The spectre of conspiracies

The idea that nothing happens by chance in history is as old as history itself. For a significant number of people, nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight; everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating events from behind the scenes. Conspiracy theories seem to be growing more popular and more widespread in the 21st century: powered by the rise of the internet and then social media; enabled by the declining influence of traditional gatekeepers of opinion such as newspaper editors and book publishers; and encouraged by the spread of the uncertainty about truth and falsehood encapsulated in the perverse concept of ‘alternative facts’.

Go on to social media and you will quickly realise how widespread conspiracy theories about key events in history have become. They have even found their way into television programmes, not just in fictional form, but in presentations that claim to pursue the ‘real’ truth that has up to now been suppressed by ‘official’ historians, or in other words, those who teach and research the past as a profession at universities and historical institutes.

Few topics in history have attracted more conspiracy theories than Nazism. Conspiracists have focused on events such as the Reichstag fire in 1933, the flight of Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941, and the death of Hitler in Berlin in 1945. And it is often claimed that the Nazis themselves were influenced by conspiracy theories such as the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory of Germany’s defeat in World War I, or the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But, broadly speaking, the Nazis were not particularly obsessed with conspiracy theories themselves. Compared with Stalin, who saw plots and cabals everywhere and manufactured fake conspiracies supposedly hatched by some of his closest ‘Old Bolshevik’ comrades so that he could rid himself of potential rivals, Hitler was relatively disinclined to believe in conspiracies. He was, in 1944,