Nazi Diary Found: Alfred Rosenberg, Third Reich Minister, Detailed Plans for Final Solution
A Nazi diary was found in an upstate N.Y. home years after its author, Hitler confidant and Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg, had been executed for his crimes. The 400 pages span years of the Holocaust, with detailed Nazi meetings, looting of Jewish art, and the Third Reich's plans for Jews recorded.
The Nazi diary was found in the possession of a former secretary to a Nuremberg trials prosecutor, Robert Kempner, by the U.S. government. Although government sources would not divulge exactly how the writings were discovered, it was agreed that Rosenberg's nearly decade-long journal was a significant historical find.
"The documentation is of considerable importance for the study of the Nazi era, including the history of the Holocaust," an assessment prepared by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington read. "A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich's policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that compliments, and in part contradicts, already known documentation."
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It is currently known exactly which ideas historians have about the Holocaust and Third Reich policy, but more details will be given out at a Delaware news conference to be held this week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Justice and the Holocaust museum.
Rosenberg hand-wrote the diary from the spring of 1936 to the winter of 1944, recording Rudolf Heiss' flight to Britain in 1941, the plans for the extermination of the Jewish people and other European minorities, and the seizure of cultural art throughout Europe. Rosenberg was convicted of war crimes as a Nazi minister and hanged in October 1946, but the diary vanished, according to Reuters.
Officials suspected Kempner had taken the diary, especially after citing some of it in his memoir. After he died in 1993 at age 93, legal battles were waged over his affects, and his children eventually bowed to pressure from the Holocaust museum to release the papers. However, they still refused to hand over the diary.
Eventually, Homeland Security and the Holocaust museum were able to track the diary to Kempner's secretary, who had moved near Buffalo, N.Y.
