Alfred Rosenberg (1890-1947) was an early Nazi, whose early reputation came from his book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and whose titles included Reichleiter, Chief of the Foreign Office of the Party (as opposed to Nazi Foreign Minister), Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, Commissioner of the Fuehrer for the Safeguarding of the National Socialist Philosophy, Commissioner for the Central Control of Questions Connected to the East European Region, and Reich Minister for the Eastern European Territories. Especially for that last role, he was hanged as a Major War Criminal at Nuremberg.
After the early days, he was not an important force in the Party. Airey Neave quotes Joseph Goebbels as saying "Rosenberg almost managed to become a scholar, a journalist, a politician, but only almost. When he confessed at Nuremberg that "National Socialism is the noblest idea to which a German could devote the strength which he has been given," Neave said Hitler and Goering despised him for his beliefs.
While he had responsibilities for ideology, it was not in the same sense of the Ideologist of the Soviet Union, who vetted all serious decisions. Philosophy is more general and perhaps more appropriate. His work also had a good deal of Nazi race and biological ideology, again an ideology for one part of a program but not an overarching one.
PhilosophyIn Myth, he wrote,
The essence of the contemporary world revolution lies in the awakening of the racial types, not in Europe alone but on the whole planet. This awakening is the organic counter movement against the last chaotic remnants of liberal economic imperialism, whose object of exploitation out of desperation has fallen into the snare of Bolshevik Marxism, in order to complete what democracy had begun, the extirpation of the racial and national consciousness.</blockqute> Many Nazis found it unintelligible, although, like the slightly more readable Mein Kampf, many copies sold. Goebbels called it an "ideological belch". Hitler said it was a "derivative pastiche, illogical rubbish."
- Airey Neave (1978), On Trial at Nuremberg, Little, Brown, p. 103
- Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression, Volume II, Chapter XVI, at 593-615