The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust

Abstract

Under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Jürgen Matthäus and Frank Bajohr have produced the most complete version yet of the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates. After lengthy efforts to recover the diary from the estate of Robert Kempner, a German-Jewish emigré who participated in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, it has appeared in German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish, with other editions yet to come. The editors suggest that additional diary entries may yet be discovered. Still, in their view what we have now challenges previous scholarly assessments that—despite Rosenberg's execution for war crimes—emphasized his marginality. The diary and supporting documents that the editors provide (excerpts from Rosenberg's publications and correspondence) suggest that Rosenberg's place in the Third Reich was more important than previously acknowledged. Rosenberg's contributions began during the Nazi movement's earliest days in Munich. An embittered Baltic German refugee and a prolific writer and journalist, Rosenberg attributed the Bolshevik and the German revolutions to the Jews, the same obsession that underpinned Hitler's world view. Rosenberg's Traces of the Jew through the Ages (1920) and The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) posited a life-and-death struggle between the “Aryan” and Jewish “races” in which Germany's future and Europe's demanded the global enemy's annihilation. In the late twenties, Rosenberg become the Nazi Party's principal international affairs authority, allowing him to challenge Jewish “influence” directly, especially that which the Nazis identified with the Soviet Union. He became the first to advocate a German-British rapprochement to check “Jewish Bolshevism,” a principle that Hitler adopted in his unpublished “Second Book” and pursued from the Nazi takeover up to the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.