Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg was the chief ideologist of the Nazi Party and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories from July 1941 to 1945. He provided much of the racial doctrine on which the killing programme rested, and as the Reich Minister for the eastern territories he commanded the civilian administration of the area in which around two million Jews and several million other civilians were murdered. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty on all four counts, and hanged on 16 October 1946.

The Myth of the Twentieth Century

Rosenberg published The Myth of the Twentieth Century in 1930, a six-hundred-page presentation of the racial-ideological framework on which the Nazi Party operated. The book was the second-largest-selling Nazi work after Mein Kampf and was the principal sustained statement of Nazi racial doctrine. It set out, at length, the conspiracy theory of Jewish responsibility for the decline of European civilisation, the racial hierarchy of European peoples, the historical role of the Aryan race, and the necessity of removing the Jewish presence from European life. Rosenberg gave hundreds of public speeches developing the argument through the 1930s. Hitler said in private that the book was unreadable; he also said that Rosenberg’s general argument was sound. The book was the cultural and ideological background against which the killing programme would later become possible.

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg

From 1940 Rosenberg ran the ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the unit responsible for the systematic looting of Jewish-owned art, books, manuscripts and cultural property across occupied Europe. The ERR plundered around 600,000 art objects in addition to several million books and tens of thousands of religious objects from Jewish collections in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The ERR Paris office, working from the Jeu de Paume, processed around 22,000 art objects in 1940 to 1942 alone, including most of the major Rothschild family collections. Rosenberg’s ERR archive, captured by American forces in 1945, was used as evidence at Nuremberg and is the basis on which much of the post-war art restitution work has been conducted.

The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories

Rosenberg was made Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, three weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The position gave him civil administrative authority over the German-occupied parts of Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states, around 50 million people in total. The Einsatzgruppen killings in his territory took place under the SS chain of command, but the wider civilian administrative environment, including the establishment of ghettos, the registration of Jewish populations, and the supply of local police and administrative manpower for the killings, ran through his ministry.

Around two million Jews were murdered in territory under his ministry’s civilian authority. He was personally informed of the killings throughout. The Einsatzgruppen reports were circulated to his ministry. He visited the occupied territories repeatedly. He met with the senior SS officers conducting the operations. He never raised an objection.

The 6 December 1941 speech

Rosenberg gave a speech at the German Foreign Press Club in Berlin on 18 November 1941, in which he explicitly described what was happening in the eastern territories. He said that the German government had been forced to undertake a biological eradication of the Jewish population of Europe, and that the eastern territories under his administration were the place where the eradication was taking place. The speech was widely reported and was used at his Nuremberg trial. He had said publicly, in November 1941, what the regime’s euphemisms were generally used to conceal.

The Nuremberg trial

Rosenberg was captured by Allied forces in Flensburg on 19 May 1945. He was tried at Nuremberg as one of the senior defendants. The prosecution’s documentary case included The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the ERR archive, the speeches, and the captured ministerial files. He was found guilty on all four counts, including conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was the only defendant on the gallows that night who refused to make a final statement. He was hanged shortly after midnight on 16 October 1946. He was 53.

What he was

Rosenberg is the case of the senior ideologist as field commander. He provided the doctrinal framework. He looted the cultural property. He commanded the civilian administration of the territory in which the largest single phase of the killing took place. He had given public speeches in 1941 that explicitly described what was being done. He had no operational authority over the SS killing units, but his ministry provided the wider environment within which they operated, and he had personally articulated the racial doctrine that the killing was conducted to implement. The Holocaust required, and got, a senior ideologist who could be relied on to provide the public language and the institutional framework for the operational killers. Rosenberg was that man.

See also

Sources

  • Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, Dodd Mead, 1972
  • Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930
  • The ERR archive, captured 1945, partly digitised at the Bundesarchiv and the National Archives
  • Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich, Knopf, 1994
  • Nuremberg trial transcripts, Rosenberg cross-examination
  • USHMM: Alfred Rosenberg