The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been accorded a demonic influence, but anyone who reads them will quickly realise how intellectually feeble they are <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
None of this mattered very much to hard-core anti-Semites, though. Hitler dismissed the question of the genuineness or otherwise of the Protocols<\/em> as irrelevant. Rather than confront the evidence head-on, he declared the fact that the \u201cJewish press\u201d (by which he meant, rather strangely, The Times<\/em>; for Hitler, all liberal newspapers were \u2018Jewish\u2019, since liberalism itself was \u2018Jewish\u2019) had tried to discredit them proved they must be genuine. And even if they were forged, they all the same revealed a deeper truth about the Jews. \u201cWhat matters,\u201d he announced, \u201cis that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims. But reality provides the best commentary.\u201d<\/p>\n
The key fact was that they purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish elders in 1897, and so emanated from what anti-Semites understood to be the Jewish community itself. This enabled anti-Semites to cite them as \u201cproof\u201d of the Jews\u2019 subversive intent. Few people probably bothered to read the actual \u201cprotocols\u201d; insofar as they were relevant to modern anti-Semitic beliefs at all, it was because of the chapter headings, commentaries and explanatory notes added by later editors.<\/p>\n
From the point of view of their actual content, as officials in the ministry of propaganda advised their boss, Goebbels, they were \u201cnot suitable as propaganda on the issues of the day\u201d. The Protocols<\/em> were too closely tied to the state of politics and the economy in early 20th-century Russia, too rambling and incoherent, and too far removed from Nazi ideology. Goebbels concluded: \u201cOne can\u2019t speak of a conspiracy of the Jewish race in any straightforward meaning of the term; this conspiracy is more a characteristic of the race than a case of intellectual intentions. The Jews will always act as their Jewish instinct tells them.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, therefore, the impact of the Protocols<\/em> would seem to have been seriously exaggerated by historians. Nor, contrary to what one might have expected, was another, somewhat more focused and coherent conspiracy theory \u2013 the stab-in-the-back myth championed by the ultra-right \u2013 particularly central to Nazi ideology.<\/p>\n
According to the nationalist ultra-right in Germany, their country had been defeated in the First World War<\/a> because of the subversive actions of socialists and revolutionaries. These groups had apparently undermined the German army\u2019s will to fight and destroyed their chances of victory by overthrowing Kaiser Wilhelm II in the German Revolution of November 1918. It was of no matter that the army was militarily defeated weeks before the revolution; or that it lacked the supplies and munitions needed to fight on; or that Germany had lost its key allies, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. For military leaders such as General Erich Ludendorff, it was an easy way of shifting the blame for the defeat away from themselves and on to the democrats and socialists they so bitterly hated \u2013 the people who had brought the democratic Weimar Republic into being.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the most extreme version of this myth, the socialists had been working to defeat Germany because they were themselves part of the purported global Jewish conspiracy that the Protocols<\/em> were supposed to have uncovered. But, contrary to what one might have expected, Hitler consistently failed to make significant use of this version of the stab-in-the-back legend \u2013 or indeed any other iteration.<\/p>\n
There was no doubt, of course, about the visceral anti-Semitism of the Nazi party, and of Hitler himself, from the very beginning. But neither Hitler in his speeches, nor the Nazi press in its propaganda, made more than very occasional mentions of the supposed stab in the back. They preferred to concentrate their fire instead on the \u2018November criminals\u2019, the men who had (in their view) cravenly accepted the armistice terms and therefore betrayed the German race in the peace settlement. It was the weak will of the kaiser and his regime that had lost the war.<\/p>\n
In their early propaganda and in the official Party Programme promulgated in 1920, the Nazis focused on what they portrayed as the economic criminality of Jewish \u201cwar profiteers\u201d. But even this propaganda line faded, as the Nazis came closer to power in the early 1930s. Rather than continuing to attack the old imperial elites for their supposed lack of willpower in 1918 \u2013 a line that would have alienated them at a time when he needed their support \u2013 Hitler preferred to instead pull them along with him in the drive towards war and conquest.<\/p>\n
The stab-in-the-back myth represented a step along the road from a systemic to a more genuine type of conspiracy theory: the event conspiracy theory. Germany\u2019s defeat in the First World War was more a bundle of events than a single occurrence. On the night of 27\u201328 February 1933, however, something happened that immediately became the object of two diametrically opposed conspiracy theories: the German national parliament building, the Reichstag, in Berlin, burned down.<\/p>\n
Hitler had only been Reich chancellor for a few weeks, as head of a coalition government in which conservatives held the majority of posts. He saw this as the opportunity to seize quasi-dictatorial powers and, declaring that the arson attack marked the beginning of a communist coup, persuaded Reich President Paul von Hindenburg to promulgate a decree suspending civil liberties. Nazi stormtroopers subsequently rampaged across Germany suppressing opposition, often with extreme violence and brutality.<\/p>\n
Communists across Europe had repeatedly tried to seize power by force, from Russia in 1917 to Hungary and southern Germany in 1918\u201319. During the time of the Weimar Republic they had been remarkably successful in winning votes, increasing their representation in the Reichstag in November 1932 to 100 seats. The Nazis, conversely, in the grip of a deep political and financial crisis, lost heavily in this, the last free election of the Weimar Republic, although they did remain the largest party.<\/p>\n
It was not wholly implausible to suggest that the communists were launching a bid for dictatorial power in Germany in February 1933. But in reality, the Communist party of Germany, well-organised and supported though it was, expected the Weimar Republic to collapse of its own accord, as the capitalist system, in the middle of the Depression, proved unable to reproduce itself.<\/p>\n
In the autumn of 1933, the Nazi leadership arrested several leading communists for the destruction of the Reichstag building and put them on trial along with one non-communist: a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was caught at the scene. In a humiliating defeat for the Nazis, the Reich Supreme Court, which had not yet been fully Nazified, was forced to acquit them for lack of evidence: only van der Lubbe, against whom alone the evidence was overwhelming, was convicted and executed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the communists developed a rival conspiracy theory, alleging that the fire had in fact been started by the Nazis themselves in order to provide an excuse for seizing dictatorial power. The communist propagandist Willi M\u00fcnzenberg staged a counter-trial in London, at which, not surprisingly, the Nazis were found guilty of the crime. For decades, this view was widely shared, including among historians.<\/p>\n
But in 1959 a German civil servant, Fritz Tobias, published research, which subsequently appeared as a formidably lengthy and deeply researched book, arguing that van der Lubbe had burned down the Reichstag on his own. The young Dutchman was an ultra-left anarcho-syndicalist who had already tried, and failed, to burn down other public buildings in Berlin in protest against what he regarded as the shameful treatment of the unemployed by the German government. But with the Reichstag building he got lucky: breaking in through a window just after nine in the evening of 27 February, he rushed through the corridors with a blazing torch and fire-lighting equipment. Curtains and wooden furniture caught fire, and updraft spread the flames into the dome above the debating chamber. Soon, the building was in ruins.<\/p>\n
For more than 60 years, communists and their sympathisers have tried to shake the evidence presented by Tobias and discredit him as an old Nazi. In fact, he was a lifelong Social Democrat who blamed his own and his father\u2019s dismissals from their jobs on the measures introduced by the Nazis after the fire. Many of the communists\u2019 arguments are characteristic of conspiracy theories in general: key documents have disappeared or have been destroyed; key witnesses have been murdered; minor discrepancies in the actual evidence prove it was falsified; critics of the conspiracy theory are politically motivated or perpetuating \u2018official\u2019 lies. Above all, their central belief \u2013 that whoever benefits from an event must have caused it \u2013 is also one of the central beliefs in conspiracy theories of many kinds.<\/p>\n
Similar allegations can be found in the burgeoning literature concerning another celebrated incident in the history of Nazi Germany: the unexpected flight of the Nazi party\u2019s deputy leader Rudolf Hess from Germany to Scotland in the middle of the war, on 10 May 1941, armed with a \u201cpeace offer\u201d for Churchill\u2019s government. The offer was rejected \u2013 it would have amounted to a virtual capitulation in the long term \u2013 and Hess was arrested, tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after Germany\u2019s final defeat, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in Spandau prison in August 1987, at the age of 93.<\/p>\n

It was obvious to most people in 1941, including Hitler, that Rudolf Hess had acted on his own. Soon enough, however, the conspiracy theories began to multiply <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
<\/p>\n
It was obvious to most people in 1941 that Hess had acted on his own. He had lost power in the Nazi leadership and planned his harebrained flight in order to restore it. Hitler was horrified when he learned of Hess\u2019s actions, as were all the other leading Nazis. Soon enough, however, the conspiracy theories began to multiply, and in recent years they have been propagated with increasing frequency. Hess was sent by Hitler; he was invited over by a secret \u2018peace party\u2019 in Britain; he was lured over by the British security services; he was collaborating with Himmler, or Heydrich, in a bid to oust the Nazi dictator; even, most bizarrely of all, the man who landed in Scotland was not Hess at all, but a double \u2013 but why anybody would have agreed to spend decades in prison without revealing he was not the real Hess has never been explained. Yet again, there are allegations that evidence has been suppressed or destroyed, and key witnesses murdered. As with the Reichstag fire conspiracy theories, documents have been presented that are clearly forgeries, designed to substitute for the real thing. None of this is at all persuasive.<\/p>\n
The fantasies of the Hess conspiracy theorists seem almost conventional, however, in comparison to the most widespread event conspiracy theory about the Nazis today. Namely, the idea that Hitler, his wife, Eva Braun, and in some versions Blondi the dog, did not die in the Berlin bunker at the end of April 1945 but escaped to Argentina, where they lived peacefully in retirement after the war.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n

The fact is that Hitler was simply too ill in April 1945 to have undertaken a daring escape from Berlin, and many eyewitnesses have testified to his suicide in the bunker <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Newspaper and magazine articles, a growing number of books, and even a three-season television series (Hunting Hitler<\/em>, broadcast on the History Channel) have presented this thesis \u2013 though without a shred of genuine evidence. Instead, all the \u2018evidence\u2019 presented is second-hand, hearsay, or, most commonly, supposition (Hitler \u2018could have\u2019 been here; he \u2018might have\u2019 been seen there). The fact is, of course, that Hitler was too ill in April 1945 to have undertaken a daring escape from Berlin, even had it been possible, and many eyewitnesses testified to his suicide in the bunker and the destruction of his corpse at the time.<\/p>\n
Common to many such theories is a counter-factual suggestion amounting, in the minds of at least some of those who purvey them, to a degree of wishful thinking: if only<\/em> the Jews had not been conspiring, then, according to conservative anti-Semites, the modern evils of liberalism, equality, free-thinking and secularisation would not be with us. If only<\/em> the German army had not been stabbed in the back, according to German nationalists, it would have won the First World War. If only<\/em> the Reichstag had not been burned down by the Nazis, according to the communists, then Weimar democracy would have survived, and the Holocaust would not have happened. If only<\/em> Hess\u2019s peace mission had succeeded, according to British nationalists and nostalgic imperialists, then the Second World War would have been brought to an end, millions saved and the British empire preserved. If only<\/em> the world had realised Hitler had escaped from the bunker, then, according to his admirers, we would know how great a genius he was \u2013 or alternatively, for his detractors, we would have been able to bring him to justice for his crimes. Conspiracists\u2019 claims about discovering unrecognised truths are often accompanied by assertions of having realised unconsidered possibilities.<\/p>\n
Conspiracy theories present to their consumers a world of black and white: of individual heroes, usually outsiders, who strive against overwhelming odds to uncover the truth; and of collective villains, usually in positions of power, who do everything to conceal it. Against the moral ambiguities of real life, they paint a picture of moral absolutes, of good and evil \u2013 a picture that is both easier to understand and, because of this, more interesting and exciting to portray than the grey complexity of documented reality. The reader, television consumer or moviegoer can gain satisfaction from identifying with the intrepid hero as he or, less commonly she, penetrates the veil of secrecy drawn by officialdom to unmask the plotters and conspirators who are manipulating events to their own advantage.<\/p>\n
The current proliferation, and, in some cases, revival of conspiracy theories involving Hitler is part of a much wider trend, in which different influences have come together to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction; or rather, perhaps, to present alternative \u2018truths\u2019, each of which claims to correspond to reality and presents its own panoply of evidential support to back up its claims.<\/p>\n
But there cannot be different and opposing true statements about something; there can only be one truth, even if it can sometimes be very hard to ascertain. Discovering what really happened in history is difficult. It requires a great deal of hard work, it demands direct examination of the evidence, it presupposes a willingness to change one\u2019s mind, and it involves the suspension of one\u2019s prejudices and preconceptions. But it can be done.<\/p>\n
Richard J Evans is a historian whose latest book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination<\/em>, is published \u00a0by Allen Lane, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n
This article was first published in the November 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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