Second World War

The Second World War becomes the most consequential historical catastrophe absorbed into the characters’ invented Plan. Their account recasts Hitler’s conquests and the Holocaust as stages in a quest for hidden knowledge, exposing the Plan’s power to make unrelated events seem inevitable and connected. The novel sets this seductive pattern-making against the real history and harm that conspiracy stories distort.

Insertion into the Plan

The collaborators explain the war through their fabricated scheme of rival secret traditions and a map whose clues would reveal a decisive point beneath the earth. In their account, Hitler had obtained four of the Plan’s six parts and sought an alliance with the Baconians, who refused him. He then presumed that the Jews possessed the most important remaining portion. The collaborators use this imagined motive to explain the Holocaust, turning the genocide into a search for a concealed message rather than confronting it as historical persecution.

Their explanation extends the Plan’s geography across Hitler’s campaigns. They interpret moves toward Danzig, Paris, Portugal, England, Palestine, the Balkans, and Russia as attempts to bring the territories of different supposed groups under his control. The narrative’s accumulation of locations and alleged strategic motives demonstrates how the Plan converts military history into a single, seemingly purposeful itinerary. These are the characters’ inventions, not the novel’s account of the war’s actual causes.

The Holocaust as Conspiracy Evidence

The most disturbing elaboration treats the procedures of genocide as clues. The characters speculate that the systematic handling of victims and their belongings was meant to locate a message supposedly hidden by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles. In their imagined chain of correspondences, the message would guide the Pendulum to the point where telluric currents converged beneath the earth’s concave surface. The atrocity is thus made to serve the Plan’s fantasy of discovering a universal center.

This interpretation exposes the moral violence of conspiratorial explanation. The characters take a real, immense crime and subordinate it to their own system, presenting its victims as bearers of a secret and its bureaucracy as evidence for a hidden search. Their reasoning does not uncover history; it replaces historical understanding with a story that makes catastrophe appear to confirm the conspiracy. The novel’s framing makes the gap between the characters’ ingenuity and the human reality they appropriate central to the episode.

Fabricated Evidence and Antisemitism

The Plan’s account draws on a longer history of forged and recycled conspiracy narratives. The characters connect antisemitic claims to the Protocols, a text presented as a program attributed to the Elders of Zion. They describe its contradictory political prescriptions and trace passages to Maurice Joly’s earlier Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, while their own account further folds in an alleged prior document by Sue. Rather than treating these shifting textual sources as evidence of fabrication, the collaborators turn the very chain of copying and resemblance into further proof of the Plan.

Their account also imagines how the Protocols might have been produced and circulated. It attributes a role to Rachkovsky, who, in their reconstruction, altered material associated with Joly and substituted Jews for Witte; it then follows the document through Glinka and other Russian intermediaries toward the tsar. This purported genealogy is itself presented inside the novel as the collaborators’ conspiracy-making, not as a reliable historical explanation. Its function is to show how a fabricated text can acquire apparent authority through circulation, political use, and the addition of further invented connections.

The Plan’s Self-Confirming Logic

The Second World War exemplifies the Plan’s method: each new historical event is treated as confirmation, while contrary details are absorbed into the pattern. The characters explicitly claim that adding Hitler gives them a reason for the war, just as adding the Assassins gives them a way to explain later events in the Persian Gulf. Their sequence of interpretations makes explanation feel like discovery, though the supposed links originate in their own analogies and conjectures.

The narrator later identifies the psychological danger in this practice. The three collaborators began by treating their connections as an ironic game, but repeated evidence-gathering trained them to connect everything automatically. Pretending to believe could become indistinguishable from belief; the narrator describes himself as becoming addicted, Diotallevi as corrupted, and Belbo as converted. The war’s place in the Plan is therefore not only an example of historical distortion. It marks the moment when a parody of conspiracy begins to govern the people who invented it.

The novel also links conspiratorial thinking to the desire to disown responsibility and uncertainty. A secret plot promises to explain frustration by supplying an enemy and a hidden cause. Once people invent such plots, they may organize against them and reproduce the conduct they condemn. In this framework, the Plan’s account of the Second World War demonstrates how an invented secret can become socially consequential when believers act as though it were real.