Alfred Rosenberg - Early Life

Early Life

Rosenberg was born in 1893 in Reval (today's Tallinn, in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire) to a family of Baltic Germans: his father, Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, was a wealthy merchant from Latvia, his mother, Elfriede, was from Estonia. (Tallinn archivist J. Rajandi claimed in the 1930s that Rosenberg's family had Estonian origins.)

The young Rosenberg studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute and engineering at Moscow's Highest Technical School completing his Ph.D. studies in 1917. While in Riga, he was a member of the Baltic German student fraternity "Rubonia". During the Russian Revolution of 1917 Rosenberg supported the counter-revolutionaries; following their failure he emigrated to Germany in 1918 along with Max Scheubner-Richter who served as something of a mentor to Rosenberg and to his ideology. Arriving in Munich, he contributed to Dietrich Eckart's publication, the Völkischer Beobachter (Ethnic/Nationalist Observer). By this time, he was both an antisemite - influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (one of the key proto-Nazi books of racial theory) - and an anti-bolshevik (as a result of his family's exile). Rosenberg became one of the earliest members of the German Workers Party (later the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazi Party), joining in January 1919; Adolf Hitler did not join until October 1919. Rosenberg had also been a member of the Thule Society, with Eckart. After the Völkischer Beobachter became the Nazi party newspaper (December, 1920), Rosenberg became its editor in 1923. Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung, Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial organisation of White Russian émigrés which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy.

In 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler—who had been imprisoned for treason—appointed Rosenberg as a leader of the Nazi movement, a position he held until Hitler's release. Hitler remarked privately in later years that his choice of Rosenberg, whom he regarded as weak and lazy, was strategic; Hitler did not want the temporary leader of the Nazis to become overly popular or hungry for power, because a person with either of those two qualities might not want to cede the party leadership after Hitler's release. However, at the time of the appointment Hitler had no reason to believe that he would soon be released, and Rosenberg had not appeared weak, so this may have been Hitler reading back into history his dissatisfaction with Rosenberg for the job he did.

In 1929 Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He later formed the "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question", dedicated to identifying and attacking Jewish influence in German culture and to recording the history of Judaism from an antisemitic perspective. He became a Reichstag Deputy in 1930 and published his book on racial theory The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts) which deals with key issues in the national socialist ideology, such as the "Jewish question". Rosenberg intended his book as a sequel to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's above-cited book. Despite selling more than a million copies by 1945, its influence within Nazism (beyond providing specious intellectual cover for unintellectual governance) remains doubtful. It is often said to have been a book that was officially venerated within Nazism, but one that few had actually read beyond the first chapter or even found comprehensible. Hitler called it "stuff nobody can understand" and disapproved of its pseudo-religious tone.

Rosenberg convinced Hitler of the Communist threat and of the supposed fragility of the Soviet Union's political structure. "Jewish-Bolshevism" was accepted as a target for Nazism during the early 1920s.

Rosenberg was named leader of the Nazi Party's foreign political office in 1933, but he played little practical part in the role. His visit to Britain in that year, designed to reassure the British that the Nazis would not be a threat and to encourage links between the new regime and the British Empire, was a notable failure. When Rosenberg laid a wreath bearing a swastika at the tomb of the unknown soldier, a British war veteran promptly threw it in the Thames. In January 1934 Hitler granted Rosenberg responsibility for the spiritual and philosophical education of the Party and all related organizations.