The Devil’s Diary by Robert K Wittman and David Kinney
William Collins, £20
The story of The Devil’s Diary opens in God’s Garden. In 1945, as General Patton’s army closed in, Nazi aristocrat Kurt von Behr was anxious to cut a deal with American military intelligence. His palace, a former Benedictine monastery, overlooked a stretch of Bavarian countryside so lovely it was called Gottesgarten. Inside the palace was a mother lode of confidential Nazi documents.
No deal was offered. Von Behr and his wife toasted the end with cyanide-laced champagne. Among the papers was the personal diary, covering the years 1934 to 1944, of Alfred Rosenberg, who would be hanged in October 1946 in Nuremberg.
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss said that the words of three men prepared him psychologically to carry out his task: Hitler, Goebbels and Rosenberg. In it from the start, Rosenberg was at Hitler’s side during the Beer Hall Putsch. He edited the Nazi weekly newspaper and wrote reams of pseudo-philosophy in the “battle for the soul of the people”. During the war years, he headed the ministry overseeing the newly conquered eastern territories.
By 1949, however, the Rosenberg diary had vanished. Tidal waves of documents were surging back and forth across Europe and America. Some documents passed through countless hands: military intelligence, prosecutors, historians, file keepers, archivists. Not all were scrupulous.
Part of Robert Wittman and David Kinney’s book is about how Rosenberg’s 500 handwritten pages came to be secreted in suburban Philadelphia and upstate New York. Wittman is the ex-FBI art crime specialist who finally tracked the diary down.
The papers were originally smuggled to America by Walter Kempner, part of the prosecuting team at Nuremberg, a German Jew who had fled to the States just as the Nazi vice tightened around Europe. Kempner seems to have been a prickly, difficult, self-centred character. The book evolves into a setting of parallel lives: Kempner fleeing and returning; Rosenberg conquering and then captured. The diaries themselves, which are heavily quoted, reveal a mind hissing and spitting with fury and grievance.
Rosenberg’s deep hatred of Christianity provides an opportunity to revisit Nazi relations with the Catholic Church. The German Church, like other parts of the Establishment, thought it could cut deals with and contain Hitler, confronting the Nazis without provoking their worst excesses. I hadn’t known that sermons by German bishops denouncing Nazi euthanasia were air-dropped by the British over Germany and occupied Europe. Rosenberg weighed up Hitler’s reaction: “He’d let them have all the imbeciles to use as priests.”
The Bishop of Münster intoned: “There are heathens again in Germany. The so-called eternal racial soul is in reality a nullity.” Rosenberg wrote in response: “Rome’s counterattack should have its answer. They’ve realised that everything’s now at stake. Rome’s Christianity is founded on fear and humility, National Socialism on courage and pride.” He called the annual march commemorating the Beer Hall Putsch a Germanic Corpus Christi procession. Rosenberg, by the way, made it on to the Vatican’s Index of censored books. Mein Kampf didn’t.
The authors have shone fresh light on the old, dismaying tale of Nazism. As the book wears on, readers must brace themselves for page after page recording the depraved, heartless violence inflicted on the Jews of Europe and overcome the temptation to toss the book aside in disgust. It remains necessary to remind ourselves how low humanity can stoop.
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