Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: The German Invasion of Russia

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team: The German Invasion of Russia - Alfred Rosenberg

The German Invasion of Russia - Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg was born in Reval in Estonia on the 12 January 1893, the son of an Estonian mother and a Lithuanian father, both of Baltic German extraction. Rosenberg studied engineering in Riga and architecture at the University of Moscow, fleeing to Paris and then Munich after the Russian revolution of 1917.

Rosenberg was active in White Russian émigré circles and also a member of the ultra-nationalist, semi- occult Thule Society, which reinforced his obsession with the nefarious role of Jews, Bolsheviks and Freemasons.

Rosenberg had the typical “Germanity” complex of expatriate Germans from the border regions, he joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and was introduced to Hitler by Dietrich Eckart, whom he eventually succeeded as editor of the Nazi newspaper, the Volkische Beobachter, in 1923.

Dietrich Eckart

Rosenberg was an important figure in the early days of the Nazi movement, Rosenberg impressed Hitler by his “learning,” largely from the cranky, tract literature of pathological nationalist fanaticism, as well as by his virulent anti- Bolshevism and anti-semitism.

In works like Die Spur der Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Tracks of the Jew Through the Ages), Unmoral im Talmud (Immorality in the Talmud) both published in 1919, and Das Verbrechen der Freimaurerei (The Crime of Freemasonry) in 1921, Rosenberg expressed his twisted belief in a Judeo- Masonic conspiracy.

According to Rosenberg, Allied Freemasons were responsible for the outbreak of the Great War while “international Jews” had manipulated and controlled the Russian Revolution.

Rosenberg was neurotically obsessed with super-natural conspiracies and dark, occult powers, he was one of the main disseminators of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist police forgery which exercised a powerful influence over some Nazi leaders and millions of their followers.

Russian copy - "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"

Hitler’s adviser on foreign affairs in the period of the so-called Kampfzeit, Rosenberg participated actively in the abortive Beer-Hall putsch of November 1923 and was deputy leader of the Party until his resignation in 1924, as a result of a feud with Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher.

Even in the early years of the movement, Alfred Rosenberg was regarded as an outsider and a “foreigner” because of his Baltic origins, his cramped, pedantic style, introverted temperament and insufferable intellectual arrogance. As editor of the Volkische Beobachter he was in constant conflict with Max Amann, Adolf Hitler’s business manager, and other leading Nazis who disliked his plodding, earnest, humourless manner.

Despite of all the above, Rosenberg established himself in the 1920’s as the guardian of the Nazi Weltanschauung (world view) and the leading theoretician of Nazi racism and its chief cultural propagandist.

Rosenberg gives a speech to listeners on the streets