Hitler's Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII

Hitler's Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII

by Lauren Young
Hitler's Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII

Hitler's Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII

by Lauren Young

Hardcover

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Overview

A timely, riveting book that presents for the first time an alternative history of 1930s Britain, revealing how prominent fascist sympathizers nearly succeeded in overturning British democracy—using the past as a road map to navigate the complexities of today’s turn toward authoritarianism.

Hitler’s Girl is a groundbreaking history that reveals how, in the 1930s, authoritarianism nearly took hold in Great Britain as it did in Italy and Germany. Drawing on recently declassified intelligence files, Lauren Young details the pervasiveness of Nazi sympathies among the British aristocracy, as significant factions of the upper class methodically pursued an actively pro-German agenda. She reveals how these aristocrats formed a murky Fifth Column to Nazi Germany, which depended on the complacence and complicity of the English to topple its proud and long-standing democratic tradition—and very nearly succeeded.

As she highlights the parallels to our similarly treacherous time, Young exposes the involvement of secret organizations like the Right Club, which counted the Duke of Wellington among its influential members; the Cliveden Set, which ran a shadow foreign policy in support of Hitler; and the shocking four-year affair between socialite Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler.

Eye-opening and instructive, Hitler’s Girl re-evaluates 1930s England to help us understand our own vulnerabilities and poses urgent questions we must face to protect our freedom. At what point does complacency become complicity, posing real risk to the democratic norms that we take for granted? Will democracy again succeed—and will it require a similarly cataclysmic event like World War II to ensure its survival? Will we, in our own defining moment, stand up for democratic values—or will we succumb to political extremism?


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062936738
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 08/23/2022
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 282,680
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lauren Young is an academic and policy consultant specializing in security and defense issues. She is a lecturer at Yale University, where she teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Jackson School for Global Affairs. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Chapter 1 German Fascism Crosses the English Channel 11

Chapter 2 More Dangerous than the Blackshirts: Secret Right-Wing Movements in Britain 31

Chapter 3 A Short History of the Long History of British Anti-Semitism 55

Chapter 4 The Debutante Nazi 61

Chapter 5 "Sweet Dr. Goebbels": Fascist Friendships 95

Chapter 6 Whose Side? The Other Story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor 109

Chapter 7 The Wolkoff Affair 139

Chapter 8 Hitler's Girl 161

Afterword Hitler's Child? 187

Acknowledgments 193

Notes 195

Index 215

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