With this general background information in mind the first phase of proof will deal with Rosenberg as official National Socialist ideologist. The proof which I will present will show the nature and scope of the ideological tenets he expounded, and the influence he exerted upon the unification of German thought, a unification which was an essential part of the conspirators’ program for the seizure of power and preparation for aggressive war.
Rosenberg wrote extensively on, and actively participated in, virtually every aspect of the National Socialist program. His first publication was the Nature, Basic Principles, and Aims of the NSDAP. This publication appeared in 1922. Rosenberg spoke of this book in a speech which we have seen and heard delivered in the motion picture previously introduced as Exhibit Number USA-167. On Page 2, Part 1, of the transcription of the speech, which is our Document Number 3054-PS, Rosenberg stated as follows:
“During this time”—that is, during the early phase of the Party—“I wrote a short thesis which nevertheless is significant in the history of the NSDAP.”—This is Rosenberg speaking.—“It was always being asked what points of program the NSDAP had and how they were to be interpreted. Therefore I wrote the Nature, Basic Principles, and Aims of the NSDAP, and this writing made the first permanent connection for Munich and local organizations being created and friends within the Reich.”
We thus see that the original draftsman of, and spokesman on, the Party program was the Defendant Rosenberg. Without attempting to survey the entire ideological program advanced by the Defendant Rosenberg in his various writings and speeches, which are very numerous, I wish to offer into evidence certain of his statements as an indication of the nature and broad scope of the ideological program which he championed. It will be seen that there was not a single basic tenet of the Nazi philosophy which was not given authoritative expression by Rosenberg. Rosenberg wrote the book entitled Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930. This book has already been offered as Exhibit USA-352. At Page 479, which Your Honor will find on the second page of Document 3553-PS, Rosenberg wrote on the race question as follows:
“The essence of the contemporary world revolution lies in the awakening of the racial type; not in Europe alone but on the whole planet. This awakening is the organic counter movement against the last chaotic remnants of the liberal economic imperialism, whose objects of exploitation out of desperation have fallen into the snare of Bolshevik Marxism, in order to complete what democracy had begun, the extirpation of the racial and national consciousness.”
Rosenberg expounded the Lebensraum idea, which idea was the chief motivation, the dynamic impulse behind Germany’s waging of aggressive war. In his journal, the National Socialist Monatshefte, for May 1932, which I wish to offer as Exhibit Number USA-594, our Document Number 2777-PS, he wrote at Page 199:
“The understanding that the German nation, if it is not to perish in the truest sense of the word, needs ground and soil for itself and its future generations; and the second sober perception that this soil can no more be conquered in Africa, but in Europe and first of all in the East—these organically determine the German foreign policy for centuries.”
Rosenberg expressed his theory as to the place of religion in the National Socialist State in his Myth of the Twentieth Century, additional excerpts from which are cited in Document 2891-PS. At Page 215 of the “Myth” he wrote as follows:
“We now realize that the central supreme values of the Roman and the Protestant Churches being a negative Christianity do not respond to our soul, that they hinder the organic powers of the people designated as a Nordic race, that they must give way to them, that they have to be remodelled to conform to a Germanic Christianity. Therein lies the meaning of the present religious search.”
In the place of traditional Christianity, Rosenberg sought to implant the neo-pagan myth of the blood.