Rosenberg, Alfred°
ROSENBERG, ALFRED°
ROSENBERG, ALFRED ° (1893–1946), chief Nazi ideologist and head of the Nazi party's foreign policy department. Rosenberg was born in Reval (Tallin), Estonia. There is some doubt about the family's German origin though their name is German. Rosenberg studied architecture at Riga and Moscow and witnessed the Russian Revolution, which he believed to have been "engineered by Jewry." He fled to Germany and settled in Munich at the end of 1918, immediately became active in nationalist, antisemitic circles and published Die Spur der Juden im Wandel der Zeiten ("The Track of the Jews Through the Ages," 1920). When the German Workers Party (dap), the precursor of the nsdap (Nazi Party), was founded, he joined it even before *Hitler. Later, as a member of Hitler's inner circle, he became editor (1921) and later chief editor (1923) of the party's Voelkischer Beobachter. He impressed Hitler with his linkage of the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and the Masons as supposedly engaging in a conspiracy to destroy the foundations of German civilization. Rosenberg published antisemitic pamphlets and introduced the Protocols of the *Elders of Zion in Nazi propaganda. He participated in the 1923 beer hall putsch. In 1930 he published his main work, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, which appeared in 24 editions by 1934, constituting a hodgepodge of ideas from Nietzsche and various racist theories. The book propounds the doctrine of an "Aryan race" as the creator of all values and culture. The protagonists of this "Aryan race" are the Germanic peoples, while the "Jewish race" had corrupted culture in different forms, one of them being Paulinic Christianity. Bolshevism, he claimed, was a new form of the Jewish quest for world rule, and, to rid themselves of Jewish corruption, the German people were obliged to replace Christianity by a new faith, based on "blood and race." With Hitler's advent to power, Rosenberg achieved renown, became head of all the party indoctrination organizations, and was later appointed by Hitler chief of the Nazi Party's foreign policy office (apa), where he ineffectually dabbled in diplomatic affairs. In fact, his office served only for disseminating antisemitic propaganda. In 1940 Hitler appointed Rosenberg head of the Hohe Schule, the future ideological University of Nazism. On its behalf Rosenberg's emissaries ransacked Jewish libraries all over Europe and concentrated their contents in Frankfurt. He headed a special staff which plundered objects of art and furniture belonging to Jews in occupied Western Europe and French art works from France, which were brought to Germany. At the outbreak of the war against Russia Rosenberg was appointed minister of occupied countries in the East and head of their civil administration (November 1941). He did not object to the annihilation of Jews, but came into conflict with the ss and their collaborators on the policy of murder, starvation, and repression of the non-Russian minorities in the occupied areas of the U.S.S.R., as it appears from correspondence in the so-called "Braune Mappe" (on the status of the local population in the Soviet territories occupied by the Germans, including correspondence with *Eichmann). He preferred more lenient methods in order to set the minority peoples against the Russians. Finally he accepted the harsher methods advocated by leading personalities of the Reich. Rosenberg, unrepentant and immovable at his trial, was hanged by sentence of the International Military Tribunal. The Memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg (ed. by S. Lang and E. Schenck) appeared in 1949, and Rosenberg's Letzte Aufzeichnungen was published in 1955.
bibliography:
E. Davidson, Trial of the Germans (1966), 125–43; imt, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 24 (1949), index; G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (1947), index; L. Poliakov and J. Wulf (eds.), Das dritte Reich und die Juden (1955), index; idem, Das dritte Reich und seine Denker (1959), index; J. Billig, Alfred Rosenberg dans l'action idéologique, politique et administrative du Reich hitlérien (1963). add. bibliography: E. Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (1972); F. Noca , Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (1986); J. Feist, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of Nazi Leadership (1970).
[Yehuda Reshef /
Michael Berenbaum (2nd ed.)]