Nazi party member and theorist Alfred Rosenberg in his jail cell, Nuremberg Germany, 1945 (Harvard Law School Library)
Before it mysteriously vanished almost seven decades ago, the private diary of Alfred Rosenberg, Adolf Hitler's “chief philosopher” and a key member of his inner circle, provided a rare firsthand account of the Nazi rise to power and the genesis of the Holocaust.
The diary was discovered hidden in a Bavarian castle at war’s end, and its more than 400 handwritten pages provided a harrowing glimpse into the mind of a man whose ideas set the stage for the Final Solution. Rosenberg had documented his role in the seizure of priceless artwork and the brutal occupation of the Soviet Union, his conversations with Hitler, and his endless rivalries with Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler—offering a look at the innermost workings of the Nazi regime. Prosecutors examined the diary during the Nuremberg war crimes trial, but after Rosenberg was convicted, sentenced, and executed, it mysteriously vanished.
Robert K. Wittman, a former FBI agent and a private consultant specializing in recovering artifacts of historic significance, first learned of the diary in 2001, when the chief archivist of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum alerted him that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars.
That phone call sparked a decade-long hunt that took them on a twisting path involving a pair of octogenarian secretaries, an eccentric professor, and an opportunistic trash-picker. From the crusading Nuremberg prosecutor who smuggled the diary out of Germany to the man who finally turned it over, Wittman found that everyone had reasons for hiding the truth.
Wittman, co-author of The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich (HarperCollins), discusses his role in the diary’s recovery, the circuitous route it followed until it was found in 2013, and the chilling insights Rosenberg’s writings provide into the foundations and the deadly operations of Nazism.
Wittman’s book is available for signing.
Other Connections
The Alfred Rosenberg diary is now part of the Robert M. W. Kempner Collection of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, named for the German-Jewish jurist who served as assistant U.S. chief counsel during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Learn more about the diary’s contents and significance, and see scans and German-language transcripts of its pages in one of the museum’s online exhibitions.
