Alfred Rosenberg

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Calling this guy garbage is an insult to garbage.

A lunatic Chaplin imitator and his greatest fans Nazism

First as tragedy

Hermann Göring Martin Heidegger Amin al-Husseini International Jewish conspiracy Antipodean Resistance The Daily Stormer

Then as farce

Stormfront Netto-uyoku John Birch Society Jonathan Bowden Michael Coombs Nathan Larson v - t - e

“”It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the "master race," who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern Occupied Territories. His woolly philosophy also added boredom to the long list of Nazi atrocities.

—US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

“”He's not a thinker. He's an ideologue.

—Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies director Jurgen Matthaus, upon releasing Rosenberg's diary to the public

Alfred Ernst Rosenberg (January 12, 1893–October 16, 1946) was a politician and leading "ideologist" of the NSDAP during both Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany era. And apocryphally, this hate-filled man was the origin of some of the alt-right glossary. Rosenberg was convicted of both war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Born Alfred Woldemarowitsch Rosenberg, his father was a Baltic German and his mother was Estonian, and he grew up in the Baltic Governorates of Russian Empire when the 1917 revolution hit Moscow. Under the influence of Russian emigrants, they managed to somehow convince Rosenberg into thinking the whole revolution was concocted by an Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. This puny idea would blossom and serve as key in shaping the whole Nazi ideology.

Most people born with a Rosenberg surname are Jewish, which caused suspicion that he was Jewish. Hungarian-Jewish journalist Franz Szell claimed in 1936 that Rosenberg did not have any German ancestry but did have Jewish ancestry. Since the war, academic sources have regarded his ancestry as German and Estonian.

From 1920 onwards, Rosenberg contributed significantly to the intensification of antisemitism (and other racialist demonization) in Germany with numerous racial ideological writings. His 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century is on par with Hitler's Mein Kampf in terms of importance in Nazism's development.

Following the Nazis' power-grab in 1933, Rosenberg was assigned a Reichsleiter (Reich leader, the second highest political rank), and very much acted as the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist. Indeed, not only did Rosenberg formalize the whole goddamn Aryan and master race ideology, he also promoted the Untermensch and degenerates concept as well.

During the Second World War, he and his Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR; Einsatzstab = taskforce) undertook raids throughout Europe, particularly to rob cultural assets. As Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO; Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete), he pursued the project of Germanizing the occupied eastern territories while systematically exterminating the Jews as part of his Eastern policy, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Ultimately, the Nazis bungled up their own war, and Allied Troops caught him. Being a major war criminal, Rosenberg was charged in the Nuremberg trials and found guilty on all four counts. He was sentenced to death and executed.

Little bit more detailed backstory

Early life

Reval (modern day Tallinn), Härjapea River circa 1889

Rosenberg was born on January 12, 1893 (per New Style dating system), to a Baltic Germans/Estonian family in Reva, Governorate of Estonia under the Russian Empire.

The First World War broke out when he was a young man, and events during it shaped him into the person he would become. Particularly during this time, he developed a hatred towards the indigenous peoples of Estonia, which is likely why he began to examine his own German heritage, and subsequent interest in studying the roots of the entire Germanic people.

In 1911 he graduated from the Petri-Realschule in Reval and enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute in Riga. During the years of the First World War, the headquarters of the Polytechnic was temporarily transferred to Imperial Technical School in Moscow (Bauman Moscow State Technical University). There, he studied engineering and architecture. Also around that time, he a became protégé of Dmitri Merezhkovsky (who had also mentored Moeller van den Bruck), whose looney takes on Christianity had effect on Rosenberg.

During his academic year in Moscow, Rosenberg found himself involved in the Russian Revolution and the following year, 1918, after graduating and reuniting with his family. Then in late November of 1918, the Estonian War of Independence broke out. The exodus of the Baltic Germans after seven centuries of domination over the region and this invasion by the Bolshevik Russia, forced Rosenberg to leave Reval indefinitely, alongside German troops evacuating Estonia after their brief occupation of the territory in 1917.

Weimar Republic

Fleeing Estonia, he first found refuge in Paris for a while, then staying in Berlin for few weeks before settling to Munich in early 1919. The city had become a rallying point for the exiled German minorities from Russia. He survived there thanks to the soup kitchen and the Baltic German relief societies. He would also come in contact with some counter-revolutionaries circles that had fled from Bolshevik Russia.

He soon started to gravitate towards the Völkisch movement politics and Dietrich Eckart's speeches. Rosenberg then either joined or began to frequent the Thule Society, a shady occulist-cum-nationalist group that carried notoriety for its strong antisemitism and association with the Völkisch movement. It was there when he met with the young Adolf Hitler, who had joined the same society a short time before Rosenberg. That said, Rosenberg, already at the time of his hypothetical entry into the Thule Society, had achieved considerable notoriety among antisemitic circles thanks to some of his publications, in particular with his two antisemitic treatises, "The Path of the Jews Through the Centuries" (Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten) and "Immorality in the Talmud" (Unmoral in Talmud), both published in 1919.

From his association with the Thule Society, he began his rapid rise to the top of Hitler's new National Socialist Party, which would have taken its trademark swastika symbol from the Thule Society. Rosenberg, thanks to his intense activity in antisemitic ideology, was immediately placed by Hitler at the head of the new Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter.

Although Rosenberg was mainly educated as an architect, he proved a deft hand in pushing horseshit for this paper. In 1921, partly thanks to the likes of Oswald Spengler opening the floodgates for national mysticism-laced pseudohistory woo, Rosenberg began to insidiously circulate this certain (falsified) document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was one of the first major cases of International Jewish conspiracy insanity and escalation of antisemitism in Weimar Republic. In 1922 he published "Plague in Russia! Bolshevism, its Leaders, Executors and Victims", a work which, by contributing the wrongdoing to "Jewish Bolshevism", really impressed Hitler.

In 1923 he took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, which lead to Hitler's arrest by German authorities, the party was dissolved and the newspaper ceased publication.

Hitler, imprisoned, designated Rosenberg to temporarily replace him at the head of the party, aware that Rosenberg, given the lack of charisma and personality, would never have been able to undermine his authority. Rosenberg visited him in prison and influenced him in the implementation of Nazi doctrine in parts of Mein Kampf. When Rosenberg led the Nazi Party, he played a significant role in defining the theoretical corpus of the Nazi party as well as in spreading the thesis of Jewish influence in the Bolshevik revolution among the first members of the party.

Still while Hitler was imprisoned, having become the ideologue of the National Socialist Party, he kept spreading antisemitic junk to the masses. During this period, he carried out the functions that Hitler could not take on, due to his conviction, and he played an important role in the marginalization of the left wing of the party, grouped around Gottfried Feder. He did not discuss the points formulated by the latter and his close associates, particularly around employee profit sharing and the place of public limited companies in the NSDAP program. After Hitler's release and given back control, Rosenberg resumed being the intellectual of the party.

Gaining political power as a Nazi bigwig

In 1930, he was elected for the first time as a member of the German Parliament. From this date until the end of the war, Rosenberg always maintained a very important role of within the party, as Hitler entrusted various important jobs to him.

In 1933, after the Nazi Party won the elections and Hitler became the new Chancellor, he appointed Rosenberg as Reichsleiter and head of the foreign office (Auslandsorganisation) of the NSDAP. This allowed Rosenberg to establish closer relationships with almost all the fascist parties around the world, a role that gave him considerable visibility. Rosenberg held this role until the end of the war and his capture in 1945.

The same year, he was also assigned as the head of the "Führer's Delegate for the Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Formation of the National Socialist Party". This more or less cemented Rosenberg as undisputed leader in terms of pushing the Nazi doctrine, second only to Hitler himself.

He was also granted control of his own Amt Rosenberg (ARo, Rosenberg Office), which was the was an official body for cultural policy and surveillance within the Nazi party. As head of research within the NSDAP, he developed Nazi research towards archaeology and ethnography. Rosenberg's ARo had major part in attacking and destroying art that was deemed "degenerate" by the Nazis.

With the support of Hans Reinerth, he began the "Federation of German Prehistory of the Reich" (Reichsbund für deutsche Vorgeschichte) under the command of ARo, and he entrusted it to Reinerth. Until 1937, this federation enjoyed undeniable success under Rosenberg's leadership; however, Rosenberg and his protégé had to reckon with the growing influence of the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage") organization of the SS from that moment on, and had to give way to this SS institution, especially after 1940.

In 1937, Rosenberg received the German National Prize for Art and Science, the Nazi replacement for the Nobel Prize.

In 1939, again because of Rosenberg's thorough knowledge of the Jewish question, Hitler ordered him to establish the "Institute for Studies on the Jewish Question" (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage), which was essentially tasked with the goal of emptying all European Jewish archives, museums and art galleries for "scientific research purposes".

World War II

Alfred Rosenberg (front row, second from right) caught mid-blink

With the outbreak of World War II, Rosenberg founded his own operational staff, called Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce), which was mainly (if not exclusively) responsible for stealing works of art from all occupied territories in Europe, particularly from France. This was to be transported to the Reich, then sold or given to the Germans in the Reich. On April 16, 1943, he sent Hitler a report summarizing all of the 20,000 works of art seized in the West by his subordinates.

After defeat of France, the first collection he targeted was that of the Rothschilds. With an estimated value of over two billion francs, it was hidden in the Château Lafite and Château Mouton Rothschild estates. An informer named "Jurschewitz" reported it and received a reward of 65,000 francs. In March 1941, a convoy of twenty-eight wagons, containing nearly four thousand works of art seized in France, arrived at Neuschwanstein Castle.

In 1939, Rosenberg had meetings with Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling (whom he had already met with in 1933) and sponsored his state visit in December 1939. Having brought Quisling into contact with Hitler, the Nazis succeeded in securing their puppet leader for Norway.

After Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and being Baltic German, Rosenberg was appointed by Hitler as 'Minister of the East' (the German occupied areas in Eastern Europe). This was the last of his many political appointments, and because of this, he gained the power to personally implement and carry out mass extermination of the Jewish population. As head of Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, he decided to implement a project called Heuaktion ("hay harvest" or "hay operation"), whose purpose was to abduct Polish and Ukrainian children to use them as slave labor in Germany.

However in the East European theater, he tended to butt heads with Heinrich Himmler, to whom Hitler entrusted to carry out operations more so than Rosenberg. The dispute really escalated in 1943 when Hans Lammers and Martin Bormann got involved. After a back and forth, Rosenberg resigned on October 12, 1944, testifying to the non-existence of his political influence at this stage of the conflict.

End of the line

After the death of Adolf Hitler, Rosenberg was excluded from government by Karl Dönitz, the new President of the Reich. A few days after the German capitulation in May 1945, Rosenberg was found and arrested in a military hospital in Flensburg-Mürwik (where he was recovering from a fall) by SAS operatives from Belgium.

While imprisoned in Nuremberg, awaiting the trial, Rosenberg wrote a series of autobiographical notes that were intended to belittle his role within the party, presumably in a last-ditch attempt at defense against the likely death penalty. He instead tried to specifically pin the blame on Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann for the Holocaust, with Rosenberg trying to exonerate himself by emphasizing that he was only involved in culture and research, tending to spend his days "isolated in libraries reading while the other hierarchs were busy weaving dense networks of relationships and extending their influence".^{[citation needed]}

At the Nuremberg Trials, Rosenberg sat in the front row. He was indicted for his political rather than his intellectual role. He was charged with conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, crimes of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

During the trial he isolated himself from the rest of the defendants, with whom he had never been on good terms. Rosenberg tried to show that many crimes in the East were committed without his knowledge and that he had no authority over the SS, which had perpetrated the worst havoc on the population of the occupied territories. He never expressed regret or remorse for his actions, instead continuing to uphold his faith in Nazism until the end, maintaining that the crimes were due to an erroneous interpretation of the National Socialist philosophy. From the testimonies of the other Nazi bigwigs, it also emerged that none of them had read but a few pages of Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century.

The court found Rosenberg guilty on all charges and on October 1, 1946; he was sentenced to death by Soviet judge Iona Nikitchenko. On October 16, 1946, he was hanged, being the fourth Nazi leader to be sent to the gallows. When asked if he had any last words, Rosenberg responded "no", being only Nazi chief to do so. His execution was slow, with it taking an= minute and a half for Rosenberg to die. His body was subsequently cremated in the East Cemetery in Munich, and his ashes, along with the ashes of 10 other defendants, were scattered in the Wenzbach, a tributary of the Isar River in Munich.

So what did this dickhead contribute?

The Myth of the 20^th Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts), is Rosenberg's best known work.

“”National Socialism is the noblest idea to which a German could devote all the strength he has been given.

—Alfred Rosenberg

Rosenberg strongly supported the theory of the Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy (favoring the spread of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), anti-communism (with particular emphasis against Bolshevism), the rejection of the so-called "degenerate art", racist and Social Darwinism theories, and the messianic vision of Hitler. He was also strongly opposed to women's rights. Rosenberg's racial theories were inspired by both European sources (Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain) and American sources (Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard). He is also known for his rejection of Christianity (referring it to as Negative Christianity), which played a major role in the development of the Nazi-led "Positive Christianity", which Rosenberg intended to serve as a transition to a new Nazi faith, as the official religion of the Third Reich.

He wrote a lot of stuff, with his more notable ones being:

• The Myth of the 20^th Century: Rosenberg's best known work, written in 1930. Together with Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, it is considered the manifesto of National Socialism. It explores various concepts that would lay the groundwork for Nazism, based on the theory of Pan-Germanism and especially on the racist ideology propagated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. The three main chapters are called "The Struggle of Values", "The Essence of Germanic Art" and "The Coming Reich". In the text, Rosenberg examines, among other things, the so-called Positive Christianity. The "myth" that is referred in the title is National Socialism, described by the author as "the myth of blood, which under the aegis of the swastika unleashes the world revolution of the race". The book was the only text of the National Socialist ideology to be placed on the Index by the Catholic Church, which fully condemned its theses.
• Blood and Honor (Blut und Ehre): consists of sixteen writings by Rosenberg from 1919 to 1933, twenty writings from 1922 to 1933, seventeen of his writings from 1920 to 1933 and finally eleven writings by Rosenberg from 1925 to 1933.
• Memoirs (Portrait eines Menschheitsverbrechers): written by Rosenberg while he was in prison in Nuremberg.

Race (Aryans and Untermensch)

According to Rosenberg, world history is shaped by the eternally raging struggle between the Nordic-Atlantic and the Jewish-Semitic peoples. At the top of his "hierarchy of races", in accordance with the National Socialist racial ideology, was the Aryans (Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine and Eastern Baltic), the descendants of ancient Indo-European populations. He claimed that the Aryans as the founders of all the great civilizations of the past, from the Persian and Egyptian to the Doric and Roman, and maintaining that the decay of these civilizations, to which he claimed the German race also belongs, was to be found in racial mixing. To him, "only the Nordic people produce culture".^{[citation needed]}

Starting from a brief and vague speculation regarding the mythical island kingdom of Atlantis mentioned by Plato, he explained that the Nordic people first appeared via the Indians and Persians. Classical Greece was thus incorporated into "Nordic Hellas" and ancient Rome into "Nordic-Republican Latinism". According to him, the only legitimate descendant of this Nordic people is the German people.

Rosenberg saw Nordic people as a race, which was not a biological, but a spiritual phenomenon. In this rejection of "racial materialism" he agreed with his arch-rival Joseph Goebbels, who, like him, wanted to shape the ideological course of the NSDAP. Rosenberg, in turn, stylized the race as an independent organism by assigning to it a soul common to all members — the "racial soul". This racial soul is the bearer and expression of the respective race. Thus, the actions of the individual member of the race are only an expression of the driving force inherent in the collective.

In order to achieve the actual goal, it is necessary to suppress any form of individualization because this endangers the unity of the race itself. Expressions of this racial soul are expressed in culture, politics, the legal system, technology and art. In this way, the racial affiliation of the respective peoples can be determined from their cultural achievements over the course of world history. These achievements were not created by individuals, but were an expression of the collective soul of the respective race, which wanted to create the ideal inherent in it. To him, the cultural achievements of Immanuel Kant, Richard Wagner, Meister Eckhart and other creative figures served Rosenberg as irrefutable proof of the superiority of the Nordic race.

Rosenberg, as he explained in his publications, considered Africans an inferior race on a par with Jews and other Semitic populations, expressing contempt also for Slavs. Influenced by the writings of American KKK-associated racialist writer Lothrop Stoddard, particularly his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man, Rosenberg proposed that all inferior races were to be called Untermensch.

Antisemitism (and Jewish Bolshevism)

Even as a teenager, Rosenberg was fascinated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which taught him the importance of the "Jewish question". In 1928, a year after Chamberlain's death, Rosenberg published a book entitled Houston Stewart Chamberlain als Verkünder und Begründer einer deutschen Zukunft. In December 1938, he wrote that the Jews were preparing to "destroy Europe in a blood frenzy".

In "The Myth of the 20^th Century", he contrasted Judaism with the "Nordic racial soul" and polarized both levels with unsubstantiated enemy images. The Jewish religion was described as devilish, while the Nordic racial soul carried a new kind of divinity within itself.

Hitler worked with the same technique of making claims; for example, the Aryans were "children of God" and a Jew was the "personification of the devil" or even "adversary of all humanity". Jesus Christ, on the other hand, was not a Jew, but an embodiment of the Nordic racial soul. This supposed fact was first misrepresented by Judaism itself, later by Paul and then also by the Roman Catholic Church in order to harm the Nordic racial soul ("Roman-Syrian principle").

These and several other passages of The Myth of the 20^th Century — such as the claim that it was the Rothschild famil, which supposedly held power in France around 1914, that started the First World War — show the basis of Rosenberg's thinking. Even if he tried to disguise it with his intellectual and historical-philosophical speculations, Rosenberg at his core, was a racist conspiracy theorist.

In "The Myth of the 20^th Century", Rosenberg demanded that sexual intercourse between Germans and Jews (consensual or rape) to be punished with confiscation of property, expulsion, imprisonment and death, depending on the severity of the case. This proposal led to a legislative proposal by the National Socialists in the Reichstag as early as March 1930.

Nazi ethics and will

For more information, see: Vitalism

The pivotal point of Rosenberg's theory was his belief in a will, that's inherent in the "racial soul". He defined the will, which was not further derived, as a formative force, "And to all doubts and questions, the new man of the coming First German Reich knows only one answer: 'I want'."^{[citation needed]} This formative force will first impose a desired design on nature and later on foreign peoples. Rosenberg also calls this characteristic "dynamic-willful" or "spiritual-architectural". The "noblest form" of National Socialist ethics, in turn, would be expressed in precisely this mere will, which sets itself a goal.

Rosenberg then built a theory of art on this, the core statement of which was that a work of art would be all the more aesthetically pleasing the more a strong will was evident in it. This in turn is reminiscent of Hitler's statement regarding the architecture of the Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg, that it was a "stone worldview". "Will" as art was also reflected in Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of The Will, in which Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders appeared.

According to Rosenberg, the will itself was not subordinate to any morality. Rosenberg's metaphysics of the will ultimately legitimized almost all actions — as long as they were desired and ordered by a strong leader, "That is the task of our century: to create a new type of human being from a new life myth." This paved the way for the subjugation of foreign peoples, for human breeding in life-bearing cages, forcible sterilization of genetically ill peoples, and for the "annihilation of life unworthy of life".

Positive Christianity

“”Today Jesus appears to us as a self-confident Lord [Herr], in the best and highest sense of the word. It is his life that acquires meaning for the Germanic people, not his tormented death, which is his image among the peoples of the Alps and the Mediterranean. The powerful avenger, enraged [Zürnende] in the temple, the man who dragged his followers, is the ideal that today springs resplendent from the Gospels, not the sacrificial lamb of the Jewish prophets, not the crucified one.

—Alfred Rosenberg

One of the concepts that pops out in his The Myth of the 20^th Century, is that of Positive Christianity. Rosenberg elevated Jesus to the superman, a symbol of the Aryan race. In particular, he exalted those aspects of his life in which, according to the Gospels, he had shown opposition to Jewish institutions. However, it should not be forgotten that, in Rosenberg's thought, Jesus was not the son of God, nor did he rise from the dead (Rosenberg calls them "legends"). In practice, the figure of Jesus is stripped of every divine and messianic attribute and is compared to the figures of great thinkers such as Confucius or Meister Eckhart. He credits Jesus for having overcome the "Syriac-Etruscan-Judaic" fracture between the human and the divine, thereby showing perfect harmony with the pantheism propagated by National Socialism, hostile to the idea of ​​a personal God. Needless to say, the concept of "Providence" for Nazism is in fact completely different from that of Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism.

Lebensraum

Together with Rudolf Hess, Rosenberg is the major integrator of the concept of Lebensraum in the National Socialist doctrine, which was used as justification to start the invasion of Eastern Europe.

Degenerate

Rosenberg is one of the earliest pushers of the word "degenerate" (Entartete) as a snarl word. It primarily caught from Rosenberg's and Hitler's use of the word regarding what was "unacceptable" art to them. Per Robert Cumming, "Nazi ideologues believed that any art that did not conform to a bourgeois ideal of well-crafted, figurative images portraying ideal heroism of comfortable day-to-day being was the product of degenerate human beings and perverted minds." Anything not fitting to Nazi's ideals of art wars labeled Entartete Kunst (degenerate art), and thusly any "degenerate" artist was not allowed to exhibit their work, penalized for trying make such, with their works were often confiscated and then destroyed. The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937, organized by Goebbels, was created to highlight the art.

Reputation amongst Nazis

“”[If Rosenberg was in power] … there would only be a cult, something or other, myths and other kinds of fraud.

—Hermann Göring

Rosenberg was disliked the Nazi leaders for his bad temper and mismanagement as an administrator. Despite his relative proximity to Hitler, it did not prevent Rosenberg from experiencing many setbacks and disappointments, which marked his career within the Third Reich. While Rosenberg was unquestionably a powerful individual in the Nazi hierarchy, he also had many rivals as well, as evidenced in autumn of 1939 when a coalition of NSDAP and German state players formed against him.

Moreover, his writings were not read much by members of the NSDAP, with Hitler himself having confessed to Albert Speer that he never read them in their entirety. Regardless, his writings attracted the deep enmity from the very Christian members of the NSDAP.

The historian Joachim Fest wrote:

Rosenberg's powers were seriously limited from the beginning. Göring was given full authority to carry out the primary plan; Himmler, the special envoy to the operational sector of the army, simultaneously held the positions of police chief, Reichsführer SS, Reich Commissioner for population transfer and consolidation of the German Volksstum; Sauckel was responsible for manpower issues and Keitel for the leadership of the Wehrmacht; all these bodies so thoroughly eroded Rosenberg's skills that he had little left but his title. […] In fact, the Reich Minister's task soon became reduced to writing texts that no one read, memoranda that never made it through the doors of his departments, protests that no one took any notice of: a forgotten comrade at the head of an equally forgotten department.

References

• World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis. 2015. ISBN 9781135812423.