The Hitler Conspiracies — why are Nazi myths flourishing?
Modern societies are awash in conspiracy theories. This year a tidal wave of pseudoscientific and paranoid nonsense about the coronavirus pandemic has swept the world. Some of it has merged with the disturbingly bizarre QAnon fantasy, according to which President Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against a caste of devil-worshipping paedophiles.
For more than 70 years, various tenacious myths have swirled around the Third Reich — in particular, the groundless theory that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in Berlin in 1945 but made his way to South America. “Despite all the evidence to the contrary, more book-length arguments for the survival of Hitler in Argentina have appeared in the 21st century than in the whole of the 55 previous years,” writes Richard J Evans, a renowned historian of modern Germany.
The problem goes beyond books, Evans reminds us. From 2015 to 2018 the History Channel broadcast a three-season television series, Hunting Hitler, based on speculation about the dictator’s survival. Shamefully, the series made no effort to address the hard evidence of Hitler’s death compiled by investigators in 1945, expanded upon and established as fact by a West German court in the 1950s and eventually available to historians. Instead, the series was full of “innuendo, suggestion and invention”. It is a comment on our times that each episode attracted on average 3m viewers.
In The Hitler Conspiracies, Evans recounts the history of five theories, demolishes their credibility and assesses their lasting importance. They include the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early-20th-century forgery alleging a worldwide Jewish conspiracy; the “stab in the back” legend, which blames Germany’s defeat in the first world war on domestic traitors; the myth that the Nazis caused the 1933 Reichstag fire; Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941, falsely depicted as a genuine Nazi peace bid or a plot concocted by British intelligence; and, lastly, Hitler’s supposed postwar life in South America.
There can be no more authoritative guide to these conspiracy theories than Evans, a former Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and author of numerous works on Germany, including a three-volume history of the Third Reich. Still, the uncompromising common sense that typifies Evans was on display more than 80 years ago in Portraits of Mean Men, a short, sharp book on the Protocols by John Gwyer, a now mostly forgotten British historian. “It saves so much thinking to think like this, to survey the world and know that all its disorders are due to the malignity of a single group of mysterious plotters,” Gwyer wrote, in words that ring today as true as ever.
The Protocols played only a small part in Nazi anti-Semitism, Evans shows. The forgery was “rambling, chaotic and unstructured” and lacked the fanatical biological racism that drove the Nazis towards genocide. As for the “stab in the back” myth, Evans says it was largely an obsession of fringe rightwing nationalists during the 1919-1933 Weimar Republic. Nonetheless the allegation that socialists and Jews had brought about Germany’s defeat was dangerous, because it associated the new, fragile democracy with national humiliation.
The legend about the Reichstag fire was communist in origin. Ignoring evidence that the fire took Hitler and his inner circle by surprise, it contended that Nazi stormtroopers had entered the Reichstag through a secret tunnel, set the building ablaze and left Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutchman who was the actual perpetrator, to take the rap. Like various theories about Hess, it was all based on totally unreliable testimony and unsubstantiated guesswork.
Hannah Arendt argued in her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that it is important not simply to disprove conspiracy theories but to ask why people fall for them. For Evans, some individuals cannot accept the role of chance in major world events. “The puzzling complexities of politics and society are reduced to a simple formula that everyone can understand,” he adds. In the internet age, “anyone can put out their views into the public sphere, no matter how bizarre they might be”.
It is becoming a deadly serious matter. The more conspiracy theories spread, the harder it is to organise society on a rational basis and to protect our freedoms.
The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, by Richard J Evans, Allen Lane, RRP£20, 288 pages
Tony Barber is the FT’s Europe commentator
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