THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Dr. Thoma.
DR. ALFRED THOMA (Counsel for the Defendant Rosenberg): May it please the Tribunal, Mr. President, the documentary film which was shown in this room and which was to illustrate the “Rise and Fall of National Socialism,” begins with a speech delivered by Rosenberg concerning the development of the Party up to the assumption of power. He also describes the Munich insurrection and says that on the morning of 9 November 1923 he saw police cars with machine-guns assembling in the Ludwigstrasse in Munich and he knew what the march to the Feldherrnhalle implied. Nevertheless he marched in the first lines. Today also, my client takes the same position in face of the Indictment formulated by the prosecutors of the United Nations. He does not want to be pictured as though nobody paid any attention to his books, his speeches, and his publications. Even today he does not want to appear as a person other than what he was once before, a fighter for Germany’s strong position in the world, namely, a German Reich in which national freedom should be linked to social justice.
Rosenberg is a German, born in the Baltic provinces, who learned to speak Russian as a young boy, passed his examination in Moscow after the Technical College in Riga moved to Moscow during the first World War, took an interest in Russian literature and art, had Russian friends, and was puzzled by the fact that the Russian nation, defined by Dostoievsky as “the nation with God in its heart,” was overcome by the spirit of materialistic Marxism. He considered it inconceivable and unjust that the right of self-determination had indeed often been promised but never voluntarily granted to many nations of Eastern Europe which had been conquered by Czarism even in the nineteenth century.
Rosenberg became convinced that the Bolshevik revolution was not directed against certain temporary political phenomena only but against the whole national tradition, against the religious faith, against the old rural foundations of the Eastern European nations, and generally against the idea of personal property. At the end of 1918 he came to Germany and saw the danger of a Bolshevistic revolution in Germany too; he saw the whole spiritual and material civilization of the Occident endangered and believed to have found his lifework in the struggle against this danger as a follower of Hitler.
It was a political struggle against fanatical and well-organized opponents who had at their disposal international resources and international backing and who acted according to the principle: “Strike the Fascists wherever you can.” But as little as one can deduce from that slogan that the Soviets entertained intentions of military aggression against Fascist Italy, just as little can one say that the struggle of the National Socialists against Bolshevism meant a preparation for a war of aggression against the U.S.S.R.
To the Defendant Rosenberg a military conflict with the Soviet Union, especially a war of aggression against the latter, seemed as likely or as unlikely as to any German or foreign politician who had read the book Mein Kampf. It is not correct to maintain that he was initiated in any way into plans of aggression against the Soviet Union; on the contrary, he publicly advocated proper relations with Moscow (Document Rosenberg-7b, Page 147). Rosenberg never spoke in favor of military intervention against the Soviet Union. However, he did fear the entry of the Red Army into the border states and then into Germany.
When, in August 1939, Rosenberg learned about the conclusion of the Non-Aggression Pact between the Reich and the Soviet Union—he was as little informed about the preliminary discussions as he was about the other foreign political measures taken by the Führer—he might have gone to see the Führer and protested against it. He did not do it, and he did not object to it with a single word, which the witness Göring confirmed as being a statement of Hitler’s.
In the witness box Rosenberg himself described (session of 16 April 1946) how he was then suddenly called to Hitler, at the beginning of April 1941, who told him that he considered a military clash with the Soviet Union inevitable. Hitler offered two reasons for it:
(1) The military occupation of Romanian territory, namely, Bessarabia and North Bukovina.
(2) The tremendous increase of the Red Army, along the line of demarcation and on Soviet Russian territory in general, which had been going on for a long time.