'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.
