Long-lost diary of top Hitler aide offers window into Nazi soul
U.S. officials on
Thursday unveiled the 400-page diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a top aide to
Adolf Hitler, who oversaw the genocide against Jews and others during
World War Two.
The diary disappeared after the
Nuremberg trials in 1946, sparking a nearly 70-year hunt that ended on
April 5 in the upstate New York town of Lewiston, at the home of an
academic named Herbert Richardson.
The
diary pages, hand-written in German and not yet completely translated
into English by scholars, offers a broader look at the Third Reich's
policies and practices, as well as an unvarnished account of a Nazi
leader's thoughts, authorities said at a news conference on Thursday.
"These
400 pages are a window into the dark soul of one of the great wrongs in
human history," said John Morton, director of U.S. Immigrations and
Customs Enforcement, which investigates cases of missing cultural
property. "It's significant because, as time marches on, there are fewer
living witnesses of what happened during the Holocaust. We still don't
know the full extent."
Pages of the
diary, which will eventually be turned over to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., were shown to reporters, including
one entry dated April 1941.
Rosenberg describes walking alone after "an important meeting" with Hitler, who told him: "Your great hour has come."
Museum
senior adviser Henry Mayer, who had been searching for the diary for 17
years, noted Rosenberg did not elaborate in the entry.
"What Hitler described was so great, he couldn't put it down," Mayer told reporters.
U.S.
officials have long suspected that a prosecutor, Robert Kempner,
smuggled the diary back to the United States after the Nuremberg trial.
Born in Germany,
Kempner 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 extermination of 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.
After his
death in 1993, heirs to his estate agreed to forfeit his possessions to
the U.S. holocaust museum, but that agreement hit road blocks and the
diary was never found.
However in
1999, when cleaning out Kempner's home in suburban Philadelphia, a man
found 40 boxes of documents, including papers outlining the Nazi's
"aggressive war against and the plundering, spoliation and the economic
exploitation of the Soviet Union by the Nazi regime," according to a
2003 court filing. But the diary was not among the materials.
"That
was what we were looking for, that's what was so frustrating," said
Robert Wittman, the founder of the FBI's Art Crime Team, and now a
private art security consultant.
In recent months, Wittman and his son, Jeffrey, helped ICE locate the diary in New York.
The
diary offers Rosenberg's recollections from the spring of 1936 to the
winter of 1944, according to an analysis by the Holocaust museum. 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 stationery,
according to a U.S. government analysis obtained by Reuters.
"Although
it is a reminder of a dark time, the Rosenberg Diary is important to
our understanding of history," said U.S. Attorney Charles M. Oberly.
"Our hope is that it will provide valuable insight to historians."
REUTERS