"It was above all a former French Jesuit and abbot, Augustin de Barruel, now regarded as the greatest conspiracy theorist in history due to his books, who fuelled the paranoid accusations against the Jews. For example, it was he who suggested that behind the three great societies – the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Knights Templar – lay the omnipresent Jews, the true masters of an invisible empire. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that, in addition to being the primary source for the Protocols, his ideas laid some of the intellectual foundations for the worldviews that culminated in the Soviet and Nazi regimes."