Filched Rosenberg Diaries Recovered

The U.S. Government has announced the recovery of 400 pages from the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a Reich minister who was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946. The announcement was accompanied by a cryptic statement prepared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"A cursory content analysis indicates that the material sheds new light on a number of important issues relating to the Third Reich's policy. The diary will be an important source of information to historians that compliments, and in part contradicts, already known documentation."

How the writings of Rosenberg might contradict already known documentation is unclear. Further details about the diary's contents could not be learned, and a U.S. government official stressed that the museum's analysis remains preliminary.

The Diaries had been held by the Nuremberg prosecution team. It now appears that they were swiped by US prosecutor Robert Kempner. Ironically, Rosenberg was charged with stealing cultural artifacts. There is also no mention of returning Mr. Rosenberg's papers to his family

David Irving blew the whistle on Kempner years ago. "Well it was pretty clear (and he did not deny) that he had stolen the entire diary of Alfred Rosenberg from the Nuremberg archives and was retaining it as his private property. The Rosenberg Diaries are a fund of true information on Hitler and the Holocaust; they are of enormous importance -- but where are they now? We await an early answer from the Holocaust Memorial Museum." http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Kempner1.html

American prosecutor Robert Kempner about the time he stole the documents. 1946

Kempner died in 1993 at age 93 and legal disputes about "his" papers raged for nearly a decade between his children, his former secretary, a local debris removal contractor and the Holocaust museum. Why a debris removal contractor was involved was not explained. http://forward.com/articles/178332/us-government-uncovers-long-lost-diary-of-top-nazi/?p=all#ixzz2W1gm4Q00

The Diaries consist of various papers written on the back of official stationary and on paper torn from a ledger book. The announcement also read, "Most entries are written in Rosenberg's looping cursive...,.No mention of who might have made additional entries and what they said was given. How the various pages are connected chronologically was not revealed. It was not disclosed if there are any missing pages.

Why Kempner stashed Rosenberg's papers away for years was not disclosed either, but Kempner is credited as the "discoverer" of the draft memo presented at Nuremberg as the Wannsee Protocol. More information may be announced this week at a news conference held jointly by officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Justice and Holocaust museum.

Kempner was almost certainly responsible for the attempt to conceal the Schlegelberger document from posterity the March 1942 Schlegelberger Document, in which a hard-pressed Adolf Hitler ordered the postponement of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem until after the war. (The document was missing from the five-item folder of photocopies, ND: 4025-PS, after he returned it to the Nuremberg Trial archives; fortunately the original folder was found intact thirty years later in the Federal Archives). Since Mr. Irving first published the document in Hitler's War, 1977, conformist historians have had a hard time explaining it away."

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Germany/Kempner/