Diary of Hitler's Confidant Found

[Nickdfresh]

CNN is reporting something on a major find of a diary found in Buffalo, NY in possession of an academic that is purportedly a diary of a close Hitler confidant. There is now a criminal investigation over how it got here…

Nazi diary by Adolf Hitler confidante sheds new light on evil
Alfred Rosenberg, executed for his war crimes in 1946, played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War Two.
REUTERS
Monday, June 10, 2013, 7:45 AM

Defendant Alfred Rosenberg, the former Chief Nazi Party Ideologist, sits in his jail cell during the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg in this photograph taken by a United States Army Signal Corps photographer in Nuremberg on November 24, 1945. Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg after his conviction. The U.S. government has recovered 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Rosenberg, a confidant of Adolf Hitler who played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War Two. To match Exclusive NAZI-DIARY/ REUTERS/United States Army Signal Corps/Handout (GERMANY - Tags: CRIME LAW POLITICS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY PROFILE)

Alfred Rosenberg sits in his jail cell during the International Military Tribunal trial of war criminals at Nuremberg in November 1945. Four hundred pages of his diary, about tensions within the German high command, were recently recovered.

The U.S. government has recovered 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a confidante of Adolf Hitler who played a central role in the extermination of millions of Jews and others during World War II.

A preliminary government assessment reviewed by Reuters asserts the diary could offer new insight into meetings Rosenberg had with Hitler and other top Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering. It also includes details about the German occupation of the Soviet Union, including plans for mass killings of Jews and other Eastern Europeans.

“The documentation is of considerable importance for the study of the Nazi era, including the history of the Holocaust,” said the assessment, prepared by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich’s policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that compliments, and in part contradicts, already known documentation.”

How the writings of Rosenberg, a Nazi Reich minister who was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946, might contradict what historians believe to be true is unclear. Further details about the diary’s contents could not be learned, and a U.S. government official stressed that the museum’s analysis remains preliminary.

But the diary does include details about tensions within the German high-command — in particular, the crisis caused by the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the looting of art throughout Europe, according to the preliminary analysis.

The recovery is expected to be announced this week at a news conference in Delaware, to be held jointly by officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Holocaust museum.

The diary offers a loose collection of Rosenberg’s recollections from spring 1936 to winter 1944, according to the museum’s analysis. Most entries are written in Rosenberg’s looping cursive, some on paper torn from a ledger book and others on the back of official Nazi stationary, the analysis said.

Rosenberg was an early and powerful Nazi ideologue, particularly on racial issues. He directed the Nazi party’s foreign affairs department and edited the Nazi newspaper. Several of his memos to Hitler were cited as evidence during the post-war Nuremberg trials.

Rosenberg also directed the systematic Nazi looting of Jewish art, cultural and religious property throughout Europe. The Nazi unit created to seize such artifacts was called Task Force Reichsleiter Rosenberg.

He was convicted of crimes against humanity and was one of a dozen senior Nazi officials executed in October 1946. His diary, once held by Nuremberg prosecutors as evidence, vanished after the trial.

A Nuremberg prosecutor, Robert Kempner, was long suspected by U.S. officials of smuggling the diary back to the U.S.

Born in Germany, Kempner had fled to America in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, only to return for post-war trials. He is credited with helping reveal the existence of the Wannsee Protocol, the 1942 conference during which Nazi officials met to coordinate the genocide against the Jews, which they termed “The Final Solution.”

Kempner cited a few Rosenberg diary excerpts in his memoir, and in 1956 a German historian published entries from 1939 and 1940. But the bulk of the diary never surfaced.

When Kempner died in 1993 at age 93, legal disputes about his papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. The children agreed to give their father’s papers to the Holocaust museum, but when officials arrived to retrieve them from his home in 1999, they discovered that many thousands of pages were missing.

After the 1999 incident, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the missing documents. No charges were filed in the case.

But the Holocaust museum has gone on to recover more than 150,000 documents, including a trove held by Kempner’s former secretary, who by then had moved into the New York state home of an academic named Herbert Richardson.

The Rosenberg diary, however, remained missing.

Early this year, the Holocaust museum and an agent from Homeland Security Investigation tried to locate the missing diary pages. They tracked the diary to Richardson, who was living near Buffalo.

Richardson declined to comment. A government official said more details would be announced at the news conference.

News Wire Services

REUTERS

[JR11]

Very interesting - at least I hope it will be. Why does the term, “Hitler Diaries” rise in my mind ? Leaving that aside, and bearing in mind the usual reservations in dealing with diaries, memoirs and such documents (especially where created by politicians of any sort), there must be some caution on how useful this document might turn out to be. True, Rosenberg was one of the earliest members of the National Socialist Workers’ Party (earlier than Hitler). True, he would appear to have played an important part in synthesising Nazi racial theory, and in carrying into such “thinking” the ideas of such luminaries as H.S. Chamberlain. However, he was not the only person who might have been involved in this. Hitler, for example, became an intimate friend of the (Richard) Wagner family quite early on, and H.S. Chamberlain (died 1927) was a member of that family by marriage. There were other routes, such as this, through the pseudo-respectable racist notions of “seers” such as Chamberlain might have found their way to Hitler in particular in a more palatable form than that supplied by Rosenberg.

Which brings us to his published writings and, in particular, to “The Myth of the 20th Century”, sometimes referred to as one of the two great unread bestsellers of the Third Reich. I have endured reading the other, “Mein Kampf”; I must admit that I have never essayed the “Myth”. However, I understand that it is (like Chamberlain’s great book) a preposterous mismash of non-history, non-science and peculiar religious/philosophical nonsense, and a very, very difficult read. All indications are that, while they would have approved of its vigorous anti-Semitism, the Nazi leadership in general found the meal served up to them by Rosenberg unpalatable and, at most, took from it the limited amount that suited their purposes and were inclined to dismiss the rest as rubbish. One important self-limiting aspect of Rosenberg’s theorising was its attempt to establish a hierarchy of races. The fact that Jews and Africans were at the bottom was, from the Nazi leadership’s viewpoint, fine. The bit about there being a hierarchy within the Aryan peoples, which included Slavs as Indo-Aryans of a type inferior to the Germans and other north-western Europeans, was a lot less convenient. The top Nazi leadership - Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann - were essentially practical politicians (of their awful type) who would never let nonsense like this get in their way. Even Himmler (whose neo-Pagan tendencies went somewhere close to Rosenberg’s views) never let any school of Germanic mysticism (even his own) obstruct the practical aspects of establishing his “SS State”, either in central Europe or in the East.

This seems to be reflected in Rosenberg’s experience as an administrator following the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union. His Reich Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories enjoyed precious little influence over what actually happened in the Occupied Eastern Territories. The view that these should be organised as a string of buffer states, held by Rosenburg and Ribbentrop, was comprehensively blocked by Hitler, in concert with Himmler and Bormann. Rosenberg’s mantra of complaint against the brutal, exploitative treatment of the lesser Aryan Slavs was, basically, ignored. More generally, Rosenberg’s social and religious views, involving strong anti-Christian and, specifically, anti-Roman Catholic beliefs and a devotion of a largely philosophical notion of religion that might be described (if somewhat over-simplistically) as Christianity with Christ, but effectively without God, was rightly regarded as impractical by the Nazi leadership that, whatever their personal beliefs, had to direct a nation which was still overwhelmingly Christian, one way or the other.

All of this seems to have resulted in a situation in which Rosenberg was increasingly marginalised in the regime’s policy formation, and in which Hitler and other leaders were inclined to placate Rosenberg to his face while expressing mockery and/or exasperation about his views behind his back. Perhaps, assuming that these papers are proved to be genuine, this picture may change, and the “diaries” may reveal a surprisingly effective version of Rosenberg and/or throw some real new light on the inner workings of the Third Reich. Clearly, we must wait and see. Best regards, JR.