QAnon, the Holocaust and the deadly power of conspiracy theories

Our nation is getting a crash course in conspiracy theories. QAnon has been in the spotlight as the latest iteration. With the rise of social media, the messenger may be new, but the message is not. Conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, well before mass communications amplified their potency. The human desire to explain complicated events in simplistic ways often leads to blaming minorities for them, sometimes with deadly consequences.

People have long attributed extraordinary power and influence to Jews, and names like "the Rothschilds" are stand-ins for an alleged global Jewish conspiracy.

A family of bankers, the real-life Rothschild family rose to prominence during the Napoleonic era. They were outliers: many Jews in Europe at that time were impoverished and lived in rural areas. Though the portrayal of the Rothschilds as powerful, greedy schemers dates to the mid-19th century, this ugly caricature mutates to fit the crisis du jour: the "Rothschilds" control the weather; they manipulate the course of wars for financial gain; they blackmail politicians to steer the tides of history.

The Nazis recognized the resonance of the Rothschilds as shorthand for Jewish evil. They even made a movie about them in 1940, an odd mashup of anti-Semitism and biopic, part of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ strategy that cinema should be the "vanguard of the Nazi military."

The Holocaust was the most murderous and massive manifestation of Jew hatred — and it began and ended with the aid of conspiracy theories. State-sponsored conspiracism fueled the genocide of 6 million innocent human beings. A major pillar of Nazi ideology — and an effective method of drumming up anti-Semitism — was the false accusation that Jews had "stabbed Germany in the back" during World War I.

In this rewriting of history, German Jews were traitors who, along with communists, had deliberately undermined their nation’s war efforts. How else to explain disastrous losses on the battlefield? The government had misled its public and average Germans were shocked by defeat. Someone needed to shoulder the blame and it was more comfortable to attribute it to an already hated minority, rather than the military brass. Someone needed to be behind the punishing economic penalties of the Treaty of Versailles and the national humiliation. Let’s blame the Jews.

One of the slippery things when writing about conspiracy theories is this: how to explain their convoluted logic without making them sound more sensible? How to lead the reader along the twisted path, without constantly having to shout "it’s not true!"?

The Nazis were opportunists. They built on millennia of widespread hatred of Jews, archaeological strata of lies. Some of these lies were spread by Catholic and Protestant leaders, most dangerously through the myth of the blood libel. Having already cast the Jews as responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, the blood libel upped the ante. Jews were now murderers of Christian children, quasi-cannibals who needed the blood of innocents for ritual purposes. But as Europe became more secular, so did its anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," originally published in the Russian Empire in 1903, is the foundational text of those who cling to the myth of a shadowy Jewish cabal seeking world domination. Its vision of sinister "elders" is a more malleable version of the Rothschild conspiracy. In the last years of the Stalin regime, dozens of Jewish doctors were put on trial, accused of a conspiracy to murder Soviet leaders. Despite a lack of evidence, the charges were plausible in a society acclimated to the idea of Jewish plots. Today, updated versions of the "Protocols" enjoy robust sales in countries from Egypt to Japan, with Jews secretly behind everything from the 9/11 attacks to COVID-19.

In a nasty irony, the Holocaust has been portrayed as a conspiracy theory in and of itself. Holocaust deniers allege that the brutal crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators are fabrications, a massive lie invented by Jews to elicit pity and profit. They argue that the documented historical record is a massive fraud — the work of a clandestine movement designed to benefit Israel and individual Jews.

Conspiracy theorists like to portray themselves as "skeptics," truth-seekers willing to bravely challenge the official line. Holocaust deniers have adopted this same pose for decades, masking their anti-Semitism under the guise of legitimate academic inquiry. Make no mistake — the motive is hatred, not skepticism or intellectual curiosity.

Edna Friedberg is a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This piece was written for The Hartford Courant.