The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich

An unprecedented, page-turning narrative of the Nazi rise to power, the Holocaust, and Hitler’s post-invasion plans for Russia told through the recently discovered lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg – Hitler’s ‘philosopher’ and architect of Nazi ideology.

A groundbreaking historical work, The Devil’s Diary offers a chilling window into the mind of Adolf Hitler’s “chief social philosopher,” Alfred Rosenberg, who formulated some of the guiding principles behind the Third Reich’s genocidal crusade. It also chronicles the thrilling detective hunt for Rosenberg’s diary, which disappeared after the Nuremburg Trials and remained lost for almost three quarters of a century, until author Robert Wittman, a former FBI special agent who founded the Bureau’s Art Crimes Team, played an important role and tells the story now for the first time.

The authors expertly and deftly contextualize more than 400 pages of diary entries stretching from 1936 through 1944, in which the loyal Hitler advisor recounts internal meetings with the Fürher and his close associates Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler; details jealousy and rivalries within the Nazi leadership – particularly with Goebbels; describes the post-invasion occupation of the Soviet Union; considers the “solution” to the “Jewish question;” and discusses his overseeing of the mass seizure and cataloguing of books and artwork from homes, libraries, and museums across occupied Europe. An eyewitness to events, this narrative of Rosenberg’s diary offers provocative and intimate insights into pivotal moments in the war and the notorious Nazi who laid the philosophical foundations of the Third Reich.

A groundbreaking World War II narrative wrapped in a riveting detective story, The Devil’s Diary investigates the disappearance of a private diary penned by one of Adolf Hitler’s top aides—Alfred Rosenberg, his “chief philosopher”—and mines its long-hidden pages to deliver an eye-opening account of the Nazi rise to power and the genesis of the Holocaust.

The diary was discovered hidden in a Bavarian castle at war’s end, but after Rosenberg was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and executed, the pages mysteriously vanished. More than half a century later, Robert K. Wittman learned of the diary when the chief archivist for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him at the FBI to say that someone was trying to sell it for more than a million dollars. The phone call sparked a decade-long hunt. From the crusading Nuremberg prosecutor who smuggled the diary out of Germany to the man who finally turned it over, everyone had reasons for hiding the truth.