The diary, which disappeared seven decades ago during the Nuremberg trials, was believed to have been smuggled out of Germany by US prosecutor Robert Kempner. The Homeland Security investigators found the diary earlier this year in Lewiston, New York. The lost pages have been handed over to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Alfred Rosenberg was one of Hitler’s senior henchman and he was involved in the killing of millions of Jewish people. In the diary he wrote about having lunch with Adolf Hitler, who was a vegetarian and who started telling him about the evils of meat.
No official translation has yet been available, however, a basic translation reveals that in February, 1941, Hitler told Rosenberg that sick children need fruit and vegetables to get better and not meat. Hitler also said that vegetarian people are ‘the tenacious forces of life.’
Rosenberg wrote about his travels in and around Germany as he tried to inspire the Nazi forces before the war. He wrote about meeting with Hermann Goering with who he discussed ‘ethno-psychological foreign policy’.
He was charged during the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946, the Mail Online reports.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum has recently posted some scans of the found pages on its website. Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the museum said that the diary will give people another perspective on Hitler’s extremist ideology which led to Nazism.
Kempner, who is believed to have stolen the papers after the Nuremberg trials and brought them to the United States, was born in Germany but moved to America in the 1930s to escape the Nazis.
Although Kempner mentioned some of the diary’s excerpts in his memoir, and a German historian did the same in 1956, the whole diary was never found until this year. When Kempner died in 1993, the museum officials went searching for the lost diary but couldn’t find it among his documents.
The search for the long-lost documents began in 1996, when two former secretaries of Kempner’s brought a collection of papers to the Holocaust museum. Later on, the museum’s official found out that the diary has been taken by the two secretaries and ‘another gentleman from upstate New York’.
It was found in April with the help of a former FBI agent.
Rosenberg was also involved in Hitler’s plan to destroy Europe’s most precious works of art. In 1930, he published a book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, in which he emphasized the superiority of Aryan culture. In 1941, he became Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
In his diary he wrote about a 1941 conference, where 10 European countries were represented at an anti-Jewish meeting. During the conference, the ten representatives discussed the removal of the Jewish race from Europe.