The Myth of the Twentieth Century
The document accompanying the prize "praises Rosenberg as a 'person who has, in a scientific and penetrating manner, laid the firm foundation for an understanding of the ideological bases of National Socialism'".
[5][6][7] Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties Rosenberg followed a long line of European racialist authors,[8] including Arthur de Gobineau (author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) but his most important "source" was the British philosopher and scientific racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
He equates the latter with the Nordic peoples of northern Europe and also includes the Berbers from North Africa (this story apparently deriving from the Kabyle myth invented by French colonists) and the upper classes of Ancient Egypt (all presumably migrating from Atlantis).
He argues that the Nazis must purify the race soul by eliminating non-Aryan elements in much the same ruthless and uncompromising way in which a surgeon would cut a cancer from a diseased body.
In Rosenberg's mythological take on world history, migrating Aryans founded various ancient civilizations which later declined and fell due to inter-marriage with lesser races.
Rosenberg wrote anti-Indian racist statements regarding Hinduism, but respected the earlier forms of it which he saw as not being racially admixed with the natives of India.
Another myth, to which he gave credence, was the idea of Atlantis, which he claimed might preserve a memory of an ancient Aryan homeland: And so today the long derived hypothesis becomes a probability, namely that from a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out in obedience to the ever renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape.
[citation needed]Johannes Steizinger writes "Rosenberg clearly played a major role in the establishment of Nazi ideology" and that "Ideology is regarded as a necessary, but not sufficient cause for participation in genocide"[11] During the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Robert H. Jackson referred to the book as a "dreary treatise[s] advocating a new and weird Nazi religion".
Adolf Hitler declared that it was not to be considered official ideology of the Nazi Party[15] and he privately described the book as "mysticism" and "nonsense".
"[19] Gustave Gilbert, the prison psychologist during the Nuremberg Trials, reported that none of the Nazi leaders he interviewed had read Rosenberg's writings.
[20] However Gilbert's notes from the Nuremberg trials repeatedly show Rosenberg's influence [21] At lunch von Papen commented, "Dodd asked him if he knew that Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, had read his works.
[25] His second reply, Protestant Pilgrims to Rome: The Treason Against Luther and the Myth of the Twentieth Century, argued that modern Lutheranism was becoming too close to Catholicism.
