WILMINGTON, Del., June 13 (by Karin Zeitvogel for RIA Novosti) – In loops of cursive on now yellow and brittle pages, top Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg bared his soul during World War II, writing warmly about Adolf Hitler and chillingly outlining his plans for what he deemed undesirables, including Soviet citizens and Jews.
“The Rosenberg diary is no ordinary diary of the time,” John Morton, director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said of the long-lost diary.
“Reading Rosenberg’s diary is to stare into the mind of a dark soul, a man untroubled by the isolation and violent extermination of Jews and others he deemed undesirable,” including Soviet citizens, Morton told a news conference here.
Rosenberg’s journal entries and reams of letters he wrote went missing shortly after World War II and were recovered several weeks ago after a lengthy investigation involving three US government entities.
The hundreds of pages recovered by a special unit of ICE that hunts for stolen historical documents and artifacts, the US Department of Justice and investigators from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington include letters from Rosenberg to Adolf Hitler and diary entries littered with the names of Nazi top brass.
Rosenberg wrote in a 1941 diary entry about being invited to dinner with Hitler to “discuss, in peace and quiet, the Russian question,” which he thought required an “immediate military” solution.
He seemed almost dreamy as he inked an entry after being named the Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, envisioning how, finally, “20 years of anti-Bolshevik work will now have a political and historical impact.”
“The fate of millions will be in my hands,” he wrote.
Rosenberg was named Nazi Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941, gaining responsibility for crafting German policy in occupied parts of the Soviet Union, including the deportation of millions of Soviet civilians for forced labor in Germany and the planned annihilation of Soviet Jews.
In a typewritten letter that was part of the recovered documents, Rosenberg complained about the way Nazi Commissar for Ukraine Erich Koch was treating the local population.
But he wasn’t upset at Koch’s brutality or racism towards Ukrainians, whom Koch called serfs worthy only of “sugar bread” as a reward and “the whip” as punishment, but at the fact that Koch was getting Ukrainians’ backs up and they were beginning to refuse to work, growing food for their Nazi masters.
Born in 1893 in what is now Tallinn, Estonia, but was then part of the Russian Empire, Rosenberg moved to France after the Russian revolution and in 1918 settled in Germany. He was convicted in 1945 as a Nazi war criminal at the Nuremberg trials and hanged on October 16, 1946.
His diary is thought to have been snuck out of Germany and over to the United States by Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Kempner, whose death nearly 20 years ago led to legal wrangling over his papers – including the Rosenberg diary – between his heritors, his former secretary, the USHMM and a debris removal firm.
Officials recovered thousands of historical documents from Kempner’s home in 1999, but the Rosenberg diary was not among them.
The long, sometimes bitter battle to recover the diary was only resolved this year, when a private detective hired by the Holocaust Museum finally found Rosenberg’s papers – at the upstate New York home of Herbert Richardson, 81, a religious studies professor turned book publisher who had reportedly obtained the diary from Kempner’s former secretary, Margot Lipton.
“We convinced Richardson that the material really belongs in the Holocaust Memorial Museum,” and the diary and other historic material were handed over, USHMM archivist Henry Mayer said at the news conference.
The officials at Thursday’s news conference would not comment on whether legal proceedings have been launched against Richardson or anyone else involved in hiding the diary, which Morton described as “the unvarnished account of a Nazi leader, his thoughts, his philosophy, his interactions with other Nazi leaders.”
And although a report released this week said that parts of the diaries contradicted “already known documentation" about Nazi Germany, Mayer said it was too early to tell if analysis of Rosenberg’s writings, which have only been in the hands of the USHMM since April, would indeed contradict accepted Nazi history.
But, he added, after hunting for the diary for nearly two decades, “it was quite something to hold it in my hands,” when it finally was handed over to the Holocaust Museum several weeks ago.
