Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg was born in Reval, Estonia on January 12, 1893, the son of a cobbler in what was at the time a part of Russia. He studied architecture in Moscow until the revolution in 1917. In 1919 he went to Munich where he joined Adolf Hitler, Ernst Roehm and Rudolf Hess in the nascent Nazi Party (NSDAP). He was editor of the party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter where he drew on the ideas of English rascist Houston Chamberlin and the fabricated "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" a supposed plot for jewish world domination. While Hitler was imprisoned after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, he made Rosenberg Party leader knowing him to be incompetent and unlikely to establish a position of power.
     Rosenberg fancied himself an intellectual and wrote several books among them, in 1927, a tome urging the conquest of Poland and the Soviet Union. In 1934 he published "The Myth of the 20th Century" a tedious exposition of German racial purity. According to Rosenberg the Germans were descended from a nordic race that thrived on clean, cold, semi-artic continent now disappeared. This, in his tangled thinking, somehow entitled the Germans to the mastery of Europe. Among the enemies of this "master race" were "Russian Tatars" and semites. The latter group included Jews, Latins and Christianity, especially the Catholic Church.
     Rosenberg was responsible for bringing Vidkun Quisling the Norwegian traitor to Hitler's attention in 1939. After the fall of France he was charged with the task of collecting and transporting stolen works of art to the Reich. From July 1941 he was the largely powerless Reichsminister for the occupied eastern territories. At the Nuremburg trials Rosenberg was convicted of war crimes and was hanged on October 16th, 1946.