The Myth of the Twentieth Century

The Myth of the Twentieth Century (German: Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts) is an influential, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historical book by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist who was one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. Rosenberg was later convicted for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946.
In the book Rosenberg contends that the Nordic-Aryan race is the originator of ancient civilizations which later declined and fell due to inter-marriage with "lesser races". Holding what he considers Aryan civilizations to be the pinnacle of humanity, he blames Semitic influences for moral and social degradation, and holds that the State must ensure that "higher" races must rule over the "lower" races and not interbreed with them.
Published in 1930, the book sold more than one million copies by 1944 thanks to Nazi support. Hitler awarded a State Prize for Art and Science to Rosenberg for the book in 1937. The document accompanying the prize "praises Rosenberg as a 'person who has, in a scientific and penetrating manner, laid the firm foundation for an understanding of the ideological bases of National Socialism'". The content of the book is a mix of racist pseudo-science and mysticism which makes the claim that the "Nordic race" originated in Atlantis and that their nobility justified the enslavement and even mass murder of non-Aryan races.
Some members of the Nazi leadership found some of this material embarrassing, but it was also publicly praised, often by the same Nazi leaders who disparaged the work in private.
Rosenberg followed a long line of European racialist authors, including Arthur de Gobineau (author of An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) but his most important "source" was the British philosopher and scientific racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Rosenberg conceived of his book as a sequel to Chamberlain's 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.
Other influences included a dubious reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner's Holy Grail romanticism (Chamberlain was Wagner's son-in-law), Haeckelian mystical vitalism, the medieval German philosopher Meister Eckhart and the heirs of his mysticism and Nordicist Aryanism in general..
Rosenberg's racial theories involve a mix of made up biology and invented history about the putative negative influence of the Jewish race in contrast to the Aryan race. He equates the latter with the Nordic peoples of northern Europe and also includes the Berbers from North Africa (this story apparently deriving from the Kabyle myth invented by French colonists) and the upper classes of Ancient Egypt (all presumably migrating from Atlantis). According to Rosenberg, modern culture has been corrupted by Semitic influences (cf. anti-Semitism), which have produced degenerate modern art, along with moral and social degeneration. Rosenberg believed that the higher races should rule over the lower and not interbreed with them. He argues that the Nazis must purify the race soul by eliminating non-Aryan elements in much the same ruthless and uncompromising way in which a surgeon would cut a cancer from a diseased body. These arguments were used to justify Nazi crimes, crimes against humanity, and the Holocaust.
In Rosenberg's mythological take on world history, migrating Aryans founded various ancient civilizations which later declined and fell due to inter-marriage with lesser races. These civilizations included the Aryan, ancient pre-Islamic Persia, Greece, India, and Rome. He saw the ancient Germanic invasions of the Roman empire as saving its civilization, which had been corrupted both by race mixing and by Judaized-cosmopolitan Christianity. Furthermore, he claimed that the persecutions of Protestants in France and other areas represented the wiping out of the last remnants of the Aryan element in those areas, a process completed by the French revolution. In contemporary Europe, he saw the northern areas that embraced Protestantism as closest to the Aryan racial and spiritual ideal, however referred to both Catholicism and Protestantism as Negative Christianity, seeing Protestantism as only half a protest. He held much higher regard for pre-Christian Germans and the earlier Arian Christian church.
Following H. S. Chamberlain and other völkisch theorists, Rosenberg claimed that Jesus was half German which he extended to Aryans and half Jewish, and that original Christianity was a German-Aryan (Iranian) religion admixed with the Jewish cult of Jehovah, but had been corrupted by the followers of Paul of Tarsus. The Mythus is both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant, seeing the Church's cosmopolitanism and Judaised version of Christianity as one of the factors in Germany's spiritual decline. Rosenberg particularly emphasizes the supposedly anti-Judaic teachings of the heresies Marcionism and Aryo-Persian Manicheanism as more representative of the true, anti-Judaic Jesus Christ and more suited to the Nordic world-view. Rosenberg saw Martin Luther and the Reformation as merely step toward reasserting the Aryan spirit but still opposed Protestantism as not going far enough, equating it with an invasive form of Christianity from Charlemagne unsuited to the German spirit.
When he discussed the future of religion, he suggested that a multiplicity of forms be tolerated, including Positive Christianity. He stated that both the cult of Jehovah and the cult of Wotan were dead, but respected Wotan due to being German and equated him with later German philosophers. This angered the Catholic Church which falsely claimed Rosenberg had converted to Germanic Heathenism. Rosenberg rejected this claim and in his defence merely respected Wotan as an historical figure. Rosenberg wrote anti-Indian racist statements regarding Hinduism, but respected the earlier forms of it which he saw as not being racially admixed with the natives of India.
Another myth, to which he gave credence, was the idea of Atlantis, which he claimed might preserve a memory of an ancient Aryan homeland:
Johannes Steizinger writes "Rosenberg clearly played a major role in the establishment of Nazi ideology" and that "Ideology is regarded as a necessary, but not sufficient cause for participation in genocide"
During the Nuremberg Trials, Justice Robert H. Jackson referred to the book as a "dreary treatise[s] advocating a new and weird Nazi religion". "Mythus" is written as an imitation of a scholarly book and Viereck notes that "Rosenberg bores both the uneducated and the well educated, but is the god of the semi-educated, whom earnest dullness and obscure grandiloquence impress as scholarly and authoritative". In his Nuremberg Trials testimony, the extermination camp commandant Rudolf Höss said that this book was one of the sources of his own anti-Semitism.
Despite Nazi support for The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Rosenberg's prominent role in promoting Nazi ideology, in private, some of the Nazi leaders had reservations about its mysticism. Adolf Hitler declared that it was not to be considered official ideology of the Nazi Party and he privately described the book as "mysticism" and "nonsense". Albert Speer claimed that Goebbels mocked Alfred Rosenberg. Goebbels also called the book a "philosophical belch". Hermann Göring said: "if Rosenberg was to decide ... we would only have rite, thing, myth and such kind of swindle." Gustave Gilbert, the prison psychologist during the Nuremberg Trials, reported that none of the Nazi leaders he interviewed had read Rosenberg's writings. However Gilbert's notes from the Nuremberg trials repeatedly show Rosenberg's influence
Although he did take very high-level positions within the Nazi state in managing propaganda, looting artworks, and overseeing Nazi rule in the Baltics and Soviet territories, the overt anti-Christian sentiment in Rosenberg's book made it awkward to give Rosenberg positions of prominence when the Nazis ascended to power. Even in their stronghold Hamburg only 0.49% of the inhabitants identified as belonging to the anti-Christian neopagan faith movement (in 1937), whereas the German Christians and their Positive Christianity had a strong standing. Many of the attacks on the book after its 1930 publication came from its explicit anti-Christian message. In 1934, The Myth of the Twentieth Century was put into the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the official list of books forbidden by the Catholic Church) by decree of the Holy Office for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, and the very fundamentals of the Christian religion".
Rosenberg wrote two supplements to the work, replying to Catholic and Protestant critics. In the first, On the Dark Men of Our Times: A Reply to Critics of the Myth of the Twentieth Century, he accused Catholics of attempting to destroy the national character by promoting separatism within Catholic parts of the country. His second reply, Protestant Pilgrims to Rome: The Treason Against Luther and the Myth of the Twentieth Century, argued that modern Lutheranism was becoming too close to Catholicism. On the Dark Men of Our Times was also put into the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1935.