There’s a big spike in Google searches related to World War II

World War II is having a moment, at least in the minds of people doing Google searches. Google Trends, a tool that measures the popularity of search terms over time, shows that there have been dramatic spikes in searches for topics related to the war, including: Reichstag fire, Pearl Harbor, fascism, Kristallnacht, and Nazi Germany.

Searches for “Reichstag fire,” the event that precipitated Adolf Hitler’s declaration of martial law in 1933, peaked worldwide the month after the Brexit vote in Britain and again in October 2016 before the US election. Those searches eventually reached an exceptional five-year high in the first week of February 2017. In the United States, searches related to the event when Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe lit the German parliament building on fire were most popular in Arizona and New Hampshire.