A new book explores the Hitler survived conspiracies including Antarctica as his base and more.
Hitler in Antarctica
reviewed by Geoffrey O’Brien
A historian of the Third Reich traces the processes by which history is not simply distorted but replaced by a fantastic parallel version.
... Richard J. Evans’s
The Hitler Conspiracies is a suite of investigations into conspiracy theories relating to Hitler and the Third Reich—whether they paved the way for the Nazi regime and its policies, served propaganda purposes either for or against the Nazis, or provided fodder in the postwar era for what has become a deliriously unfettered global traffic in “alternative facts.” Having recounted the history of the Third Reich in a series of magisterial volumes and engaged closely and combatively with postwar revisionists (
In Hitler’s Shadow) and Holocaust deniers (
Lying About Hitler), Evans now confronts history that is not simply distorted or evaded but replaced altogether by a fantastic parallel version. The result, far from being a narrowly specialized study, could not be wider and more timely in its implications.
He has singled out—from a vast range of possibilities, since anything having to do with Hitler and the Nazis by now has its attendant corpus of folklore and fabrication—five focal points: the anti-Semitic tract
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its influence on the Nazi regime; the “stab in the back” legend that Germany’s defeat in World War I was due to nefarious attitudes and actions on the home front; the question of who was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933; the purpose of Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941; and, in the book’s longest chapter, the multiple and ever-evolving scenarios in which Hitler, rather than dying in his bunker, somehow survived the war. Evans establishes with characteristic precision the background of each one and then traces, in necessarily intricate detail, the processes by which it was transformed and deformed. Since such processes tend to flourish in a climate of mystification and deliberately, sometimes sanctimoniously convoluted misdirection, it takes all his gifts for rigorously compact exposition to keep the narrative lines clear.
In a domain full of digressive rabbit holes and feverish flights of free association, Evans fixes his attention on the human circumstances out of which those flights arise: the freight of lives lived, actions committed, milieus inhabited. A tone of calm skepticism does not disguise his underlying theme of proliferating peril. Beginning in the aftermath of the French Revolution—a crucial juncture for the formation of modern-style conspiracy theories centering around libertine philosophers, Illuminati, Freemasons, and Jews—the book moves inexorably toward our present moment: “Nowhere has the spread of conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ become more obvious than in revisionist accounts of the history of the Third Reich.” ...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/hitler-conspiracies-antarctica/
The idea that Hitler did not die in 1945, as commonly believed, but survived long afterwards and lived peacefully into old age has become more widespread in the past few years.
If you type “Hitler Argentina” into a search engine, you’ll be taken to page after page of reports alleging that the Nazi dictator did not shoot himself in his bunker beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery on 30 April 1945, but, on the contrary, escaped by plane and submarine to Argentina, and lived there with his partner Eva Braun for many years.
The story has been told in articles, press reports, books and even a 24-part television series. This is not fiction, as in novels such as Timur Vermes’s 2012 bestseller
Er Ist Wieder Da (published in the UK as
Look Who’s Back), or fantasy, as in the 1976 episode of the TV series
The New Avengers, which both depict Hitler being kept in suspended animation for decades after the war. This claims to be fact, with the real Hitler carrying on in South America with an animation that is anything but suspended.
The story of Hitler’s survival has escaped the confines of the lunatic fringe and made its way into the mainstream media. Fuzzy photographs have appeared in the press purporting to be images of Hitler in old age. Time and again, the US national press has reported the discovery of newly released secret service files reporting sightings of the former Nazi dictator after the end of the war. Not only will the story not go away, it seems to be finding new traction in the age of social media and the internet. Hitler sells.
Even where, as usually happens, the survival story advertised in headlines turns out to be an invention if you read the article through to the end, readers will be drawn to the paper by the idea there might be evidence that Hitler survived. From 2015 to 2018, the television series
Hunting Hitler showed a group of investigators travelling across South America looking for traces of the former dictator who, it claimed, had lived in Argentina for many years and died in peaceful old age. Appearing on the History channel (watched by more than 300 million households worldwide),
Hunting Hitler ran for three series with an average three million viewers per episode. ...
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2020/12/what-hitler-conspiracies-mean
