On Tuesday, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum acquired and posted online the diary of a top Nazi war criminal, who developed the genocidal racist ideology of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. The Rosenberg Diary had been missing since the Nuremberg war crimes trials that ended in 1946.
Alfred Rosenberg, author of the diary, was the Nazis' chief 'racial theorist,' and was a key developer of the German "master race" ideology that spurred the genocidal horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime in murdering 6 million Jews.
The museum had been working with US legal officials and law enforcement agents to recover the missing 425 page diary. It was officially transferred to the museum on Tuesday, at a ceremony in which museum director Sara Bloomfield said the diary arrived "in its proper home."
The diary is available to the public, scanned and transcribed in the archives section of the museum's website. It spans 10 years, starting in 1934.
At the end of World War II Rosenberg was captured, convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials in which German-Jewish lawyer Robert Kempner was a prosecutor, and executed in October, 1946.
Kempner had escaped to the US during the war. After the Nuremberg trials he apparently held on to the diary until his death in 1993.
Some pages used at the Nuremberg trials have long been in the museum's possession. However, the vast bulk was missing until November 2012, when the US Attorney's office in Delaware and Homeland Security special agents were tipped by an art security specialist working with the museum as to the diary's whereabouts.
The diary was found at the home of academic publisher Herbert Warren Richardson near Buffalo, New York, where it apparently arrived from Kempner's assistants. The diary was repossessed by the US government.
Recently artifacts from the Nazi regime have been in the news, as an art trove of paintings looted by the Nazis was found last year in the home of a reclusive Berlin art collector Cornelius Gurlitt, son of a Nazi-era art dealer.
Meanwhile the Nazi legacy of racism and anti-Semitism has been rearing its head in Europe lately, as a survey in November there found anti-Semitism is on the rise.
Last Friday the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned Italian populist leader Andrea Zunino for employing Jewish conspiracy theories in justifying Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism.