The Holocaust enters the novel through a false explanation devised by the conspiratorial Plan: the Nazi genocide is imagined as a search for a hidden message among Europe’s Jews. The theory is not an account of what happened but a measure of how far the Plan’s compulsive pattern-making has gone, converting mass murder into supposed confirmation of its own mythology and exposing the lethal stakes of antisemitic conspiracy narratives.

The Plan’s Conspiratorial Explanation

The proposed explanation begins with a fictional reconstruction of Nazi aims. Hitler, the characters speculate, had acquired four-sixths of the Plan and sent Hess to England to seek an alliance with the Baconians. When that effort supposedly failed, the conspirators imagine that Hitler turned to the Jews because they held the remaining, most important part of the secret. In this account, the relevant group was not in Jerusalem but among the Diaspora; the Holocaust is then declared to be explained by that imagined search.

The theory assigns a further purpose to the genocide’s bureaucratic procedures. The characters speculate that the Nazis were looking for a message hidden on or in the possessions of one of the millions of victims, whom they identify in their mythology as a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles. They claim that this supposed clue would let Hitler use the Pendulum to locate the point where telluric currents converged beneath the Earth’s concave surface. The imagined destination merges the Mystic Pole with the center of the Earth and recasts the atrocity as a quest for mastery of the world. These details belong to the novel’s fictional Plan, not to the historical explanation of the Holocaust.

How Antisemitic Texts Are Made and Recycled

The characters’ invention unfolds against a history of fabricated plots. They describe the Protocols as twenty-four declarations attributed to the Elders of Zion, whose contradictory program supposedly combines attacks on liberalism with calls to foment revolution, exploit social conflict, promote arms production, and manipulate governments. The text’s contradictions do not weaken the conspiracy in the characters’ reconstruction; they supply more material to be interpreted as evidence of hidden coordination.

The novel traces the Protocols’ textual ancestry through earlier political writing. In its account, the Times of London identifies Maurice Joly’s 1864 Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel as a source: Joly’s pamphlet against Napoleon III gave Machiavelli arguments later reused in the Protocols. The fictional investigators then extend the chain backward, claiming that Joly copied a document associated with Sue. Each apparent exposure of plagiarism becomes, under the Plan’s logic, another link in a concealed tradition rather than a reason to reject the conspiracy.

The narrative also describes how antisemitic accusations were redirected and repurposed. After the Jesuits saw that Sue’s Ordonation was attributed to them, the account says, they used Simonini’s letter to attribute it to Jews. It further recounts a theory that Rachkovsky adapted a pamphlet found at Elie de Cyon’s villa, substituting Jews for Witte as the alleged subject of a plot. In this account, the document then passed through Juliana Glinka to Russian officials and reached the tsar, placing Witte in political difficulty. The characters’ story about the Protocols thus depicts forged evidence as a political instrument, while itself displaying the temptation to turn a chain of claims into a totalizing explanation.

The Novel’s Critique of the Plan

The Holocaust theory marks the Plan’s collapse of distinctions between analogy and identity, speculation and fact. The narrator recalls that the three men initially recognized their associations as unwarranted and treated them as parody. But the habit of connecting everything gradually took hold: pretending to believe could become indistinguishable from believing. The invented explanation of the Holocaust is among the starkest consequences of that transformation, as the characters fit historical suffering into a scheme built to confirm itself.

The Plan’s broader social logic is stated plainly: a secret society might spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The novel also presents conspiratorial thinking as a way of assigning blame for failures and frustrations to hidden enemies rather than confronting uncertainty or responsibility. Once the Plan is invented, however, others can recognize fragments of their own mythology in it and act as if it had always existed. The narrator concludes that such a plan can become real through belief and action. The Holocaust episode therefore does more than extend the fictional conspiracy: it demonstrates how a fabricated master explanation can appropriate history, reproduce antisemitic falsehoods, and make the search for hidden meaning more compelling than the reality it distorts.