Christian Historical Lessons: Adolf Hitler and Conspiracy Theories

It was the beginning of a relationship that would affect the career of Adolf Hitler. Eckart accepted Rosenberg as a ‘co-warrior against Jerusalem’ and soon his articles on Russia began appearing not only in Eckart’s paper but in another Munich weekly Deutcshe Republik. The theme of these articles was that the Jew stood behind the world’s evils: The Zionists had planned the Great War as well as the Red Revolution and were presently plotting with the Masons to take over the world.

What particularly impressed Hitler was Rosenberg’s revelations that Bolshevism was but the first step in a vast global Jewish plot to conquer the world. Final ‘proof’ of this was revealed the day after the historic Hofbrauhaus meeting with publication in the Volkischer Beobachter of ‘the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ This purported to be the verbatim report of twenty-four secret sessions of the Elders of Zion in Basel, Switzerland, in a conspiracty to conquer the world. This book was supporting evidence of Hitler’s own prejudice and fears…

The ‘Protocols’ was written in France, a hotbed of anti-Semitism, by agents of the Czar and published a few years later in Russia, at the end of the nineteenth century; its first publication in Germany had come a year after the armistice in a Russian emigre magazine but had caused little stir. An amateruish forgery, it had been accepted as gospel by both Wilhelm II and and Nicholas II.

John Toland, Adolf Hitler (p. 78, 102). Emphasis mine.

My wife suggested I do a historical blog suggesting takeaways Christians can have from historical events and people. I read 10 pages of a biography a day, and after annoying her enough with my thoughts, she lovingly directed me to the blogosphere. For now, I’ll plan on publishing that here.  

I’m reading a massive mid-twentieth century biography of Adolf Hitler by John Toland (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945). Early in the book, Toland describes some of the conspiracy theories and nervous political energy that the young Adolf Hitler allowed himself to be swept up in. In 1919-1920 Adolf Hitler was a former lonely vagabond who had tried to make a living as a painter and was now back from the front of World War I. He was disillusioned with the portion of the German population who had wanted the war to end even though it had meant German surrender and treaty conditions very harsh to “the fatherland.” Hitler in 1919-1920 was apparently a man without fully formed convictions, though clearly irritated at much of the world and seeing that world as wronging him. 

Conspiracy theories, at least when indulged in as a way of life, are poisonous to reason. God is the author of reason and logic in the sense that, rightly applied, they are mental exercises that correspond to reality as God has created it. In other words, God is the author of what my mind is employing when I conclude “A cannot be non-A,” or “a tree cannot simultaneously be a tiger.” I am using the mind He gave me to correctly perceive the reality He truly made and which truly exists. Conspiracy theories distort a man’s ability to see reality by playing on his angst. We all have fears, and we all desire to be “in the know.” And when someone tells us that the world is really being secretly controlled by Group X and then weaves an interesting story of that secret control, our fears of being harmed and our desire to be enlightened get pitted against our ability soberly assess facts and reach a logical conclusion. All of a sudden it doesn’t matter that the facts do not warrant a conclusion that an organization called “Illuminati” is dictating government policies worldwide or that there is a secret effort by a global syndicate to do harm to human beings by depositing chemicals in the air.  When a man has been thoroughly ensnared by the conspiratorial mindset, reason and the use of logic are no longer the primary tool being used in constructing his view of reality. His angst is the primary tool, and the conspiracy theory is what put the tool in his hand and set that hand moving. 

Hitler was an anxious, frustrated, sinful man. His anger and his pride are obvious in the first seventy or so pages of Toland’s biography. But Toland also gives more than a few examples of people who knew him saying that they do not remember an extraordinary anti-semitism coloring Adolf Hitler’s speech or personality during or before World War I. The anger and pride were there, but he had not constructed a view of the world that had a secretive human villainy at its heart. That came after the war, when he read literature and joined a political group that proposed that Jews were the shadowy puppet masters controlling society. And that conspiratorial bent directed all his anger and pride to a single subset of humanity, and spun his sinful thoughts and emotions and actions into a web that later underpinned his dictatorship. 

Thankfully, not every person who believes a false conspiracy theory (or, as is usually the case, believes multiple false conspiracy theories) becomes a murderous dictator. After all, a world with a limited number of people and a limited amount of space can only have so many dictators. But to become intoxicated by them does undermine reason and logic, God-given tools by which we can comprehend His world.

And there is another problem from the Christian perspective: The truth is that the good God of Jesus Christ controls the world and is fully sovereign over every last thing that happens in it. A Christian should not be allured by the possbility of being in on the truth that a secret cabal is actually running the world; we already know who is running the world. The most powerful men who controlled the largest empires in history were all underneath His rule, were born when He ordained, only lived as long as He allowed, and were either saved by His electing grace or damned by His just retribution. We know who ordains everything from the blossoming of a tulip to the outbreak of a world war: Yahweh. We should not be attracted to or played by the seductive call of conspiracy theories. 

And if we allow ourselves to be, we will be at their mercy, less likely to see the world as it truly is, and less likely to daily bless and beseech the Name of the true controller of all history.