Adolf Hitler's chief copy writer was not at his typewriter last week. Scented, elegant, pseudo-intellectual Doktor Alfred Rosenberg (not to be confused with Jewish Rosenbergs) had a new job which made him one of the biggest of big Nazi executives. He had become the Reich Minister for the East. As such he stayed in his Berlin offices, but he let his ingenious mind range over the whole 615,000 square miles—thrice the area of Germany in 1937—which Adolf Hitler had conquered in Soviet Russia and now were his to administer.
Doktor Rosenberg had as yet had little time for real administrative action. But for months his experts had been planning the economic exploitation of the conquered farms and factories. And certain social innovations might be expected. They were implicit in Doktor Rosenberg's nickname—The Jew Gobbler.
For administrative purposes the vast terrain was divided into two parts: the Ukraine and Ostland (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, White Russia). Doktor Rosenberg enraged many Ukrainian nationalists, who for years had hoped for Ukrainian independence, or a Reich Protectorate, by handing two big chunks of the Ukraine to others—Eastern Galicia to the Government of Occupied Poland, the great seaport Odessa to Rumania.
It was a proud, almost unbelievable week for the Jew Gobbler. Ever since boyhood he had dreamed dizzying dreams of holding great power in Russia. Now that they were coming true they made his role as Hitler's copy chief seem small indeed.
Rosenberg's Rise. Yet no copy writer has ever been able to pump more wordy gas into a factual vacuum than Doktor Alfred Rosenberg. Born 47 years ago in Rakvere, Estonia, he was the son of an Estonian mother and a German father who sold leather to shoemakers. Young Alfred went to high schools in Tallinn and Riga, developed a high admiration for —and a profound social inferiority complex about—noble Baltic families descended from medieval Teutonic Knights. Even at this early period it entered Alfred's head that if one cannot be born into an aristocracy, one may at least try to create an aristocracy of one's own.
When World War I began, Alfred was studying architecture in Moscow. He disapproved of the Russian nobility, who, unlike the Baltic nobles, were occasionally cordial to Jews and other social inferiors. He despised the Communists. After they took power, he had returned to Tallinn to teach drawing and preach antiSemitism. In 1919, when the Communists approached Estonia, Alfred took his leave.
Dandified Alfred Rosenberg, 26, perfumed and wearing yellow suede gloves, turned up in Munich where he sought out the tiny German Workers Party, which also disliked Jews. He talked all one night in a beer hall with one of the Party members, another middleclass, unsuccessful artist—30-year-old Adolf Hitler.
Rosenberg did most of the talking, and Adolf Hitler had never heard anything like it. He talked of a superpeople modeled on Nietzsche's "blond beasts" who would despise such feeble Christian virtues as humility and tolerance, who would glorify fighting strength and conquer the world, who would, obviously, be the reanimated German people.