A long lost Nazi diary which was written by a war criminal during the second world war has been recovered and published online. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum recovered the personal account, known as the Rosenberg Diary.
The diary, kept by a close confidant of the Fuher himself called Alfred Rosenberg, outlines the Nazi’s fascist theories which ultimately led to the death of more than six million Jews.
The diary, which has been mysteriously missing since 1946, wasn’t easy to recover as the museum worked closely with law enforcement agents to get their hands on it.
Sara Bloomfield, the museum director, said at a ceremony that the 425-page diary was now “in its proper home.”
The diary offers a unique insight into the Nazi war machine and the thinking behind the final solution, which aimed to destroy Jewry completely.
It is available to the public online, in the archives section of the museum’s website, with a transcript in German . The writings cover a whole decade, from 1934-44.
In their search for the Rosenberg diary, the museum finally traced it to the home of Herbert Warren Richardson, a publisher from Buffalo, New York.
Rosenberg himself was a chief racial theorist and a good friend of Adolf Hitler. He was the thinking behind the idea that Germans were the “master race,” and superior to all other people – including their fellow Europeans.
Rosenberg was captured by allied forces at the end of the war, and convicted of war crimes during the Nuremberg trials. He was executed at the end of 1946 at the age of 53.
Museum director Bloomfield said of the Nazi diary at the ceremony:
“The Rosenberg diary will add to our understanding of the ideas that animated the extremist ideology of Nazism. We are grateful to our partners at ICE who helped us secure this important piece of history, a significant addition in our urgent efforts to rescue the evidence of the Holocaust.”