Fact Check!

In 1941, an estimated 80,000 people attended the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in Nazi controlled Serbia. The show featured dozens of anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic propaganda films, plus hundreds of posters and brochures intended to expose a supposed “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” for world domination.

Throughout World War II, such propaganda was an important tool of the Nazi Party, which aimed to root out what it described as a powerful Masonic–Jewish cabal. It certainly wasn’t the only conspiracy to place Masonry in its crosshairs.

This year’s International Conference on Freemasonry, coming March 14 to UC Berkeley, is going deep on alleged Masonic plots throughout history and the cultural ephemera associated with them. That includes examples of explicit propaganda, such as the 1943 Nazi-backed French film Forces Occultes, but also misunderstood satire, as in the case of the 1975 Illuminatus! Trilogy of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson that inspired a renewed wave of interest in Illuminati conspiracies.

That such a theme should emerge now, in our own “post-truth” political age, may be fitting. But according to conference organizer Susan Sommers, it’s a happy accident. Last year’s “Masonry in Popular Culture” theme resulted in so many submissions that Sommers elected to divide them into two parts: Last year’s conference focused mostly on Masonry in the arts, while this year’s tends more toward its role in the political realm.

As speaker Felip Corte Real de Camargo, of the University of Bristol, explains, “Freemasonry has been cast as a threat by the Nazis, embraced as a patriotic ally by Brazil’s military dictatorship, dismissed as a corrupt network during Italy’s turbulent ‘years of lead,’ and [otherwise] portrayed as a sinister secret government.” It is, in other words, in the eye of the beholder. 

The International Conference on Freemasonry takes place March 14, 2026, at UC Berkeley. Register at freemason.org/berkeley.