The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination

Description

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.

Richard J. Evans is the author of a number of major books, including In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War and The Pursuit of Power. His most recent book is the biography of Eric Hobsbawm. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, where he also led a five-year Leverhulme research programme on conspiracy theories and their impact on democracy. He was knighted in 2012 for services to scholarship.

A wonderful book that's both hard to put down and brilliantly insightful in its analysis of the ways in which conspiracy theories and so-called "alternative facts" are constructed and justified - and why they're such nonsense... Evans performs his task with such withering and entertaining wit that it's worth putting up with the nonsense to enjoy the brilliant demolition... It's a 5 out of 5 masterpiece. -- Martin Bentham * Evening Standard * There can be no more authoritative guide to these conspiracy theories than Evans ... It is becoming a deadly serious matter. -- Tony Barber * Financial Times * Brilliant ... Deploying him against conspiracy theorists is a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. -- Simon Griffiths * Mail on Sunday *