THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ALFRED ROSENBERG

By Peter Peel

ALFRED ROSENBERG was born on the twelfth day of January, 1893 and was hanged at Nuremberg at 1:49 A.M. on the morning of 16. October 1946. He was the fourth man of the ten on whom Master-Sergeant John C. Woods performed his grisly task as hangman on that cold, black night. Adolf Hitler had died by his own hand on 30 April, 1945 as the Russian army closed inexorably around the last redoubt of the Reichskanzlei bunker. As a captive of the Russians, it is unlikely that he would ever have been brought to any kind of trial-even such as the Nuremberg proceedings. Like Sultan Bayazid in the hands of Timur, or Emelyan Pugachev at the mercy of that enlightened monarch, Catherine the Great, Hitler would probably have ended in an iron cage, suspended from the Kremlin walls and reduced, no doubt, to a mindless vegetable by the inquisitors who had learned their trade so well in the Lubianka cellars. And such was the prevailing mood of the times, even in the Western democracies, that it is doubtful that any voices would have been heard protesting.

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