54 Facts About Alfred Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany, and led Amt Rosenberg, an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945.

Alfred Rosenberg helped direct the extermination of the Slavs After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.

Alfred Rosenberg was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on 16 October 1946.

The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory and its hatred of the Jewish people, the need for Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered "degenerate" modern art.

Alfred Rosenberg was known for his hatred and rejection of what he regarded as "negative" Christianity he played an important role in the development of German nationalist Positive Christianity, which denied that Jesus is the Messiah and rejected the Old Testament.

Alfred Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Reval, then in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire.

Alfred Rosenberg's mother Elfriede, who had French and German ancestry, was the daughter of Louise Rosalie, born near Leal in 1842, and of the railway official Friedrich August Sire, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1843.

Alfred Rosenberg married Woldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, a wealthy merchant from Reval, in the Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in 1886.

Alfred Rosenberg's paternal grandfather, Martin Rosenberg, was a master shoemaker and elder of his guild.

The Hungarian-Jewish journalist Franz Szell, who was apparently residing in Tilsit, Prussia, Germany, spent a year researching in Latvian and Estonian archives before publishing an open letter in 1936, with copies to Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and others, accusing Alfred Rosenberg of having "no drop of German blood" flowing in his veins.

Alfred Rosenberg's claims were repeated in the 15 September 1937 issue of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

The young Alfred Rosenberg graduated from the Petri-Realschule and enrolled in architecture studies at the Riga Polytechnical Institute in the Autumn of 1910.

Alfred Rosenberg gave his first speech on "Jewish Marxism" on 30 November, at the House of the Blackheads, after the 28 November 1918 outbreak of the Estonian War of Independence.

Alfred Rosenberg emigrated to Germany with the retreating Imperial German army, along with Max Scheubner-Richter, who served as something of a mentor to Rosenberg and to his ideology.

Alfred Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung, Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial organisation of White Russian emigres which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy.

Alfred Rosenberg sympathized and identified with Talaat Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the Armenian genocide, claiming that there was "a deliberately Jewish policy which had always protected the Armenians" and that "during the world war, the Armenians have led the espionage against the Turks, similar to the Jews against Germany".

On 1 January 1924, Alfred Rosenberg founded the Greater German People's Community, a Nazi front organization.

In 1929 Alfred Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture.

Alfred Rosenberg later formed the "Institute for Research on the Jewish Question", the first branch of a projected Advanced School of the NSDAP, dedicated to identifying and attacking supposed Jewish influence in German culture and to recording the history of Judaism from a radical nationalist perspective.

Alfred Rosenberg was elected as a Reichstag Deputy in 1930 and would continue to serve in this capacity until the end of the Nazi regime.

Alfred Rosenberg helped convince Hitler, whose early speeches focused on revenge against France and Britain, that communism was a serious threat to Germany.

In Rome during November 1932 Alfred Rosenberg participated in the Volta Conference about Europe.

In May 1933 Alfred Rosenberg visited Britain, to give the impression that the Nazis would not be a threat and to encourage links between the new regime and the British Empire.

In October 1933, Alfred Rosenberg was named as a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law.

Alfred Rosenberg built on the works of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Madison Grant and the Klansman Lothrop Stoddard as well as on the beliefs of Hitler.

Alfred Rosenberg placed Blacks and Jews at the very bottom of the ladder, while at the very top stood the "Aryan" race.

Alfred Rosenberg promoted the Nordic theory which considered the Nordic race the "master race", superior to all others, including to other Aryans.

Alfred Rosenberg was influenced by the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory promoted by the Catholic counter-revolutionary tradition, such as the book Le Juif, le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chretiens by Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, which he translated into German under the title The Eternal Jew.

Alfred Rosenberg got the racial term Untermensch from the title of Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-men, which had been adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen.

Alfred Rosenberg reshaped the Nazi racial policy over the years, but it always consisted of Aryan supremacy, extreme German nationalism and rabid antisemitism.

Alfred Rosenberg viewed homosexuality as a hindrance to the expansion of the Nordic population.

Alfred Rosenberg criticised those who did not subscribe to his racial theories.

Alfred Rosenberg was raised as a Lutheran, but he rejected what he called "negative" Christianity later in life.

Alfred Rosenberg took inspiration from Houston Stewart Chamberlain's ideas and condemned what he called "Negative Christianity", instead Rosenberg was arguing for a so-called "Positive" Christianity which was based on the argument that Jesus was not a Jew but a member of an Indo-European enclave which was resident in ancient Galilee who fought against Judaism.

In 1940 Alfred Rosenberg was made head of the Hohe Schule, the Centre of National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research, out of which the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg developed for the purpose of looting art and cultural goods.

Alfred Rosenberg created a "Special Task Force for Music" to collect the best musical instruments and scores for use in a university to be built in Hitler's home town of Linz, Austria.

Alfred Rosenberg Meyer served as his deputy and represented him at the Wannsee Conference.

Alfred Rosenberg had presented Hitler with his plan for the organization of the conquered Eastern territories, suggesting the establishment of new administrative districts, to replace the previously Soviet-controlled territories with new Reichskommissariats.

Alfred Rosenberg often complained to Hitler and Himmler about the treatment of non-Jewish occupied peoples.

Alfred Rosenberg proposed the creation of buffer satellite states made out of Greater Finland, Baltica, Ukraine, and Caucasus.

Alfred Rosenberg was one of the few in the Nazi hierarchy who advocated a policy designed to encourage anti-Communist opinion among the population of the occupied territories.

Amongst other things, Alfred Rosenberg issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms.

Alfred Rosenberg issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming and restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers.

Alfred Rosenberg noted that many joined the partisans when volunteers for work details declined and the Germans resorted to force to acquire workers from the East.

Alfred Rosenberg was captured by Allied troops on 19 May 1945 in Flensburg-Murwik.

Alfred Rosenberg was tried at Nuremberg and found guilty of all four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity.

Alfred Rosenberg was sentenced to death and executed with other condemned co-defendants at Nuremberg Prison on the morning of 16 October 1946.

Alfred Rosenberg was perceived as lacking the charisma and political skills of the other Nazi leaders, and was somewhat isolated.

In some of his speeches Hitler appeared to be close to Alfred Rosenberg's views, rejecting traditional Christianity as a religion based on Jewish culture, preferring an ethnically and culturally pure "Race" whose destiny was supposed to be assigned to the German people by "Providence".

Alfred Rosenberg placed himself in the position of being the man to save Positive Christianity from utter destruction at the hands of the atheistic antitheist Communists of the Soviet Union.

Also, while Alfred Rosenberg thought Christianity should be allowed to die out, Himmler actively set out to create countering pagan rituals.

Alfred Rosenberg gave the impression of clinging to his own theories in a fanatical and unyielding fashion and to have been little influenced by the unfolding during the trial of the cruelty and crimes of the party.

The ruthless pursuit of Nazi aims turned out to mean not, as Alfred Rosenberg had hoped, the permeation of German life with the new ideology; it meant concentration of the combined resources of party and state on total war.

Alfred Rosenberg and Kramer had two children: a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Irene, who was born in 1930.