Whilst it's unusual to write a review of a book that you haven't finished reading, this is an example of a history book that speaks to the present day, and the current world situation. Richard J Evans is a prolific historian, specializing in Nazi Germany. Published in 2020, his latest work, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, deconstructs and debunks conspiracy theories involving Hitler and the Nazis: that the Jews had a secret plot to undermine civilization, as outlined in the Protocols of Zion, that Germany lost the First World War because it was "stabbed in the back" by socialists and Jews in 1918, that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in February 1933 in order to seize power, Rudolf Hess's 1941 flight to the UK to offer the British a peace deal was sanctioned by Hitler, and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America.
One way to counter conspiracy theories is with sober, factual analysis. The author offers this book for "our own troubled times." It was published before the start of the Covid pandemic, but plenty of conspiracy theories have arisen surrounding it, circulated rapidly by alternative news outlets and social media, perhaps adding to the general sense of fear and uncertainty that presently pervades the world. For this reason, this type of book is needed more than ever.
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-hitler-conspiracies-9780241413463
https://www.richardjevans.com
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