The Alfred Rosenberg Diary

The Museum is racing to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust -- archives, documents, photographs, videos, and artifacts -- to help us better understand this history and to bring its lessons to future generations.

Alfred Rosenberg’s diary is one such artifact that has surfaced after more than a decade of Museum efforts to find it. The roughly 400 pages of loose-leaf paper cover the years 1936 through 1944, when Rosenberg was responsible for looting valuables in lands occupied by the Nazis and planning Nazi rule of conquered Soviet territories. The discovery of the diary will undoubtedly give scholars new insight into the politics of Nazi leaders and fulfills a Museum commitment to uncover evidence from perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Robert M. W. Kempner

For almost 14 years, the Museum’s Robert M. W. Kempner Collection was incomplete. Kempner was a prominent German-Jewish jurist who opposed the Nazi Party’s rise to power. He lost his German citizenship in 1935 and in 1939 immigrated to the United States. After the war, he served as the US director of research at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, deputy chief of counsel at the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, and chief prosecutor for Case #11, known as the “Ministries Case.”

As a researcher and prosecutor, Kempner had an eye for incriminating documents. He is credited, for example, with identifying the Wannsee Protocol, which documents a meeting of high-ranking Nazi and German officials to discuss implementation of the “Final Solution.” Kempner eventually shared the Wannsee Protocol with other prosecutors, and it became a centerpiece of the evidence submitted in the Ministries Case.

[W.Z. Many scholars have reservations as to the circumstances and validity of the Wannsee Protocal "discovered" by Robert Kempner. As suggested above, high-resolution color images of all material relevant to the Wannsee Protocol in possession of the USHHM and in other locations should be made available to scholars and the general public.]

As the Nuremberg trials drew to a close, Kempner received permission from the Office of the Chief of Counsel of War Crimes to retain unclassified documents “for purposes of writing, lecturing and study.” He returned home with an unknown number of documents in his possession.

For the rest of his career, Kempner practiced law in the United States and Germany, mostly representing Jewish clients in Nazi restitution cases. He wrote articles that cited documents kept in his personal library, which other scholars did not have access to. He died in 1993, and in 1997 his heirs informed the Museum of their intention to donate a large number of documents.

Listen to the Museum’s senior advisor on archives, Henry Mayer, recount the story of how the Museum acquired the Kempner collection.

The Missing Diary

Museum staff first surveyed Kempner’s collection in August 1997 and made a detailed report of the documents they had been able to examine. After a dispute regarding the estate was resolved almost two years later, Museum staff returned to reassess the collection in July 1999. They discovered that many documents had been removed from Kempner’s home.

Some of the missing documents were located in 2001, when Kempner’s home was emptied and items were found that had not been there when the Museum took possession of the collection. Still more documents were located in 2003 in another private home.

None of these collections of documents included the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, an influential Nazi ideologue. The author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), which embodies a dichotomist worldview pitting the “Aryan” and Jewish “races” against each other, Rosenberg reached the apex of his political career when Hitler appointed him Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in July 1941. During the war years, he operated the most successful Nazi organization involved in the looting of artworks, books, and archival materials in German-occupied Europe.

After the war, Rosenberg was found guilty by the International Military Tribunal on counts of conspiracy to commit aggressive warfare, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.

It was well known in academic circles that Rosenberg had kept a diary. The US National Archives has sections of the original diary and copies of other sections. Excerpts have been published in German. In articles, Kempner quoted from parts of the diary that no one else had ever seen. However, the diary was not among any of the Kempner document caches that Museum staff had seen.

Following clues as to its location, the Museum worked with the FBI, the Department of Justice, and later a private investigator to locate the diary. In early 2013, Homeland Security Investigations special agents found it at a private company in upstate New York and it was then transferred to the Department of Homeland Security office in Wilmington, Delaware.

In Wilmington, the Museum’s director of applied research scholars, Jürgen Matthäus, examined the diary and confirmed that it was the long-sought-after Rosenberg diary. The roughly 400 pages cover the years 1936 through 1944 and are in generally good condition. As a piece of evidence gathered for the Nuremberg trials, the diary belongs to the US government, which intends to deposit it with the Museum.

Read the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement press release.

The Museum’s senior advisor on archives, Henry Mayer, said he feels a sense of fulfillment after years of searching for the diary. “To have it in safe hands, that is a great victory,” he said. As part of the Museum’s collections, the diary would be accessible to scholars and the public. While Museum scholars have yet to fully study its contents, Mayer said, “It does give details that one would never know about the politics within the top leadership of the Nazi party and the state.”

RELATED LINKS

• Alfred Rosenberg
  
• Robert Kempner
  
• “An Over 15-Year Journey”: The Robert M. W. Kempner Collection
  
• International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
  
• Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg

Long-lost diary of top Hitler aide Alfred Rosenberg found

Mysteries of the Lost (and Found) Nazi Diaries

The diaries of the top Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, which disappeared mysteriously after his 1946 hanging as a war criminal, are now in U.S. government custody. The pages have not all been read, but U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's senior archivist Henry Mayer believes the writings could turn out to be the most revealing Nazi documents ever found.

Mayer characterizes Rosenberg as "an unhappy man" disliked by top Nazi leaders including Hitler -- and Rosenberg in turn disliked them. He suggests that Rosenberg was not German but was perhaps Estonian. Mayer agrees with the theory that Rosenberg tried to prove his German identity by advocating extreme racism in theory and practice.

The diaries were the focus of a crowded press conference on June 13, 2013 in Wilmington, Delaware. John Morton, who heads the Wilmington-based Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), announced HSI's lead role in the seizure of the documents. (Related: "Final Effort to Find Nazi War Criminals.")

Morton said that the volumes were removed from the Nuremberg international war crimes tribunal by an American member of the prosecutorial team, Robert Kempner, who "smuggled" them into the U.S. but evaded scholarly inquiries about their whereabouts.

After Kempner's death in 1993 at age 93, his heirs -- his widow, their two sons, as well as other relatives and friends -- resisted handing over the documents and disagreed over who inherited what and where the diaries might be stored. But now, after a 17-year search and frequent but fruitless negotiations with the heirs, police armed with search warrants seized the documents, which Mayer has authenticated as Rosenberg's diaries.

After a day of perusing some of the 400 pages handwritten in German, Mayer could see that Rosenberg focused on certain subjects, including  brutality against Jews and other ethnic groups and forcing the civilian population of occupied Russia to serve Germany. But Mayer believes that Rosenberg's hostile comments about Nazi leaders may be even more interesting and offer new insights. Addressing the press, Mayer characterized Rosenberg's evaluations of his fellow Nazi leaders as "unvarnished."

Mayer explained to this reporter that he was not given enough time to read any diary entry from beginning to end, but that he peeked into them and "arranged" them. He is convinced that scholars will find them "very important" and that the papers will open new avenues of research. He suggested that the documents will offer revelations.

But, Mayer noted to the press, it may take a long time, possibly years, for scholars to complete their analyses of the diaries.

The diaries were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. On June 13, 2013 they were rehoused in cartons and displayed in HSI headquarters in Wilmington. Morton explained to the press that they will be taken to the U.S. Department of Justice, which will come up with a precise legal definition of their status. Next, the documents will be delivered to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, which has agreed to present them to the Holocaust Museum for study and display.

According to HSI spokesperson Ross Feinstein, "some time ago" HSI took over from the FBI the case of the missing Rosenberg diaries, as well as the many pending investigations of Nazi art thefts. In the segments of the diaries that Mayer read, he learned that Rosenberg was deeply involved in organizing the expropriation of art owned by Jews. The diaries may give new clues to the ongoing investigations.

The recovery of the diaries may lead to investigations of another sort. Herbert Warren Richardson of Lewiston, N.Y., who says he is an academic and publisher, is suspected of hiding the documents, which were stolen from the U.S. government. He may be charged with a criminal act, but the speakers who addressed the press conference emphasized that they are not allowed to say a word about the case. Speaking with several officials, this reporter learned that much depends on what Richardson will disclose about the documents and whether he agrees to hand over additional documents he is suspected to have stashed away. One scholar who had contact with him suggests that he is a difficult eccentric.

"This is an ongoing investigation," Morton stressed, pointing out that delicate legal matters need to be settled, such as permissions from the courts.

Addressing the press, Morton called the diaries "a window" into Rosenberg's "dark soul." Mayer talked about the additional 350 feet of documents seized from the Kempner cache as possibly containing important new material. But, he suggested, at this stage we know very little.

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