The spread of conspiracy theories

One of the things that concerns me as an historian is the spread of conspiracy theories in the last 20 years or so. Essentially, it’s a theory that whatever happens in the world, particularly in political events, is caused not by chance but by a conspiracy by a small group of people behind the scenes manipulating what goes on. An obvious example is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy of the United States, which the contemporary investigation showed was carried out by one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. However, there’s an enormous amount of conspiracy theory that alleges that that can’t have been possible, that it must have been a larger group of people in the CIA.

The Reichstag burning

Photo by Dorti

One of the factors which was very important in bringing the Nazis to power was the burning down of the Reichstag building – the German national parliament in Berlin – on 27th and 28th February 1933. It was used by the Nazis on 28th February to persuade President Hindenburg to sign a decree essentially suspending civil liberties because it was regarded as an emergency. The Nazis claimed it was a conspiracy by the Communists to take over power. However, the Communists responded by saying that the Nazis themselves had started the fire to be able to pass this decree suspending civil liberties. Indeed, the decree was renewed all the way up to 1945. It was an essential part of the pseudo-legal justification for Nazi dictatorship.

In fact, one man was found at the scene, a young, extreme left-wing Dutchman called Marinus van der Lubbe. He had already tried to burn down several public buildings in Berlin in protest against what he thought of as the German government’s shameful handling of unemployment. He succeeded with the Reichstag building. The Nazis arrested several Communists and accused them of helping to cause the fire. Yet, even in 1933, the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig, which had Conservative but not Nazi judges, found that there was not enough evidence to convict these people. Only van der Lubbe was convicted. It’s re-emerged recently that there’s no convincing evidence that anyone apart from van der Lubbe was responsible for the burning.

The mindset of conspiracy theorists

The mindset of the conspiracy theorists is that somehow chance events like that don’t happen. Everybody and everything must be planned secretly. Anyone who benefits from an event must be responsible for it. The Nazis benefited from the Reichstag fire. Therefore, they must have caused it. In fact, it’s overwhelmingly likely that had the Reichstag not burned down, some other excuse would have been found at some point, maybe a few weeks later, by the Nazis, for suspending civil liberties.

Rudolf Hess’s mistake

Another example is the flight that the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, took to Scotland in May 1941, carrying peace terms to the Duke of Hamilton, a prominent, though not politically important, figure in Anglo-German relations. He was simply a leading member of a friendship association with Germany, not a pro-Nazi organisation, but Hess got it wrong and thought he was very significant, and flew to Scotland. Churchill and the government realised immediately that this was the “peace terms” he offered, which said Britain should leave Germany a free hand in Europe and could keep her Empire, with the exception of giving some parts back to the Germans. This would have meant surrender, so they rejected. Hess was imprisoned for life after the Second World War and stayed there until his death in 1987.

Conspiracy theorists cannot believe that this was just a rather harebrained scheme on Hess’s part: Hitler surely must have organised it all, or there must have been a conspiracy in Britain to lure us over or a conspiracy in Germany to send him over now. In fact, there’s no evidence for any of this; there’s a lot of manipulated, even invented, evidence, as is the case with the Reichstag fire, to bolster the conspiracy theory. This, again, has become more widespread and more prominent, particularly on social media in recent years. All you have to do is look at the reaction of Hitler and the leading Nazis when they found out that Hess had gone to Scotland. They were horrified and outraged. It was an absolute shock, and there’s overwhelming evidence to show that they weren’t acting. You can’t have that many people acting in that way. There are even more bizarre conspiracy theories that say Hess was replaced by a double. Why would a double have agreed to stay in prison, in solitary confinement, for the last years of his life? Of course, this is never explained. So, these are, I believe, products of a mindset in which nothing happens by chance and individuals have no particular role in history.

Becoming more widespread

Photo by philippgehrke.de

Like many historians, I’m very concerned that conspiracy theories have become more widespread. Above all, it’s the rise and spread of the internet and social media that have encouraged this because they bypass what you might call the gatekeepers of opinion formation – newspaper editors, magazine editors, radio producers and TV executives. There’s also a degradation of public discourse, encouraged by some politicians, in which telling lies, expounding often rather harmful or offensive fantasies, has become more acceptable in recent years. We have to relentlessly hammer away at evidence-based arguments that we have to use evidence in an objective, fair-minded way to establish the truth against this kind of distortion.

Countering what they say?

Conspiracy theorists are often people who somehow want validation and want their self-esteem boosted by arguing, or thinking even, that historians and the media have got it wrong and they alone know the truth. We all are somehow what they call “purveyors of official knowledge”, as if historians like myself were told what to say and what to think by governments in some way, and so I think it’s quite difficult to counter what they say. They tend to be self-sealing communities who refuse to acknowledge any other evidence than the kinds of things they believe in themselves.

There are arguments, for instance, that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and went to live in Argentina. This is largely, although not exclusively, a neo-Nazi idea, because neo-Nazis simply cannot accept that Hitler shot himself in the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery, as the Red Army was coming into the city; that he died a sort of ignominious, cowardly death.

Contemporary politics

Photo by Benoit Daoust

Historical scholarship is a type of science. It relies on a concept of objectivity; that is to say, orienting ourselves on the evidence that we see before us, the evidence that emerges out of experimentation or the evidence that comes from astronomical observation. It’s similar to historical investigation based on the evidence that we find – documentation, archaeological remains, all kinds of different things – and in a sense you have to suspend your own beliefs and prejudices if you find evidence that goes against them. That’s a crucial part of being a scholar or a scientist.

Since the economic crisis of 2008 to 2009, although the relationship between that crisis and these political developments is complicated and much debated, there’s been an emergence of what you might call populist politicians in a number of different countries: Donald Trump in the United States; Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; Duterte in the Philippines. One thing that unites them is disbelief in their refusal to accept science. They believe they have a direct line to popular public opinion, that they represent the people, that scientists are part of an elite. Populism is directed, above all, against what the populists think of as the entrenched power influence of the elite. Therefore, being anti-science is part of being a populist.

Discover more about

Nazi conspiracy theories

Evans, R. J. (2018). In Defence of History. Granta.

Evans, R. J. (2020). The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination. Penguin.

Conspiracy theories: from Nazi Germany to today