In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile times – not least because it unpicks twisted ways of thinking that stretch far beyond the legacy of the Third Reich and its leader. Sir Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian and Hitler-era specialist who supported fellow-academic Deborah Lipstadt in her landmark court victory over the Holocaust-denying writer David Irving, led a five-year research programme on “Conspiracy and Democracy”.

Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to the needs of the larger-than-life actor-manager Donald Wolfit. The Dresser, adapted by Harwood, went on to become a great film success starring Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney.

Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, The Plot Against America flashes back to the global turbulence of the 1940s to depict a counterfactual America that turns to the dark side. Instead of the re-election of Franklin D Roosevelt for a third term in 1940, the aviation pioneer and wildly popular celebrity Charles Lindbergh is elected President, on a platform of keeping America out of the new war in Europe.

The notion of massed aircraft dogfighting over southern England seems inconceivable now, but the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was all too horribly real for its participants. Marking the 80th anniversary, this three-part recreation of three pivotal days in the campaign began with 15 August, the day of the first major German attacks.

When the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by the British 11^th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945, the BBC’s reporter Richard Dimbleby was there to record the occasion.

It’s all in the timing. Here was David Baddiel beginning a stand-up turn at a gig in Finchley. A Holocaust survivor gets to heaven, and God asks for a Holocaust joke. God says that his joke isn't funny, and the survivor replies “Well, I guess you had to be there.” Baddiel believes there is nothing that is impervious to a joke.

Just as Joker was the most divisive film of 2019, so Jojo Rabbit may take the mantle for the early months of 2020. The issue is not that director Taika Waititi is making a comedy about the Nazis – plenty of filmmakers have done that, from Mel Brooks to Tarantino – but the manner in which he goes about it. For some, his “anti-hate satire” will be funny, inventive and hopeful, for others too cartoonish for its subject matter. In fact, it's all of those things.

Boris Pahor is the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In this program, the 106-year-old recounts his experiences as a political refugee and prisoner to the Nazis during their rule in his native Slovenia. As a study of one individual, The Man Who Saw Too Much is a graceful attempt to itemise the totality of the Holocaust by viewing it through an especially enlightening lens.

The only novel by the Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth, Youth Without God was written in exile after he fled Anschluss Vienna and published in 1938, shortly before his death.

“All this evil and dark crap was supposed to be fun,” complains exasperated Norwegian black metal overlord Euronymous, played by Rory Culkin, as his world spirals out of control in a cataclysm of murder, suicide and church burnings. The true events that inspired Lords of Chaos are some of the most bizarre and twisted in the history of popular music. Fun they are not. Freakish, depressing and horrific, certainly.