Alfred Rosenberg (12 January 1893 – 16 October 1946) was the Leader of the Foreign Policy Office of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 under Nazi Germany's Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg was also Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories from 1941 to 1945, and was tried and hanged for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 after World War II.
Biography[]
Alfred Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Reval in the Russian Empire (present-day Tallinn, Estonia) to an Estonian and Latvian father and a German and French mother. During the 1917 Russian Revolution, he led some opposition to the communist revolutionaries and his family was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1918. Rosenberg became an anti-Semite and an anti-Bolshevik after moving to Munich in the Weimar Republic. In 1923, he became a member of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party and quickly rose to fame as a Nazi radicalist. He oversaw the construction of a racial ladder in Nazi Germany and saw his mission as the conquest of Slavic countries by Germany, with his attitudes on Slavs depending on where they lived. He also argued for a new religion of the blood.
Leader of the Foreign Policy Office of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, Rosenberg emitted a hostile message to many neighboring countries. Within Germany, he looted Jewish homes. After World War II's Operation Barbarossa (the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union), Rosenberg was made the Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories. Rosenberg governed all of Germany's occupied territories in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a post similar to Hans Frank in the General Government of Poland. Rosenberg oversaw the execution of Soviet prisoners-of-war, Bolsheviks, Slavs, Poles, Jews, gays, gypsies, union officials, Catholics, the disabled, priests, and other undesirables in concentration and extermination camps such as Babi-Yar, Ponary, Novogrodek, Bronna Gora, Polanka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Many of the targeted groups were either put to work, gassed, shot, or all three in these camps under his rule. He also had SS units shoot Bolshevik leaders and Jews on the spot during their movements through Russia and had Russian partisans dig graves before they were executed by summary firing squad.
Rosenberg after being hanged
Rosenberg was captured by the Allied Powers at the end of World War II and was one of the defendants tried in the 1946 Nuremberg Trials. He was one of the principal planners of the invasions of Norway and the Soviet Union as the leader of Germany's foreign affairs. He also plundered occupied countries and executed many innocent people, not to mention his many executions at extermination and concentration camps. Rosenberg was hanged for these crimes on 16 October.
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