This is a strange book, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. More a collection of essays than a straight read-through, Richard Evans examines five issues concerning the Third Reich that continue to attract huge amounts of speculation.
He starts by looking at whether the Holocaust was inspired by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Then he considers whether the German army really was “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Socialists in 1918. Next he spools forward to examine who burned down the Reichstag, after which he scrutinises the thorny old question of the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland in 1941. Finally, he tackles the theory that Hitler hotfooted it out of his bunker at the end of the war to live out his twilight years in the vast Nazi retirement home that was Patagonia.
It is the latter topic that has attracted the most attention over the past few years, with numerous books, articles, websites, and even a popular multi-season documentary series called Hunting Hitler, which, it should be declared, this reviewer was approached to appear in. Because of the popularity of this conspiracy theory, there have even been a few books published that rebut the notion of the fleeing Führer, most notably Hitler’s Death by Luke Daly-Groves, who managed to write that book while in the middle of completing his doctorate.
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