The Myth of the Twentieth Century (German: Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts)

is a 1930 book by Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi theorist[1] and official who was
convicted of crimes against humanity and other crimes at the Nuremberg trials and
executed in 1946. Rosenberg was one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi Party
and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1941, history professor
Peter Viereck wrote: "In molding Germany's 'psychology of frightfulness' Rosenberg
wields an influence as powerful as that of the much publicized Goebbels and the
much feared Himmler and his secret police."[2]

Thanks to Nazi support, the book sold more than one million copies by 1944. 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'".[3][page needed] 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.[4]