Alfred Rosenberg

In 1915, he married Hilda Leesmann, an ethnic Estonian. But, they got divorced in 1923.

In 1925, he married Hedwig Kramer. They were blessed with two children; a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter, Irene, who was born in 1930. Their marriage lasted until his execution.

He considered those Germans impure who did not marry Germans as they have violated the purity of German blood ancestry by diluting it with the blood of non-German people.

He was born on January 12, 1893 in Reval, Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire, to Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, a shoemaker and wealthy merchant, and his wife, Elfriede.

His father was known to be half-Estonian and half-Latvian in origin while his mother was German with some French background, according to the newest research.

He excelled in his early education and graduated from the Petri-Realschule in Reval.

After schooling, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute where he joined a pro-German student group. He also studied engineering at Moscow's Highest Technical School and obtained his doctorate in 1917.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917, he and his family supported the counter-revolutionaries. But after they lost, he along with his family immigrated to Germany in 1918. Max Scheubner-Richter, the mentor behind his German ideology, also immigrated along with him to Munich.

After World War I, the anti-Semitic and anti-communist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazi Party, marked Munich as its center for revolutionizing the country. In 1919, Rosenberg became one of the earliest members of the party.

He also became a member of Thule Society and Aufbau Vereinigung, a Munich based counter-revolutionary conspiratorial group, whose members were involved in terrorist activities to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian regimes of the far right.

In 1923, he became one of the first editors of the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ when it became the Nazi party newspaper. He published his philosophies and ideas in the newspaper and it soon became infamous for its poisonous anti-Semitic articles.

In 1923, after Hitler was imprisoned following the failure of ‘Beer Hall Putsch’—a failed attempt to seize power in Munich—he appointed Rosenberg as the leader of the National Socialist movement, a position he held until Hitler’s release.