The real danger comes when right-wing populists tie conspiracy theories to racism. A case in point is Nazi Germany, where fictional racist conspiracy theories linked to racism fed a “Final Solution” that became the mass murder of millions of innocent, defenceless people.
In the Holocaust, as many as 6 million Jews and 500,000 Roma and Sinti were killed. In addition, a huge number of gay people, disabled people, Jehovah’s witnesses, political opponents and trade unionists were imprisoned and killed.
The historian Jeffrey Herf has stated that in the Nazi conspiracy theories “Jewry” plots were claimed to be behind a “war of extermination” launched against Germany and that the Nazi leadership publicly threatened to “exterminate” and “annihilate” the Jews as an act of “retaliation”.
Herf writes: “I explore how the Nazi leaders and propagandists translated the latter fundamental ideological concept into a narrative. Between 1939 and 1945, Hitler himself, his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and dozens of other Nazi officials and propagandists, presented the war as one waged between Nazi Germany and an “actually” existing international Jewish conspiracy.
This idea was hammered home in numerous secret directives concerning broader themes and small details of how the press should cover and interpret unfolding events. These ideas were disseminated daily and weekly to journalists and editors at several thousand newspapers and magazines by Otto Dietrich, the director of the Reich Press Office, and his staff.” See also chapter 1, chapter 6, chapter 7 chapter 11 and chapter 12 about conspiracy theories and other urban legends.