Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg (12 January [O.S. 31 December 1892] 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a Baltic German[1] Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg ("Rosenberg's bureau"), an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on 16 October 1946.
Alfred Rosenberg
Position established
Position abolished
Position established
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Position established
Position abolished
12 January [O.S. 31 December 1892] 1893
Reval, Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire
(present-day Tallinn, Estonia)
16 October 1946 (aged 53)
Nuremberg Prison, Nuremberg, Bavaria, Allied-occupied Germany
2
Architect, politician, writer
Authoring The Myth of the Twentieth Century
The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, including its hatred of the Jewish people, the need for Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered "degenerate" modern art. He was also known for his hatred of Christianity,[2][3] however, he played an important role in the development of German nationalist Positive Christianity, which denied that Jesus is the Messiah and rejected the Old Testament.
Early life[edit]
Family[edit]
Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Reval, now Tallinn (the capital of modern Estonia), then in the Governorate of Estonia (Russian Empire). His mother Elfriede (née Siré), who had French and German ancestry, was the daughter of Louise Rosalie (née Fabricius), born near Leal (modern Lihula, Estonia) in 1842, and of the railway official Friedrich August Siré, born in Saint-Petersburg (Russian Empire) in 1843.[4][5] Born in the same city in 1868, Elfriede Siré received the Christian sacrament of Confirmation in Reval at 17 in 1885. She married Woldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, a wealthy merchant from Reval, in the Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (St-Petersburg) in 1886.[5] His paternal grandfather, Martin Rosenberg, was a master shoemaker and elder of his guild. Born in Riga in 1820, and probably partly of Latvian descent, he had moved to Reval in the 1850s, where he met Julie Elisabeth Stramm, born in Jörden (Estonia) in 1835. The two married in the German St. Nicholas parish of Reval in 1856.[4][5] His mother died two months after his birth.[6][5]
The Hungarian-Jewish journalist Franz Szell, who was apparently residing in Tilsit, Prussia, Germany, spent a year researching in Latvian and Estonian archives before publishing an open letter in 1936, with copies to Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and others, accusing Rosenberg of having "no drop of German blood" flowing in his veins. Szell wrote that among Rosenberg's ancestors were only "Latvians, Jews, Mongols, and French."[7] As a result of his open letter, Szell was deported by Lithuanian authorities on 15 September 1936.[8] His claims were repeated in the 15 September 1937 issue of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.[9]
Education and Early Career[edit]
The young Rosenberg graduated from the Petri-Realschule (currently Tallinna Reaalkool) and enrolled in architecture studies at the Riga Polytechnical Institute in the Autumn of 1910. In 1915, as the German army was approaching Riga, the entire school evacuated to the Moscow Imperial Higher Technical School[10][11] (Russian: Императорское Московское техническое училище (ИМТУ)), where he completed his PhD studies in 1917. During his stays at home in Reval, he attended the art studio of the famed painter Ants Laikmaa - though he showed promise, there are no records that he ever exhibited.
During the German occupation of Estonia in 1918, Rosenberg served as a drawing teacher at the Gustav Adolf Gymnasium and Tallinna Reaalkool (current Tallinn Polytechnic School[12]). He gave his first speech on Jewish Marxism on 30 November, at the House of the Blackheads, after the 28 November 1918 outbreak of the Estonian War of Independence.[13] He emigrated to Germany with the retreating Imperial German army, along with Max Scheubner-Richter, who served as something of a mentor to Rosenberg and to his ideology. Arriving in Munich, he contributed to Dietrich Eckart's publication, the Völkischer Beobachter (Ethnic/Nationalist Observer). By this time, he was both an antisemite – influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, one of the key proto-Nazi books of racial theory – and an anti-Bolshevik.[14] Rosenberg became one of the earliest members of the German Workers' Party – later renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazi Party – joining in January 1919, eight months before Adolf Hitler joined in September. According to some historians, Rosenberg had also been a member of the Thule Society, along with Eckart,[15] although Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke contends that they were only guests.[16][17] After the Völkischer Beobachter became the Nazi party newspaper in December 1920, Rosenberg became its editor in 1923.[18] Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung, Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial organisation of White Russian émigrés which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy.[19]
Rosenberg sympathized and identified with Talaat Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the Armenian genocide, also claiming that there was "a deliberately Jewish policy which had always protected the Armenians" and that "during the world war, the Armenians have led the espionage against the Turks, similar to the Jews against Germany".[20][21]
Nazi Party[edit]
In 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, who had been imprisoned for treason, appointed Rosenberg as the leader of the Nazi movement. Hitler remarked privately in later years that his choice of Rosenberg, whom he regarded as weak and lazy, was strategic; Hitler did not want the temporary leader of the Nazis to become too popular or hungry for power, because a person with either of those two qualities might not want to cede the party leadership after Hitler's release. However, at the time of the appointment Hitler had no reason to believe that he would soon be released, and Rosenberg had not appeared weak, so this may have been Hitler reading back into history his dissatisfaction with Rosenberg for the job he did.[22]
On 1 January 1924, Rosenberg founded the Greater German People's Community, a Nazi front organization. Headquartered in Munich, it was largely limited to Bavaria, the birthplace of National Socialism, had no substantial presence outside that State and became a haven for Nazi Party members from that area. Prominent members included Max Amann, Phillip Bouhler, Hermann Esser, Franz Xaver Schwarz and Julius Streicher.[23]: 49 Rosenberg, one of the least charismatic of the Nazi leaders and lacking in leadership qualities, was soon pushed aside by Streicher, a far more ruthless and abrasive personality, who was elected Chairman on 9 July 1924 with Esser, also a coarse, bullying sort, as his Deputy Chairman.[24]
In 1929 Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He later formed the "Institute for Research on the Jewish Question", the first branch of a projected Advanced School of the NSDAP,[25][26] dedicated to identifying and attacking supposed Jewish influence in German culture and to recording the history of Judaism from a radical nationalist perspective. He was elected as a Reichstag Deputy in 1930 and would continue to serve in this capacity until the end of the Nazi regime. First elected as a representative of the electoral list, from 1933 on he represented electoral constituency 33, Hesse. In 1930, he also published his book on racial theory The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts) which deals with key issues in the Nazi ideology, such as the "Jewish question." Rosenberg intended his book as a sequel to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's above-cited book. Despite selling more than a million copies by 1945, its influence within Nazism remains doubtful. It is often said to have been a book that was officially venerated within Nazism, but one that few had actually read beyond the first chapter or even found comprehensible.[27] Hitler called it "stuff nobody can understand"[28] and disapproved of its pseudo-religious tone.[14]
Rosenberg helped convince Hitler, whose early speeches focused on revenge against France and Britain,[29] that communism was a serious threat to Germany. "Jewish-Bolshevism" became an ideological target for Nazism during the early 1920s.[14]
In Rome during November 1932 Rosenberg participated in the Volta Conference about Europe. British historian Sir Charles Petrie met him there and regarded him with great distaste; Petrie was a Catholic and strongly objected to Rosenberg's anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiments.[30]
The following year, following the Nazi seizure of power, Rosenberg was named leader of the Nazi Party's Foreign Policy Office in April, and on 2 June 1933 he was named a Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party.[31] In May 1933 Rosenberg visited Britain, to give the impression that the Nazis would not be a threat and to encourage links between the new regime and the British Empire. It was a notable failure. When Rosenberg laid a wreath bearing a swastika at the Cenotaph, a Labour Party candidate slashed it, later threw it in the Thames and was fined 40 shillings for willful damage at Bow Street magistrate's court.[32][33]
In October 1933, Rosenberg was named as a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law.[34] Then on 27 January 1934, Hitler made Rosenberg the "Führer's Representative for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the NSDAP." This was the origin of the Amt Rosenberg.[35]
Family Life[edit]
Rosenberg was married twice. In 1915, he married Hilda Leesmann, an ethnic Estonian; they divorced in 1923. Two years later, in 1925 he married Hedwig Kramer,[93] to whom he remained wed until his execution by the Allies. He and Kramer had two children: a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Irene, who was born in 1930.[94] His wife died in 1947.
Informational notes
Citations
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