The name of this person will never appear on the honorary list of graduates of "Baumanka" (Moscow State Technical University named after NE Bauman / Moscow Higher Technical School), although it is known to the whole world. At the dawn of his life, he received a high-quality education in the Russian Empire, and in maturity brought colossal evil to his homeland. He not only directed the invading armies against the country where he was born, but also hatched plans for its complete destruction and dismemberment. Alfred Rosenberg was the main ideologue of the Nazi party and the author of the plan for the development of the "eastern territories", having played a crucial role in unleashing an aggressive war against the Soviet Union.
It is unlikely that the Revel shoemaker Voldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, a Baltic German by birth, and his wife Elfrida Caroline Zire, who came from a family of French Protestant Huguenots who moved to Estonia, could have assumed that their son Alfred, who was born on January 12, 1893, would later play a very significant role in world history.
Today Revel is called Tallinn and is the capital of Estonia, and then, in 1893, it was part of the Russian Empire as the capital of the Estland province. Most of the urban population of Estland was made up of the Ostsee or Baltic Germans. Many Russian statesmen, generals and naval commanders, scientists, engineers, doctors, and cultural workers emerged from the Eastsee Germans. But there were also people like Alfred Rosenberg, who hated Russia and never identified themselves with it.
Young Alfred was educated at the Revel Petrovsky Real School, and in the fall of 1910, at the age of 17, he entered the Faculty of Architecture of the Riga Polytechnic Institute (now the Riga Technical University). Shoemaker Voldemar and his Elfrida lived well, since they were able to provide their son with a good education in the future. When the First World War began, Alfred was 21 years old. But he did not get into the Russian army or the front: he was transferred to Moscow, to the architectural faculty of the Moscow Higher Technical School, which he graduated in 1918 at the age of 25. In the same 1918, Alfred returned to his native Revel.
By this time, Estonia was already in the hands of the German troops. The RSFSR, under the terms of the Brest Peace, renounced its claims to the Baltic lands, and Germany, in turn, refused to recognize the independence of the Republic of Estonia and established an occupation regime here. In the young Rosenberg, who had just yesterday studied at a Russian university, national feelings leaped up. He applied to join the German Expeditionary Force, but he was not accepted into military service. The command's verdict was unequivocal and offensive for the Eastsee German Rosenberg - "Russian!" The young man had no choice but to get a job as a modest teacher in the Revel men's gymnasium (now it is the Gustav Adolf Gymnasium in Tallinn). However, such a job seemed boring and unpromising to an ambitious young man, and even in such a turbulent time. In addition, Rosenberg was extremely hateful towards the October Revolution, towards Marxist and communist ideas. It was anti-Bolshevism that pushed the young engineer - architect and school teacher to more radical nationalist views.
At the end of 1918, Alfred Rosenberg moved to Germany, or rather, to Munich. In the Bavarian capital by this time the "Thule Society" was operating - either an occult or a political organization that united German nationalists of a special persuasion - the so-called. Völkische (from Völkische Bewegung - People's Movement). Members of the "Thule Society" were looking for the origins of the Aryan race and sought to justify its superiority over other races. It was a small circle of Munich intellectuals, who, perhaps, could not imagine what consequences their theoretical and philosophical research would lead to humanity in two decades.
Alfred Rosenberg met 50-year-old Dietrich Eckart, a talented playwright and journalist who played a very important role in the early stages of the formation of German Nazism. It was Eckart who introduced Rosenberg to the Thule Society, and soon the young Baltic German met World War I veteran Adolf Hitler. By the time of their acquaintance, Rosenberg, an educated and erudite man who closely perceived racist and anti-Semitic ideas, was already engaged in publicistic activities. He had a very great ideological influence on Adolf Hitler, contributing to the strengthening of the latter's anti-Semitic views (previously, Hitler was very indifferent to the "Jewish question" and even tried to avoid offensive statements about Jews).
Unlike most of the founders of the Thule Society - intellectuals and dreamers far from “popular politics,” Alfred Rosenberg was distinguished by his ability to explain racial ideas in a form popular and accessible to the masses. He considered all the events taking place in the world from the point of view of racial theory. Of course, the October Revolution, which Rosenberg hated, also suffered. In 1920, Rosenberg joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party and received party card number 625. He quickly became one of the most important figures in the party, effectively becoming its main ideologist. In 1921, Rosenberg took over as editor-in-chief of the party newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter", and in April 1933 he headed the Foreign Policy Department of the NSDAP. Peru Rosenberg owns a number of books outlining the foundations of Nazi racial theory. The most important work of Rosenberg is considered the book "Myth of the XX century". Already after Hitler came to power, Alfred Rosenberg in 1934 was appointed the Fuehrer's Commissioner to control the general spiritual and ideological education of the NSDAP, on the issues of the German workers' front and all related organizations. Simultaneously, since 1940, Rosenberg headed the Central Research Institute for National Socialist Ideology and Education. Another project headed by Rosenberg was the author's "Reichsleiter Rosenberg's Headquarters". It was this structure that was engaged during the Second World War with the plundering of cultural property from the territories of the occupied countries and their export to Germany.
Since the spring of 1941, Alfred Rosenberg has become one of the key figures in the development of Nazi Germany's plans to attack the Soviet Union. Of course, not being a military leader or a "silovik", Alfred Rosenberg was solely responsible for the ideological and political support of the upcoming "blitzkrieg". On April 2, 1941, Hitler instructed Rosenberg to develop the foundations of Germany's occupation policy in the east. A little more than two weeks later, on April 20, 1941, Hitler appointed Rosenberg the commissioner for the centralized solution of the issues of the Eastern European space. Obviously, the Fuehrer believed that Rosenberg, a native of the Baltics, selflessly devoted to the ideas of National Socialism, was the ideal figure to lead the occupation administration in the east after the Soviet Union was defeated.
At the same time, there was a very ambiguous attitude towards Rosenberg in the Nazi military and political elite. On the one hand, both the Fuhrer and his entourage recognized Rosenberg's ideological merits for the formation of Nazi ideology, on the other hand, they treated him very condescendingly, since Rosenberg was a very mediocre manager. Playing an important role in the Nazi party, in fact from the first years of its existence, Alfred Rosenberg was never able to become a truly influential ally of the Fuhrer not in ideological, but in organizational matters - he enjoyed much less influence than Goering, Hess, Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann and some other important leaders of the Third Reich.
It was Rosenberg that Hitler entrusted with the creation of a special plan for the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. The ideologist of Nazism was convinced that in order to crush the power of the Soviet state, it was necessary to encourage separatist movements on the territory of the Soviet Union, to cultivate Russophobic nationalism among the peoples of the various republics of the USSR. On June 22, 1941, Germany and its satellites attacked the Soviet Union. Less than a month after the outbreak of the war, the Imperial Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories was officially created on July 17, 1941. Alfred Rosenberg became the minister. Thus, it was he who headed the activities of all German governing bodies in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union - in Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and some regions of the RSFSR. This circumstance makes Rosenberg one of the main Nazi war criminals responsible for the destruction and robbery of the Soviet population in the occupied territories.
The Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was subordinate to the Nazi governing bodies - the Reichskommissariats: "Ostland" (headquarters in Riga) - the Baltic States and Belarus, headed by Reichskommissar Heinrich Lohse; "Ukraine" (headquarters - in Rovno) - the territory of most regions of Ukraine, as well as the south of the Brest region, the Gomel region of Belarus, part of the Pinsk and Polessye regions, the head is Reich Commissioner Erich Koch. After the planned occupation of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, Rosenberg planned to create the Reichskommissariat “Caucasus” with its center in Tbilisi and headed by Reichskommissar Arno Shikedanets. On the territory of Central Russia to the Urals, the Reichskommissariat "Muscovy" was to be created under the leadership of Siegfried Kashe, and in Central Asia - the Reichskommissariat "Turkestan". Although the apparatuses of the Reichskommissariat "Muscovy", "Kavkaz" and "Turkestan" were formed already in 1941, their officials were not destined to begin their direct duties - near Moscow, the offensive of the "iron columns of the Wehrmacht" was broken.
It is still impossible to recall what the Nazis did in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union without shuddering. The list of Nazi war crimes in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and the North Caucasus is huge. And a colossal share of the blame for them lies with Alfred Rosenberg - a man whose fanaticism largely pushed the Hitlerite leadership to those atrocities that it did not initially plan. So, it was Rosenberg who initiated the total destruction of a number of national groups of the Soviet Union (Jews, Gypsies), while at the same time he sought to cultivate anti-Russian sentiments in the occupied territories as much as possible - among Ukrainians, Belarusians, Cossacks, Baltic peoples.
Under the direct supervision of Rosenberg, cultural values were exported from the occupied cities, and, as we know, a lot of works of art, literature, just historical and cultural values were exported. There is also Rosenberg's fault in the hijacking of Soviet citizens for slave labor in Germany and other European countries. It is known that Rosenberg treated the peoples of the Soviet Union as second or even third class people. An architect by training, a theorist who did not fight or kill people, Rosenberg expressed the most bloodthirsty and antihuman ideas even in comparison with other Nazi leaders.
However, already in 1944, most of the territory of the Soviet Union was liberated. Officials of the Reichskommissariat evacuated in a hurry, fleeing the advancing units of the victorious Red Army. But Rosenberg continued to insist on the advisability of preserving his Ministry of the Eastern Territories, even when Hitler's armies were ousted from the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states. Rosenberg's desire to preserve the ministry irritated even the closest associates in the party, who already constantly made fun of the main Nazi ideologue, who was good at talking about inferior races, but practically failed to establish normal administrative work.
Nevertheless, Rosenberg remained Minister for Eastern Territories until the very last days of Hitler's Germany. After the victory, he fled to the north of the country, where the government of the official Hitlerite successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, settled. However, on May 19, 1945, at the Flensburg hospital, Alfred Rosenberg was arrested by members of the British 11th Army. He did not succeed in avoiding responsibility for crimes during the bloody war, unleashed in many respects with the direct participation of Rosenberg.
Hitler's ideologist and Minister for Eastern Territories became one of the main defendants in the famous Nuremberg Trials. Unlike many other prominent Nazi figures who at least tried to portray remorse, Alfred Rosenberg never repented of anything, at least not publicly. He refused the last word before the execution and ascended the scaffold, never renouncing the convictions that led to the death of millions of people and cost his own life. On October 16, 1946, Alfred Rosenberg ended his life on the gallows at the Nuremberg Prison. He was 53 years old.
