The Hitler Conspiracies : The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination

Resumen del libro

'Both hard to put down and brilliantly insightful ... a 5 out of 5 masterpiece' Martin Bentham, Evening StandardThe 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' ageThe idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight, that everything is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating everything from behind the scenes - these notions are 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. In The Hitler Conspiracies renowned historian Richard Evans 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 that 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.

Biografía del autor

Sir Richard J. Evans (Londres, 1947) es presidente del Wolfson College de Cambridge y Provost del Gresham College de Boston. Hasta 2014 fue Regius Professor de historia en la Universidad de Cambridge. En 1994 recibió la Medalla de Hamburgo del Arte y la Ciencia por servicios culturales a la ciudad. Sus libros previos incluyen In Defense of History (1997), Telling Lies about Hitler (2001), La llegada del Tercer Reich (Península, 2005), El Tercer Reich en el poder (Península, 2007), El Tercer Reich en guerra (Península, 2011) y La lucha por el poder (Crítica, 2017). Fue nombrado Sir en 2012.