The Devil's Diary

The Devil's Diary is the true account of the disappearance of Alfred Rosenberg's journal of Nazi ideology that shaped the genesis of the Holocaust. An influential figure in Adolf Hitler's early inner circle, Alfred Rosenberg made his name spreading toxic ideas about the Jews throughout Germany, publishing a bestselling masterwork of Nazi thinking at the dawn of the Third Reich. His diary was discovered hidden in a Bavarian castle at war's end-five hundred pages providing a harrowing glimpse of the man whose ideas set the stage for the Holocaust. Prosecutors examined it during the Nuremberg war crimes trial, but after Rosenberg was convicted, sentenced, and executed, it mysteriously vanished. New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman, who as an FBI agent and private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historic significance, learned of the diary when the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's chief archivist informed him that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars. A decade-long hunt led them to many people who handled and hid the book. 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. Drawing on Rosenberg's entries about his role in the seizure of priceless artwork and the brutal occupation of the Soviet Union, his conversations with Hitler and his rivalries with Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler, Wittman and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Kinney's The Devil's Diary offers vital historical insight of unprecedented scope into the innermost workings of the Nazi regime-and into the psyche of the man whose radical vision mutated into the Final Solution.