An Estonian who joined Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1919 and became editor of the party newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, and a leading ideologist of the Nazi movement. In 1934, he published The Myth of the Twentieth Century in support of Nazi Racism. The use of “myth” in his title is not intended to disparage; on the contrary the myth is of the purity of the German’s Nordic qualities and their superiority over most, if not all, other supposed types Jews, Catholics, and so on. His theories claimed to provide the intellectual underpinnings for the Nazi racist policies and the brutal acts of genocide and repression that the Nazis carried out. Rosenberg was continuing and extending a German tradition of Nordic supremacy and anti- Semitism that was largely developed in the 19th century from the works of Frenchman Comte Joseph D. gobineau and of composer Richard Wagner’s English son-in- law Houston Stewart chamberlain. His pseudoscientific theories gained support from respectable contemporary scientific academics such as Professor Hans Friedrich K. Gunther of the University of Jena. Anti-Semitism ran deep in the German psyche and was fertile ground for exploitation.
In 1923, Rosenberg republished The Protocols of Zion, a work that was presented as the record of meetings where Jewish leaders planned to control the world. The work was already known to be a fraud, a revision of an 1865 book by Maurice Joly that attacked Napoleon III and had nothing to do with Jews, but it made useful ammunition for Hitler’s campaign.