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, into a well-to-do Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) family. He thus belonged to one of those German minorities dispersed throughout the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, whose destiny was a burning issue in the early part of the twentieth century. As a citizen of the Russian Empire, Rosenberg was not among the German populations deported at the beginning of World War I, and he completed his engineering and architectural studies in Moscow before fleeing the Russian Revolution of 1917. He witnessed the outbursts of virulent Germanophobia in Russian cities, notably in Petrograd and Moscow. In his flight he passed through France, as did many refugees from World War I and the Russian Revolution, and then made his way to Munich.

Nothing is known of Rosenberg's political radicalization or of his relationship to the German nation during the war, but it is certain that in 1918 he was embarked upon a militant career that would take him from the Thule Gesellschaft, a völkische (people's movement) and anti-Semitic group of activists, via the teachings of Dietrich Eckardt, a Munich journalist who was Hitler's mentor, to the Nazi Party (NSDAP) itself, which he had joined by 1920. There he was quickly assigned tasks relating to propaganda and theory, writing fervid anti-Semitic pamphlets and concocting a theory of Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. As a result of these efforts, Rosenberg inherited the mantle of Eckardt when the latter died while editor in chief of the NSDAP newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (People's observer). Rosenberg later served as a stand-in for Hitler when the Nazi leader was imprisoned after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 9 November 1923, and formed a replacement organization for the banned NSDAP. He was also the founder of a Militant League for German Culture, an organization whose name underlined the continuity between Nazi themes and earlier rhetorics of justification for World War I. What the name did not signal, however, was the deep-seated racism that Rosenberg had internalized and that is discernible in all his writings, including his major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), often considered the most important contribution to Nazi ideology after Mein Kampf. Though deemed obscure even by the Nazis themselves, Rosenberg's theoretical contribution hewed fast to the party's picture of history, focusing on the definition of Aryan and the circumstances of the decline of Aryan populations in India.

After becoming a parliamentary deputy representing the Rhineland in 1930, Rosenberg concentrated on theoretical issues and on the regulation of scientific research. From 1934 on he was responsible for the party's censorship of science, and in 1939 he founded an Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, under whose aegis, during World War II, he organized a campaign of meticulous cultural pillage, looting many eastern European libraries in order to build up the collections of this improbable research center. Rosenberg was the chief ideologist of the Third Reich, and he had much to do with unofficial policies abroad; while head of the NSDAP's foreign-policy department, for example, he worked closely with the clandestine networks of Nazified Volksdeutsche that constituted a kind of fifth column in central and eastern Europe.

Thus, while Rosenberg's main activity had to do with party dogma and its dissemination, his ethnic German roots and his familiarity with the Russian and Baltic worlds equipped him to affect internal developments in an eastern Europe destined to become the colonizable Hinterland of the developing Third Reich. It was the combination of these two supposed areas of competence that qualified Rosenberg for the post of minister of occupied eastern territories, which he took up in 1941. In this capacity he played a leading part in the Nazis' occupation policies. His activity was subject, however, to the proliferating tendencies so characteristic of Nazi institutions. He set up a civil administration to carry out the NSDAP's rapacious policies in Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic states, yet he never managed to gain control over either the Polish territories governed by Hans Frank or the lands of southeastern Europe. Nor did he ever muster the means to challenge the overwhelming influence of the SS in those regions. After a vain attempt in the winter of 1941 to be put in charge of policy on the Jewish question, which was by now clearly genocidal in character, Rosenberg was gradually marginalized. But even as a Nazi philosopher whose books went unread and a minister with limited powers, he contributed decisively to a radicalization of occupation policies that cost millions of lives in the western territories of the Soviet empire.

It was on the basis of this dual role—as official ideologue of the Reich and predatory and genocidal administrator of its colonies—that Alfred Rosenberg was tried at Nuremberg, condemned to death, and executed on 16 October 1946.

See alsoFascism; Germany; Nazism; Occupation, Military.