Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Tallinn in the Russian Empire, the capital of modern Estonia, to a family of Baltic Germans. His father, Waldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, was a wealthy merchant from Latvia, and his mother, Elfriede (nee Sire), was a teacher of French language in Tallinn. The Hungarian-Jewish journalist Franz Szell, who was apparently residing in Tilsit, Lithuania, spent a year researching in Latvian and Estonian archives before publishing in 1936 an open letter, with copies to Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, and others, accusing Rosenberg of having "no drop of German blood" flowing in his veins. Szell wrote that among Rosenberg's ancestors were only "Latvians, Jews, Mongols, and French."

Since the invasion of the Soviet Union intended to impose the New Order, it was essentially a war of conquest. German propaganda efforts designed to win over Russian opinion were, at best, patchy and inconsistent. Alfred Rosenberg was one of the few in the Nazi hierarchy who advocated a policy designed to encourage anti-Communist opinion among the population of the occupied territories. His interest here was mainly in the non-Russian areas such as the Ukraine and the Baltic States; however, supporters of the Russian Liberation Army were somewhat able to win him over.  Amongst other things, Rosenberg issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms (kolkhoz). He also issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming and restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers. But decollectivisation conflicted with the wider demands of wartime food production, and Hermann Goring demanded that the collective farms be retained, save for a change of name. Hitler himself denounced the redistribution of land as "stupid".  There were numerous German armed forces (Wehrmacht) posters asking for assistance in the Bandenkrieg, the war against the Soviet partisans, though, once again, German policy had the effect of adding to their problems. Posters for "volunteer" labour, with inscriptions like "Come work with us to shorten the war", hid the appalling realities faced by Russian workers in Germany. Many people joined the partisans rather than risk being sent to an unknown fate in the west.  Another of Rosenberg's initiatives, the "Free Caucasus" campaign, was rather more successful, attracting various nationalities into the so-called Eastern Legion (Ostlegionen), though in the end this made little difference in the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front.

What other nationalities were attracted?