Back to reading WWII books, I see. Yes, I am. I genuinely can’t help myself no matter how hard I try. I feel as though I am not entirely to blame because of each book published every year, I’d wager a high percentage are about WWII. Like how I kept it vague without any real statistics? This might be an interesting task for my data visualization loving husband. I could ask him to make me some sort of chart showing books published in the last year and their subject matter. Then we will test my little theory. I’d have to go major publishing houses because otherwise how would I collect all that data? Anyway, you see, I am off on a crazy tangent… just like this book! Did you see what I did there? Yes, I brought it home to you.
Who is Alfred Rosenberg? Well, if you haven’t read the hundreds (thousands? millions?) of books about WWII, Rosenberg was an “idea man” and if you know anything about the Nazi’s and their ideas, you can rest assured he was a nasty piece of work. While Rosenberg isn’t the only person who pushed the Final Solution, his anti Semitic writings and conveniently incorrect philosophical writings were very influential, particular to Adolf Hitler. Though Rosenberg isn’t one of the people who gets a great amount of press, he was the architect of the Nazi’s fanatical anti church pro revised Aryan paganism stance. He was directly responsible for persecution of several Catholic leaders. Rosenberg also came up with the little plan to loot art across Europe, initially to “preserve” the good stuff but also to finance the war. His role in this issue is often overlooked as Goering and several other ranking officials took up stealing priceless treasures with a vengeance that Rosenberg just couldn’t match. Like I said, a real charmer.
This book also focuses on the life of Robert Kempner (also, not a very nice man if you want my honest assessment, and not just because he abandoned his children across Europe to save his own skins, but also because he wasn’t much of a team player, more on that later), one of the prosecutors (German born) at the Nuremberg Trials and the reason it took such a long time for Rosenberg’s private diaries to come to light. The whole first portion of the book actually speaks about Kempner and the challenge that the US Government and the Holocaust Museum of DC had to recover the diaries after Kempner essentially stole them during the Nuremberg trials in order to write his own books on the subject later on. Kempner deliberately obstructed his own team on numerous occasion by withholding documents, and taking others that he wasn’t authorized to have. Really, he was a bit of a jerk. Then the book zig zags focussing on the life of Alfred Rosenberg, and the life of Robert Kempner.
I didn’t love the organization of this book. I feel the Kempner portion was either unneeded or an entire book could have been written solely about his role in WWII and the subsequent recovery of Rosenberg’s missing papers. Trying to put everything into a book supposedly devoted to Rosenberg was a bit of a stretch. It didn’t meld terribly well. Also, the title itself was misleading. There are very few actual excerpts of what Rosenberg wrote, but more of an overview of his life and the types of things he was writing at the time. The book followed how Rosenberg’s own ideology changed as his importance within the Nazi Party grew and his power struggles with Hitler’s other favorite cronies. While this is interesting reading material, it doesn’t really add to a WWII narrative in a meaningful way. These stories have been told before. I would only recommend this book to people who read primarily WWII history.
RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI