They do not allude to Nazi topics such as anti-communism or biologist racism; rather they focus attention on an alleged Jewish dominance of the press, the university and finance, aimed at undermining the foundations of society. Possibly written between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, The protocols draw on a previous literature that goes back to the anti-Jacobin reactions that the French Revolution produced; later, the royalist Arthur de Gobineau circulated the idea of a dominant Aryan race threatened by the Jewish plot.
But if they find their oldest sources in France, the protocols reached their final form in tsarist Russia where they were first published in 1903. Their German career was prodigal. In 1933, the year of Hitler's rise to power, it already had 33 editions. However, as early as 1921 a correspondent for The Times in Istanbul reported that The south africa phone number list Protocols plagiarized a book published in Geneva in 1864, as discovered by a Russian émigré. The German press echoed this news and Hitler, in a typical movement of the paranoid character, saw in it nothing more than proof of the truth of the text's contents.
Joseph Goebbels, more nuanced, exposed in his diary that the protocols were a forgery, but only on a factual level, since they contained an indisputable "inner truth". The book was not only a success in Germany, but also elsewhere. Evans remembers that Winston Churchill himself pondered it. The Nazi Party even published a popular version. But the dissemination of The Protocols during the Third Reich ran into a major stumbling block when in 1937 the Swiss Supreme Court considered them spurious, although it authorized their publication as political propaganda.