Rosenberg, Alfred

1893–1946

   Rosenberg was born into one of the overseas German communities at Reval in Tsarist Russia, and trained as an architect in Moscow before the revolution. On its outbreak he made his way to Germany, filled with violent anti- Bolshevik and anti-Semitic sentiments, to which he was able to give full vent when he joined the Nazi Party and became editor of its newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. During HITLER’s imprisonment after the 1924 Munich Putsch he was temporarily party leader. He lacked executive skills, however, and was relegated to theoretical and educational activities when Hitler resumed the leadership. Hitler had, nevertheless, a sort of reflexive respect for him as an intellectual and old comrade, and made him Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941, on the grounds of his special knowledge of and interest in the region. But Rosenberg exercised little real power there. It was GOERING and HIMMLER who put into practice the theories of racial superiority and exploitation that he had advanced. As a prophet of the excesses of Nazism, and an accessory to its crimes, he was tried and executed at Nuremberg.