Rosenberg, Alfred

Rosenberg, Alfred (äl`frĕt rō`zənbĕrk), 1893–1946, German Nazi leader. He was born in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), and studied architecture in Riga, and later in Moscow. Returning to Reval, he became active as a political ideologist until he fled (1919) to Germany to escape arrest for counterrevolutionary speeches. There he joined the National Socialist party and became the editor of the party organ, Völkischer Beobachter. The author of an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and neopagan book, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [the myth of the 20th cent.] (1930), he supplied Adolf Hitler with the spurious philosophical and scientific basis for his racist doctrine (see National Socialism). Rosenberg was made (1933) foreign affairs secretary of the party and distinguished himself as the foremost anti-Bolshevik among its leaders. In 1941 he was appointed minister for the occupied Eastern territories. Convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg trials, he was executed.

Bibliography

See his memoirs (tr. 1949) and his Selected Writings, ed. by R. Pois (1970); R. Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (1972).

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Rosenberg, Alfred

(born Jan. 12, 1893, Reval, Estonia—died Oct. 16, 1946, Nürnberg, Ger.) German Nazi ideologue. As editor of the Nazi Party newspaper from 1921, he drew on the ideas of the English racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain for his books espousing German racial purity and anti-Semitism, which reinforced Adolf Hitler's own extreme prejudices. In World War II he oversaw the transport of stolen art into Germany and was a government official in the occupied eastern territories. After the war he was tried at the Nürnberg trials and hanged as a war criminal.

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Rosenberg, Alfred 

Born Jan. 12, 1893, in Tallinn; died Oct. 16, 1946, in Nuremberg. One of the main war criminals of fascist Germany.

In 1923, Rosenberg became editor in chief of the central organ of the Nazi party, Völkischer Beobachter. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), he published a “substantiation” of the racist views and expansionist foreign policy program of German fascism. In 1933 he became head of the foreign policy department of the National Socialist Party. In July 1941, Rosenberg became minister of the occupied Eastern territories. He was one of the organizers of the mass murders and lootings that were conducted by the German administration in Poland, the USSR, and the other countries temporarily captured by the fascist German troops. Rosenberg was executed by verdict of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.