Diaries of Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg have been found in the United States. The nearly 400 pages cover the period from 1936 to 1944. The diaries can provide important new insights into the history of the Third Reich, such as the internal power struggle and decisions surrounding the Holocaust.
Alfred Rosenberg was one of Adolf Hitler's confidants and an important ideological pioneer of the NSDAP, the German Nazi Party. At the Nuremberg trials, he was found guilty of war crimes and held jointly responsible for the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Rosenberg was hanged on October 16, 1946. The extensive diaries he kept in the years before were used as evidence during the trial.
After Nuremberg, however, the diaries disappeared without a trace. It is suspected that they were taken to America by Robert Kempner, one of the prosecutors at the trials. Now, nearly 70 years later, researchers at the American Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. report that the books have been recovered. They cover the period from 1936 to the winter of 1944. Most of the 400 pages are written in Rosenberg's own handwriting. A large part on official paper of the NSDAP.
“If the diaries are authentic, they are indeed of great historical value,” says Willem Melching, historian and Germany expert at the University of Amsterdam. “They can then offer new insights into the ideology of the Third Reich, the internal power struggle and the persecution of the Jews. Unfortunately, with diaries it is often the case that they have been rewritten with knowledge afterwards.”
An official press conference on the discovery will follow later today, but some details have already been announced. For example, the diaries contain a number of previously unknown passages about summits between Rosenberg, Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring. According to researchers at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the diaries also provide insight into conflicts at the top of the Third Reich, including the large-scale robbery of art treasures by the Nazis, which Rosenberg coordinated.
‘Racial World Revolution’
Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) is regarded by historians as one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich. Rosenberg was one of the early members of the NSDAP and worked closely with him from the beginning of Hitler's political career. When Hitler ended up in prison after the failed Bierkeller putch in 1923, he appointed Rosenberg temporary leader of the Nazi movement.
In 1930 Rosenberg published Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ("The Myth of the Twentieth Century"), in which he describes how he believes that once dominant Aryan culture is being destroyed by infiltration by foreign races, especially the Jews. Higher races, such as the Aryan, should naturally rule over lower races, such as Slavs and Jews. Rosenberg wrote that in the twentieth century a world racial revolution would take place “under the swastika.”
Probably only a handful of devoted readers have struggled to the very end through Rosenberg's boring and hard-to-follow prose. And Hitler himself, according to the great historian Richard Evans, claimed that he had never read more than a small portion of it and that he deeply disliked its pseudo-religious tone. But it is equally clear that some of the ideas from the book would later become highly influential.
When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in July 1941, Rosenberg was appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. In this high official position he would become involved in the Germanization and reclassification of the conquered areas of Eastern Europe. He maintained close ties with the Nazi leadership for a long time and was involved in the plans to make Eastern Europe 'Jew-free'.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Rosenberg was one of the few Nazi leaders to say he had known nothing about the Holocaust. That is highly unlikely, however, because two of his closest collaborators (on his behalf) attended the Wannsee conference, 20 January 1942 in Berlin, where the final details about the logistics of the genocide were discussed.