DR. THOMA: You just mentioned Germany as your intellectual home. Will you tell the Tribunal by which studies and by which scientists you were influenced in favor of the German mentality?
ROSENBERG: In addition to my immediate artistic interests in architecture and painting, I had since childhood pursued historical and philosophical studies and thus, of course, instinctively I tended to read Goethe, Herder, and Fichte in order to develop intellectually along these lines. At the same time, I was influenced by the social ideas of Charles Dickens, Carlyle, and, with regard to America, by Emerson. I continued these studies at Riga and, naturally, took up Kant and Schopenhauer and, above all, devoted myself to the study of the philosophy of India and related schools of thought. Later, of course, I studied the prominent European historians of the history of civilization; Burckhardt and Rohde, Ranke and Treitschke, Mommsen and Schlieffen. Finally, in Munich I started to study modern biology more closely.
DR. THOMA: You frequently mentioned in the course of your speeches “the embodiment of the idea.” Was this due to Goethe’s influence?
ROSENBERG: Yes, it is a matter of course that the idea, to see the world as an embodiment, goes back to Goethe.
THE PRESIDENT: [To Dr. Thoma.] The Tribunal, you see, want you to confine yourself to his own philosophy and not to the origins of these philosophies, insofar as you are referring to philosophical subjects at all.
DR. THOMA: How did you come to the NSDAP and to Hitler in Munich?
ROSENBERG: In May 1919 the publisher of the journal which I mentioned was visited by a man by the name of Anton Drexler, who introduced himself as the chairman of a newly founded German Labor Party. He stated that he advocated ideas similar to those expressed by this journal, and from that time I began to have connections with a very small group of German laborers which had been formed in Munich. There in the autumn of 1919 I also met Hitler.
DR. THOMA: When did you join Hitler?
ROSENBERG: Well, at that time I had an earnest conversation with Hitler, and on that occasion I noticed his broad view of the entire European situation.
He said that in his opinion Europe was at that time in a social and political crisis, such as had not existed since the fall of the ancient Roman Empire. He said that seats of unrest were to be found everywhere in this sphere, and that he was personally striving to get a clear picture from the viewpoint of Germany’s restoration to sound conditions. Thereupon, I listened to some of the first speeches by Hitler which were made at small meetings of 40 and 50 people. I believed, above all, a soldier who had been at the front, and who had done his duty silently for 4½ years, had the right to speak now.