{"id":2043,"date":"2020-10-20T15:31:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2020-10-20T15:31:24","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T14:31:24","slug":"review-the-hitler-conspiracies-the-third-reich-and-the-paranoid-imagination-by-richard-j-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-the-hitler-conspiracies-the-third-reich-and-the-paranoid-imagination-by-richard-j-evans\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, by Richard J. Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The German army would have won the First World War, except that it was &#8220;stabbed in the back&#8221; by Socialists and Communists.   Hitler was convinced by the <em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/em>, which he believed to be a genuine historical document, that the Jews were taking over the world and needed to be the stopped.  The Reichstag fire of 1933 was a Nazi plot (or a Communist one) and not the work of one arsonist.  Rudolf Hess made his solo flight to Britain in 1941 at Hitler&#8217;s behest and at the invitation of a &#8216;peace party&#8217; in the U.K. which was plotting a coup against Churchill.  Hitler survived the war, having been rescued from Berlin, placed on a U-boat and sent off to a comfortable retirement together with his wife Eva Braun, somewhere in Argentina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of those sentences are true.  All of them are widely believed, to one degree or another.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve taken an interest in one or more of those ideas over the years, and particularly enjoyed reading the theory that the prisoner who spent decades in Berlin&#8217;s Spandau prison wasn&#8217;t actually Rudolf Hess but a double.  Richard J. Evans has poured ice cold water on some much-loved conspiracies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His forensic dismantling of each of those &#8220;alternative histories&#8221; could not come at a more timely moment, as the notion of &#8220;alternative facts&#8221; is defended by the current occupant of the White House.  His book deserves a wide readership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The German army would have won the First World War, except that it was &#8220;stabbed in the back&#8221; by Socialists and Communists. Hitler was convinced by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2044,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2045,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions\/2045"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}