In 1946, Alfred Rosenberg was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, for his role as the top civilian administrator on Nazi-occupied Soviet soil during World War II. As Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories, Rosenberg carried out a brutal policy of terror against the conquered Russians and Ukrainians and was also responsible for the organized plunder of artistic and cultural treasures throughout all of Nazi-occupied Europe.
A Baltic German, born in Estonia in 1893, Rosenberg studied architecture in Moscow. He arrived in Germany in 1918 and began writing anti-Semitic articles for newspapers. His first book,The Tracks of Jewry through the Ages, was published in 1919. He met future German chancellor Adolf Hitler through their membership in the German Workers' Party, but Rosenberg soon joined Hitler's fledgling National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He became editor of the party organ, the Voelkischer Beobachter, in 1921. He took part in the ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923, and when the Nazi Party was banned for a time because of it, Rosenberg helped create Great German Volk Community, a cover organization. Fiercely anti-Semitic, he viewed himself as the chief ideologue for the Party, and though other high-ranking Nazis disliked Rosenberg, Hitler was impressed by his fanaticism.
Rosenberg founded the Combat League for German Culture, and his ideas about German racial superiority and the threat of communism were further expounded in another book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. In it, however, he argued against organized religion, which put him at odds with Hitler's ideas about the role of the Catholic and Protestant churches; they felt that conservative church leaders could be an important ally in the Nazis' bid to mainstream publicsupport. Rosenberg was elected to the Reichstag in 1930, and after the 1933 seizure of power, he headed the Foreign Policy Office for the Nazi Party. When Germany invaded France in 1940, the Nazis realized that a wealth of priceless art would be theirs for the taking, and Rosenberg was appointed to head what was called Einsatzstab Rosenberg (Rosenberg Operation Staff). It was ostensibly a group of scholarly experts who supervised the"protection" from potential wartime damage of art and other cultural treasures from French museums, libraries, and even private homes. Rosenberg organized 26,000 railroad cars full of such treasure from France alone; the policy continued across the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Rosenberg was also involved in assisting the 1940 invasion of Norway by meeting the year before with a pro-Nazi Norwegian politician, Vidkun Quisling. Rosenberg then arranged a meeting between Quisling and Hitler after the Norwegian warned that the British, with whom Germany was at war, might invade the Norwegian coast as a strategic move. Rosenberg also knew about the planned invasion of the Soviet Union, and in June of 1941 he was made Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories, which gave him control over part of the Soviet Union's large, populous western region. As the leading civil administrator here, Rosenberg carried out Hitler's orders that all enemy crops and resources be seized and given to Germans first. "We see absolutely no reasonfor any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian peoplewith the products of that surplus-territory," Rosenberg statedjust prior to the invasion. "[I]t is sure that the future willhold very hard years in store for the Russians." Rosenberg also carried out the Nazis' "Germanisation" program to ultimately eliminate the Slavic population from the Baltic to theTranscaucasus, which would make room for German emigrants. All Jews were deported to concentration camps, and non-Jews were sent to work in Germany as slave laborers. Rosenberg issued quotas to his local administrators, such as one dated June 14, 1944, that called for 40,000 to 50,000 new laborers for German munitions factories; to meet the quota, children aged ten to 14 were taken.Rosenberg also declared that the Rules of Land Warfare, from earlier decrees at international conferences in The Hague, Netherlands, were inapplicable to captured territories in the east. Arrested after Germany's defeat, Rosenberg stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He claimed that he had rescued much of Europe's artistic treasures from being destroyed by bombs, but was found guilty of crimes against peace and three other counts, and hanged with other defendants on October 16, 1946.
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