The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination

Renowned historian Richard Evans puts 'fake news' in historical perspective in this challenging and illuminating study The idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people behind the scenes, is as old as history itself. But conspiracy theories are becoming more widespread in the twenty-first century. Nowhere have they become more obvious than in revisionist accounts of the history of the Third Reich. Long-discredited conspiracy theories have taken on a new lease of life, given credence by claims of freshly discovered evidence and novel angles of investigation. This book takes five widely discussed claims involving Hitler and the Nazis and subjects them to forensic scrutiny- that the Jews were conspiring to undermine civilization, as outlined in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'; that the German army was 'stabbed in the back' by socialists and Jews in 1918; that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to seize power; that Rudolf Hess' flight to the UK in 1941 was sanctioned by Hitler and conveyed peace terms suppressed by Churchill; and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America. This is a history book, but it is a history book for the age of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts'- a book for our own troubled times.