Rosenberg was dedicated to rooting out ‘degenerate’ art and became a mastermind of the Holocaust. His diaries, lost in the murky world of Nazi memorabilia, have only recently come to light
One might think the major sources for the history of the Third Reich had all long since been brought to light, but new finds keep turning up. The latest is the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, self-proclaimed chief ideologue of the National Socialist movement and author of its most important pseudo-intellectual text after Hitler’s Mein Kampf – The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg was more than just a writer: from 1923 onwards he edited the party’s daily newspaper, and in 1928 he founded and ran a crusading organisation, the Fighting League for German Culture, dedicated to rooting out “degenerate” art, books, plays and other cultural products from the German public scene.
During the war he headed up the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force, which began by collecting Jewish artefacts for a projected museum for the study of what he hoped would soon be an extinct race, but quickly graduated to looting artworks, manuscripts and other treasures from Jews sent to the camps. According to the task force itself, bureaucratic in its precision, its loot filled 1,418,000 railway trucks. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Rosenberg was made minister for the occupied eastern territories, in which capacity he put his theories of an irreconcilable antagonism between Jews and “Aryans” into practice by taking a leading part in the expropriation, imprisonment and murder of the millions of Jews who fell into his area of competence. Not surprisingly, after he was captured by allied troops at the end of the war, he was tried for his crimes and executed.
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