'Brilliant a 5 out of 5 masterpiece' Evening Standard The renowned historian of the Third
Reich takes on the conspiracy theories surrounding Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in a vital
history book for the 'post-truth' age The idea that nothing happens by chance in history
that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight that everything that occurs is the
result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating everything from
behind the scenes is as old as history itself. But conspiracy theories are becoming more
popular and 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. In doing so it teases out some
surprising features these and other conspiracy theories have in common. 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.
