The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein – review

Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a century trying to find answers to the troubling theories and nagging questions that always swirl around notorious crimes. The more famous the crime, the harder it is to get at the truth, especially if the crime has political consequences. For example, John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was quickly proven to have been part of a conspiracy involving leaders of the defeated Confederate states; but when a reunited country was later seeking reconciliation, it was found expedient to suppress this fact and portray him instead as a deranged individual who had acted alone.

In the case of the Reichstag fire of 1933, which brought Adolf Hitler to power, the opposite was the case. It suited the Nazis to blame it on a conspiracy by the communists, and the communists on a conspiracy by the Nazis; and most people believed in one or other of these two conspiracy theories.