Rosenberg, Alfred

(1893–1946)

   Born in Estonia, Rosenberg was an early mentor of Adolf Hitler and became the foremost racial philosopher of the Third Reich as well as the head of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Affairs Department. The son of an Estonian mother and a Lithuanian father, both with Baltic German roots, Rosenberg studied architecture at the University of Moscow but fled to the West following the Russian Revolution in 1917. In Munich he was involved in White Russian emigre circles as well as being a member of the anti-Semitic Thule Society. Rosenberg was obsessed with conspiracy theories that accused Jews, Freemasons, and the Bolsheviks as the cause of the world’s disorder. According to Rosenberg, Freemasons were responsible for World War I, while “international Jews” were responsible for the Russian Revolution. In line with his belief in conspiracy theory, Rosenberg was a primary disseminator of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Germany. He joined the Nazi Party in 1919, and Hitler appointed him editor of the Volkischer Beobachter in 1923.

   Rosenberg impressed Hitler with his “erudite” learning, and Hitler came to depend on him during the formative years of the Nazi Party in the 1920s. Like Hitler, Rosenberg was driven by a fanatical nationalism, a virulent anticommunism, and anti-Semitism. His works include The Track of the Jew through the Ages (1919), Immorality in the Talmud (1919), and The Crime of Free Masonry (1921). Soon after being elected to the Reichstag in 1930, Rosenberg published The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which, together with Mein Kampf, became the bible of the Nazi movement, although Rosenberg’s book was ridiculed in some Nazi circles. The book was influenced by the racial theories of Comte de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Rosenberg served as Hitler’s deputy for monitoring the spiritual and ideological education of Nazi Party members. During the war, Hitler appointed him Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories. But Rosenberg’s role in the inner circle of Hitler’s advisers was eclipsed by his more powerful rivals, such as Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann. Toward the end of the war, he became a pathetic figure who was not taken seriously by the party hierarchy, including Hitler. At Nuremberg he was found guilty of war crimes and hanged.

   See also Rosenberg Special Operations Staff.