The Devil's Diary; Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich

x, [2], 513, [3] pages. Illustrations. Includes Prologue: The Vault. Chapters include Lost and Found: 1949-2013; Lives in the Balance: 1918-1939; and At War: 1939-1946. Includes Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Appendix A: A Third Reich Timeline; Appendix B: Cast of Characters; Notes; Selected Bibliography, and Index. Robert King "Bob" Wittman is a highly decorated former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who was assigned to the Philadelphia Field Division from 1988 to 2008. Having trained in art, antiques, jewelry and gem identification, Wittman served as the FBI's "top investigator and coordinator in cases involving art theft and art fraud". During his 20 years with the FBI, Wittman helped recover more than $300 million worth of stolen art and cultural property, resulting in the prosecution and conviction of numerous individuals. In 2005, he was instrumental in the creation of the FBI's rapid deployment Art Crime Team (ACT). He was instrumental in the recovery of colonial North Carolina's copy of the original Bill of Rights in 2005, after it was stolen by a Union soldier in 1865. Wittman represented the United States around the world, conducting investigations and instructing international police and museums in recovery and security techniques. After 20 years with the FBI working against art theft, he worked as an art security consultant for the private sector David Kinney is the author of The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich written with retired FBI art crime expert Robert Wittman. It tells the story of the disappearance and recovery of Nazi Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg's diary. Kinney also wrote The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob (2014), a kaleidoscopic look at Bob Dylan through the lives of his fans and followers, and The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish (2009), which follows the fanatical saltwater fishermen of Martha's Vineyard during the island's annual derby. His journalism has appeared in newspapers around the country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times. At The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest paper, he was a political reporter on the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. An influential figure in Adolf Hitler's inner circle from the start, Alfred Rosenberg made his name by spreading toxic ideas about the Jews throughout Germany. As the Third Reich dawned, his master-work of racist philosophy became a national best-seller and a touchstone of Nazi thought. Rosenberg's diary--five hundred pages offering a harrowing glimpse into the mind of the "intellectual high priest of the master race''--was discovered in a Bavarian castle at war's end. 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 then as a private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historical significance, first learned of the diary in 2001, when the chief archivist for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him to say that someone was trying to sell it for more than a million dollars. This book provides vital insight of unprecedented scope and intimacy into the innermost working of the Nazi regime--and the psyche of the man whose radical vision gave rise to the Final Solution. Derived from a Kirkus review: 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.…