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

The Devils Diary starts off with a mystery, chiefly the whereabouts of Alfred Rosenberg’s diaries. Alfred Rosenberg wasn’t your garden variety Nazi. His racial ideas and views on a “Jewish Conspiracy” fed the fire that rose into National Socialism in Germany. Rosenberg’s story is told alongside that of one of his prosecutors, Robert Kempner, who would play a key role in the Nuremberg trials post World War II. Rosenberg would battle Goebbels, Goering, and Himmler for the favor of Adolf Hitler as time went on and the Third Reich would tighten its grip on Germany and eventually Europe. Rosenberg’s diary chronicles much of the rise and eventual fall of the hydra that was Nazi Germany.

The Devils Diary is part biography/part detective story. It is a story of a man whose hatred would fuel the souls of many more, but the book also delves into the life of Robert Kempner, who escaped the mass slaughter of his people and eventually got a small amount of revenge against his family’s killers. The authors show the quick rise and fall of a man who hid behind an ideology, but took no responsibility for the atrocities committed in the name of such ideology. Interesting doesn’t do enough to adequately describe a timeless work such as this. It is nothing short of a treasure.