Historians look at the rise of Fascism on the Continent during the 1930s as a road map to understanding the perils of today’s world. Yet, the insidious story of fascist sentiment in England before the Second World War has been largely overlooked, with most of the historical evidence long classified as too explosive by successive British governments. With HITLER’S GIRL: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII, academic and policy expert Lauren Young is the first to fully unpack the covered-up story of the rise of English fascism and how it bore many of the hallmarks of the upsurge of nationalism and populism in the U.S. and Europe today.
HITLER’S GIRL takes its title from British headlines about Unity Mitford, the high-profile British socialite whose four-year affair with the Fuhrer went largely unchallenged by British authorities. Other stories Young delves into include the membership of the Duke of Wellington and other influential Brits in the secret Right Club, the still classified communications between members of the British royal family and their cousins in the German nobility, and the Cliveden Set, which ran shadow foreign policy in support of Hitler. Collectively, many in the British ruling class formed what Young calls a murky Fifth Column in support of Nazi Germany.
Young warns of the parallels between that perilous era and our own with “the nagging sense that the postwar liberal democratic heritage that we [have] always assumed would be our birthright [is] starting to feel like a losing hand of poker…. As defenders of the democratic tradition, we [are] watching the chips pile up in adversarial hands, hoping that the tide [will] change, without ever folding and reevaluating both the gravity of our loss and a better strategy.” Russian oligarchy and the invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump—these threats to our postwar democratic traditions mirror aspects of England’s own prewar clandestine reality and raise disturbing questions: When does complacency become complicity? Is a cataclysmic event like World War II needed to reassess and ensure democracy’s survival?
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.
“Confirms not only the danger British fascists posed to the nation but also the government’s embarrassing, often inexplicable unwillingness to take steps against them. . . . A cautionary tale for today [when] Democratic institutions are fragile and many of the problems roiling the waters of the ’30s are ascendant again.”
— Library Journal
“Defense analyst Young explores the pro-Nazi sentiments of ‘an influential segment of [Britain’s] elite’ in this . . . intriguing history . . . The brisk narrative contains many shocking revelations.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A fresh analysis of fascism in 1930s Britain. . . . Thanks to newly opened and expanded archives, the author is able to expose a host of fascist-leaning figures during the 1930s, revealing the shockingly broad complacency and complicity among the aristocratic class.”
— Kirkus Reviews
New York Jewish Travel Guide
