Rosenberg's Russia

Adolf Hitler's chief copy writer was not at his typewriter last week. Scented, elegant, pseudo-intellectual Doktor Alfred Rosenberg (not to be confused with Jewish Rosenbergs) had a new job which made him one of the biggest of big Nazi executives. He had become the Reich Minister for the East. As such he stayed in his Berlin offices, but he let his ingenious mind range over the whole 615,000 square miles--thrice the area of Germany in 1937--which Adolf Hitler had conquered in Soviet Russia and now were his to administer.

Doktor Rosenberg had as yet had little time for real administrative action. But for months his experts had been planning the economic exploitation of the conquered farms and factories. And certain social innovations might be expected. They were implicit in Doktor Rosenberg's nickname--The Jew Gobbler.

For administrative purposes the vast terrain was divided into two parts: the Ukraine and Ostland (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, White Russia). Doktor Rosenberg enraged many Ukrainian nationalists, who for years had hoped for Ukrainian independence, or a Reich Protectorate, by handing two big chunks of the Ukraine to others--Eastern Galicia to the Government of Occupied Poland, the great seaport Odessa to Rumania.

It was a proud, almost unbelievable week for the Jew Gobbler. Ever since boyhood he had dreamed dizzying dreams of holding great power in Russia. Now that they were coming true they made his role as Hitler's copy chief seem small indeed.

Rosenberg's Rise. Yet no copy writer has ever been able to pump more wordy gas into a factual vacuum than Doktor Alfred Rosenberg. Born 47 years ago in Rakvere, Estonia, he was the son of an Estonian mother and a German father who sold leather to shoemakers. Young Alfred went to high schools in Tallinn and Riga, developed a high admiration for --and a profound social inferiority complex about--noble Baltic families descended from medieval Teutonic Knights. Even at this early period it entered Alfred's head that if one cannot be born into an aristocracy, one may at least try to create an aristocracy of one's own.

When World War I began, Alfred was studying architecture in Moscow. He disapproved of the Russian nobility, who, unlike the Baltic nobles, were occasionally cordial to Jews and other social inferiors. He despised the Communists. After they took power, he had returned to Tallinn to teach drawing and preach antiSemitism. In 1919, when the Communists approached Estonia, Alfred took his leave.

Dandified Alfred Rosenberg, 26, perfumed and wearing yellow suede gloves, turned up in Munich where he sought out the tiny German Workers Party, which also disliked Jews. He talked all one night in a beer hall with one of the Party members, another middleclass, unsuccessful artist--30-year-old Adolf Hitler.

Rosenberg did most of the talking, and Adolf Hitler had never heard anything like it. He talked of a superpeople modeled on Nietzsche's "blond beasts" who would despise such feeble Christian virtues as humility and tolerance, who would glorify fighting strength and conquer the world, who would, obviously, be the reanimated German people.

Alfred Rosenberg gave Adolf Hitler words for his feelings, sales talks for what he wanted to sell. Hitler echoed and expanded them in Mein Kampf. But whereas Rosenberg was at his best across a beer-hall table, Hitler learned to yell the Rosenbergian language through the microphones to millions.

In 1921 Rosenberg drew up the program for the new National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1923, when Adolf Hitler staged his beer-hall Putsch, his torrential pamphleteer was at his side. Next day, when the parading Nazi leaders were fired upon and Adolf Hitler ducked so hard that he dislocated his arm, Alfred Rosen berg was not prominent enough to be arrested. While the imprisoned Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, Rosenberg produced his Mythos of the Twentieth Century, the secondary Nazi bible.

In this work it developed that the Greeks and Romans were actually Nordics --just as, when it later became convenient, Doktor Rosenberg pronounced the Italians "Mediterranean Nordics." The Englishman was "at once arrogant, rude and brave when he raises his hand and establishes an empire--a creative nation of masters! . . . The United States have the great task, after throwing overboard the rotten ideas upon which they were founded, of creating a racial state."

In the Mythos, published in 1930, Doktor Rosenberg called for the conquest of Russia, with the destruction of Poland and France as necessary preliminaries. He looked forward to an eventual alliance with England.

Rosenberg's Decline. After Hitler came to power, he made the mistake of sending the English-admiring Rosenberg on a visit to London. There he was snubbed by the Government leaders, and the leftist press was not very kind to an ideologist who had declared: "When we are in power, the head of a prominent Jew will be stuck on every telegraph pole between Munich and Berlin." After Doktor Rosenberg had laid a swastika wreath on the Unknown Soldier's cenotaph, a British war veteran heaved the wreath into the Thames.

This London reception cost Doktor Rosenberg the Nazi Foreign Ministry. He was removed from the political limelight and left to his scholarly studies, the classrooms where he taught young Nazis how to garble history and philosophy, and the editorship of the Voelkischer Beobachter. But he soon resumed more practical work --the secret coordination of anti-Communist groups along the Russian border from Finland to the Ukraine. During the German-Soviet Pact it was frequently stated that Doktor Alfred Rosenberg was under a cloud. But probably his Fuehrer frequently pointed out to him the silver lining.

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