The Devil's Diary

Starred review from April 25, 2016
Wittman (Priceless), a former FBI investigative expert on cultural property crime, joins forces with journalist Kinney (The Dylanologists) to share the engrossing story of former Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, his diary, and the lengths historians had to go to in order to get their hands on it. Rosenberg, a virulent anti-Semite with a deep need for attention and status, found kindred souls in the Nazi party and had a profound influence on Hitler during his rise to power. In 1934, Rosenberg began a diary that he kept current through the end of WWII. It was packed with details of the party's inner workings. Robert Kempner, a lawyer and Social Democrat who escaped Germany, ended up in the U.S. and landed a gig in the War Department where he helped prosecute Rosenberg, among others. Kempner took possession of Rosenberg's diary, but it was essentially "lost" for decades. Kempner disavowed ownership of it, and after his death his heirs went to extraordinary lengths to keep it secret. Wittman and Kinney's chronicle of the efforts historians took to gain access to the diary feels like it's pulled from a movie, especially when they add in Rosenberg's story. This is an outstanding piece of journalism. Agent: Larry Weissman, Larry Weissman Literary.

March 1, 2016

Best-selling author and former FBI agent Wittman, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kinney here team up to focus on the history and impact of the long-awaited recovery of the diary of Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), a leading player of the Third Reich, whose anti-Semitic ideologies influenced Adolf Hitler himself. In 2013 the journal was discovered after decades of ambiguity concerning its location. Robert Kempner, a Nazi opponent and prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, stole the diary and thousands of other original Nazi artifacts for his personal collection. Years later, Wittman and Henry Mayer, chief archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum managed to recover these items and analyze their content. Though marketed as "a game-changing World War II narrative wrapped in a riveting detective story," this work's modern crime content is slim. Furthermore, while the revelation of the diary contributes significant insight into the backdrop of World War II, the story appears to be contextualized with unrelated historical details. VERDICT These faults aside, those with an interest in German history will find this narrative engaging. [See Prepub Alert, 8/1/15.]--Marian Mays, Washington Talking Book & Braille Lib., Seattle

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2016
A fascinating scholarly detective story centering on the often overlooked ideological architect of the Third Reich, who could never be made to "accept the notion that the ideas he had trumpeted had led to genocide." Bound up in this study of Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), whose influence on Nazi policy was constant until a late-in-the-game falling-out with Hitler, is a tale of how his diary wound up in the United States, now in the holdings of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. That tale involves a Jewish lawyer who, ousted from his post in the German government by Hermann Goring, ended up in the U.S. advising the FBI and eventually returning to Germany to work for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. Robert Kempner (1899-1993) was no less diligent an archivist than the Nazi regime he detested, and, write former FBI investigator Wittman (Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures, 2010) and journalist Kinney (The Dylanologists, 2014, etc.), he "spent four years immersed in the documentary evidence of the Nazi crimes." Moreover, brilliant as a researcher and litigator while also a first-class hoarder, he squirrelled away some of that documentary evidence in his own archives, including Rosenberg's diary. The picture that long-missing diary affords of those Nazi crimes does not remake our understanding, but it certainly adds to it. When Rosenberg grimly writes, "some still haven't yet understood...that things have to be calculated differently now," he is signaling the onset of the extermination of Europe's Jews. The two narrative threads--one tracking Rosenberg across two decades of Nazi activism and the other examining the fortunes of his diary--don't always line up neatly, and the storyline sometimes has a stop-and-go quality. However, the authors do an excellent job of teasing out the fine details and placing them in the larger context, in the bargain offering overdue acknowledgment of Kempner's many contributions to the short-lived effort to bring Nazis to judgment. A footnote to a much larger story but a welcome one.

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