May 1942, Riga, Latvia. The city lives under German occupation, and the new Nazi order already reaches into every part of daily life. Since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Baltic states have been absorbed into a system of foreign rule built on military force, racial ideology, and administrative control. Streets, railway stations, offices, and public buildings now serve the occupier. Jewish communities have already been devastated by mass shootings, ghettos, arrests, and deportations. Food, labour, and raw materials are being redirected toward the
needs of the Reich, while fear and uncertainty spread through a region that has already passed from Soviet rule into another form of violence and occupation. One of the chief political architects of German rule in Eastern Europe responsible for the mass murder of millions is Alfred Rosenberg. Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in the city of Reval, today’s Tallinn and the capital of Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. He grew up in a Baltic German family and his life was marked by early loss, because his mother Elfriede died
shortly after his birth and his father Woldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg died when he was still young. After completing his basic studies he studied architecture first in Riga and later in Moscow, and these years proved decisive for his political development. In revolutionary Russia he witnessed the collapse of tsarist Russia and the violence of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Under the influence of Russian émigré circles and antisemitic conspiracy theories, he interpreted these events as the result of a supposed Jewish-directed plot.
From that point onward, he increasingly fused anti-Bolshevism with antisemitism and built a worldview in which Jews were blamed for revolution, instability, and modern decline. After leaving Russia in 1918, Rosenberg went first to his hometown and later to Germany. He went to Munich, where he joined the early Nazi movement and soon became a writer who supplied ideological language and historical myths to the Nazi movement. During the Weimar Republic, the democratic German state founded after the First World War, he published a series
of antisemitic texts and conspiracy driven pamphlets in which he claimed that Judaism, Freemasonry, finance, liberalism, and Bolshevism were all parts of one single destructive force. He helped spread the lie that the Russian Revolution had a Jewish character and played an important role in giving the Nazi movement its enduring obsession with so-called Judeo-Bolshevism. Rosenberg’s influence inside the Nazi movement grew steadily and in November 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler, who had been imprisoned for treason,
appointed Alfred Rosenberg as the leader of the Nazi movement in his absence. Rosenberg was seen as weak in this role and in the following years he focused more on the ideology of the Nazi party. He wrote for the Völkischer Beobachter, the main Nazi Party newspaper that spread propaganda and agitation, and in 1930 published The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the book that made his name as one of National Socialism’s leading ideologues. In it, he tried to construct a racial philosophy of history in which the so-called Aryan race stood at the summit of civilization,
while Jews were depicted as a corrosive anti-race that threatened all healthy nations from within. The work was often mocked even by some fellow Nazis, yet it contributed to an intellectual climate shaped by scholars and ideologues, in which exclusion, persecution, and later extermination were presented as historically necessary. Rosenberg’s ideas also reached beyond race alone. He attacked Christianity in its traditional form, called for a Germanic reshaping of belief, and imagined a future racial order that
would reorganise society, culture, and politics according to Nazi principles. Rosenberg was also elected as a member of the German Parliament – the Reichstag – in the September 1930 election, representing the Nazi Party. He would continue to serve in this capacity until the end of the Nazi regime. When Adolf Hitler came to power on 30 January 1933, Rosenberg entered the upper ranks of the Nazi regime. He took on positions linked to propaganda, culture, and foreign affairs and also oversaw institutions that were meant to supervise ideological education
and shape cultural life inside the Third Reich. Yet his importance became especially visible during the Second World War, which started on 1 September 1939 when Germany attacked Poland. In July 1940, a few weeks after Nazi Germany defeated France, Rosenberg created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, an organisation tasked with seizing cultural property in occupied territories. Rosenberg directed the plunder of libraries, archives, museums and private collections across occupied Europe, but his newly formed organisation did not simply steal objects.
It was part of a larger project especially directed against Jews, whose homes, archives, books, and artworks were confiscated as they were stripped of rights, property, and finally life. On 17 July 1941, less than a month after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The ministry was responsible for administering large areas of conquered land, including the Baltic region, Belarus, and Ukraine. The ministry was not created to protect the local population or restore civil
life – it was designed to impose German control, organise exploitation and coordinate a policy of mass murder in Eastern Europe. Under Rosenberg’s authority, the Baltic states were incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the civil occupation structure that governed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Belarus. The occupation combined army power, police terror, administrative regulation, and economic extraction. Local institutions were subordinated to German rule. Food and raw materials were
directed toward the German war effort and the region was treated as colonial space. At the same time, Rosenberg’s ministry took part in the persecution and destruction of Jews. The Baltic region became one of the first parts of occupied Europe where the war against the Soviet Union quickly merged with systematic mass murder. Rosenberg was open about this topic when during a press conference in November 1941 he said: “Some six million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a biological
extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and it will only be solved for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals… And to this end, it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or otherwise bring about their eradication.” According to this policy and Rosenberg’s plans Jews were rounded up, shot in forests and ravines, confined in ghettos, used for forced labour, and deported.
By the time Rosenberg arrived in Riga in May 1942, the Jewish communities of the Baltic states had already suffered catastrophic destruction. His ministry helped provide the administrative framework for segregation, ghettoisation, and the seizure of property, while the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organisation, carried out the killings with ruthless speed. Rosenberg’s ministry was also represented at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, where senior officials coordinated the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question,
meaning the systematic extermination of European Jewry. It was the only ministry represented by two officials, which shows how deeply it was involved in the policies being implemented. Rosenberg’s importance in the East lay in the connection he embodied between ideology and administration. He was not the man standing at execution pits or directing camp guards on a daily basis, but he helped create the world in which such actions became state policy. As the war turned against Germany after 1943, the empire Rosenberg had helped to design in the East
began to collapse. As Soviet military victories shattered the illusion of permanent German rule in Eastern Europe and in the Baltic region, Rosenberg remained tied to the shrinking structures of the Nazi regime until its final moments. During the Battle of Berlin, he was still in the German capital, but as the city came under direct assault and the Nazi state began to disintegrate, the government ministries and surviving leaders were evacuated. After Hitler’s last birthday on 20 April 1945, Rosenberg was told to leave Berlin and move north with the remnants of the
collapsing regime. By this stage, Rosenberg’s position had become almost non-existent. On 6 May 1945, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had succeeded Hitler as head of state, informed him in writing that he would no longer continue as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories nor would he have any role in his new government. This did not mean much, because just a few days later, on 8 May 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. On 18 May 1945, Rosenberg was captured by Allied forces at the naval hospital in Flensburg –
Mürwik, a city near the Danish border, and was transported through various places till August 1945 when he was transferred to Nuremberg to stand trial. – Jorge please go with this option. On 20 November 1945, the Nuremberg Trial against the major war criminals began. Rosenberg was charged on four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Rosenberg attempted to minimise his responsibility and like many
of the defendants, he tried to shift blame onto other leaders of the regime who were already dead. He presented himself as a thinker and administrator rather than as a direct criminal. He claimed limited knowledge about the atrocities, denied full responsibility, and sought to separate ideas from consequences. However, the tribunal did not accept this defence and the judges recognised that Rosenberg’s role as an ideologue was itself politically significant and that his later ministerial office connected him directly to the administration of occupied
territories where enormous crimes had been carried out. The court found that his ministry had been involved in policies of exploitation and persecution and that he shared responsibility for forced labour measures and for the criminal system of mass murder established by Nazi Germany. Rosenberg’s conduct in prison and during the trial showed no moral reflection. He never expressed genuine remorse for the destruction of Jewish life, for the suffering of civilians in occupied Eastern Europe, or for the millions who had died under the system he had helped to shape.
On 1 October 1946, the International Military Tribunal found Alfred Rosenberg guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging. In the early hours of 16 October 1946, Rosenberg was led to the gallows in the Nuremberg prison together with other condemned Nazi leaders. He did not offer a final statement of remorse and according to the record, when asked whether he had any last words, he replied simply, “No.” The 53-year-old Rosenberg was executed by American Army sergeant John C. Woods,
who was deliberately bad at his job making the 10 Nuremberg war criminals that he executed that same day suffer as they all died a long agonizing death. They fell from the gallows with a drop insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation that in some cases lasted several minutes. In Rosenberg’s case it was 14 long minutes before he died. After that, his corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Wenzbach, a small tributary of the River Isar.
