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Alfred Rosenberg gave Adolf Hitler words for his feelings, sales talks for what he wanted to sell. Hitler echoed and expanded them in Mein Kampf. But whereas Rosenberg was at his best across a beer-hall table, Hitler learned to yell the Rosenbergian language through the microphones to millions.
In 1921 Rosenberg drew up the program for the new National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1923, when Adolf Hitler staged his beer-hall Putsch, his torrential pamphleteer was at his side. Next day, when the parading Nazi leaders were fired upon and Adolf Hitler ducked so hard that he dislocated his arm, Alfred Rosen berg was not prominent enough to be arrested. While the imprisoned Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, Rosenberg produced his Mythos of the Twentieth Century, the secondary Nazi bible.
In this work it developed that the Greeks and Romans were actually Nordics —just as, when it later became convenient, Doktor Rosenberg pronounced the Italians "Mediterranean Nordics." The Englishman was "at once arrogant, rude and brave when he raises his hand and establishes an empire—a creative nation of masters! . . . The United States have the great task, after throwing overboard the rotten ideas upon which they were founded, of creating a racial state."
In the Mythos, published in 1930, Doktor Rosenberg called for the conquest of Russia, with the destruction of Poland and France as necessary preliminaries. He looked forward to an eventual alliance with England.
Rosenberg's Decline. After Hitler came to power, he made the mistake of sending the English-admiring Rosenberg on a visit to London. There he was snubbed by the Government leaders, and the leftist press was not very kind to an ideologist who had declared: "When we are in power, the head of a prominent Jew will be stuck on every telegraph pole between Munich and Berlin." After Doktor Rosenberg had laid a swastika wreath on the Unknown Soldier's cenotaph, a British war veteran heaved the wreath into the Thames.
This London reception cost Doktor Rosenberg the Nazi Foreign Ministry. He was removed from the political limelight and left to his scholarly studies, the classrooms where he taught young Nazis how to garble history and philosophy, and the editorship of the Völkischer Beobachter. But he soon resumed more practical work —the secret coordination of anti-Communist groups along the Russian border from Finland to the Ukraine. During the German-Soviet Pact it was frequently stated that Doktor Alfred Rosenberg was under a cloud. But probably his Führer frequently pointed out to him the silver lining.