Historical Figures

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946)

Alfred Rosenberg (photo:Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1985-0723-500, Bauer, Friedrich Franz, license CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) - Nazi criminal, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, creator of racist theories. He was born in 1893 in Riga. His mother died shortly after, and his father when Alfred was 11 years old. The boy's upbringing was taken care of by his aunts. In 1915 he married Hilda Lessema. He studied architecture in Riga, and later in Russia he completed his engineering studies, where he designed a crematorium as part of his thesis.

In 1918 he left for Germany. A year later he became one of the founders of the German Workers' Party, later transformed into the NSDAP. He became the group's main ideologist and co-founded the entire Nazi ideology (it was he who developed the racist ladder of races with supernaturals and subhumans). After the outbreak of the war, he was mainly involved in the looting of works of art, furniture and other goods.

After the Third Reich's aggression against the USSR in 1941, Hitler appointed him Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. While holding this position, he supervised, among other things, the deportation of forced laborers. After the war, he was captured and sentenced to death in the Nuremberg trial for industrial looting and crimes against the people of the USSR.