Rosenberg, Alfred [key], 1893–1946, German Nazi leader. He was born in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), and studied architecture in Riga, and later in Moscow. Returning to Reval, he became active as a political ideologist until he fled (1919) to Germany to escape arrest for counterrevolutionary speeches. There he joined the National Socialist party and became the editor of the party organ, Völkischer Beobachter. The author of an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and neopagan book, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [the myth of the 20th cent.] (1930), he supplied Adolf Hitler with the spurious philosophical and scientific basis for his racist doctrine (see National Socialism). Rosenberg was made (1933) foreign affairs secretary of the party and distinguished himself as the foremost anti-Bolshevik among its leaders. In 1941 he was appointed minister for the occupied Eastern territories. Convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg trials, he was executed.
See his memoirs (tr. 1949) and his Selected Writings, ed. by R. Pois (1970); R. Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (1972).
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