HITLER’S GIRL

A fresh analysis of fascism in 1930s Britain.

Using the outrageous behavior of Hitler devotee Unity Mitford, the youngest of the Mitford sisters, as a point of reference, Young examines the ingrained fascism of upper-crust British society in the years before World War II. 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. As the author shows, the rise of nationalism occurring in Germany after the ravages of World War I was exported to Britain during a similarly vulnerable time. Britain was losing many of its imperial realms, and the communist threat was rampant. Consequently, many in Britain admired Hitler’s strong-armed tactics in controlling inflation and squelching opposition, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, a British parallel paramilitary operation of antisemitic, right-wing thugs, gained enormous popularity. Diana Mitford, eldest of the five aristocratic, free-willed Mitford sisters, left her marriage to Bryan Guinness to marry Mosley in secret, while her younger sister Unity, drawn magnetically to Hitler, installed herself in Munich until he drew her into his inner circle of sycophants. Meanwhile, the royal family, of German stock, was being recruited by Queen Mary’s cousin, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, all while the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson continued to demonstrate alarming German sympathies—a subject that has been well chronicled elsewhere. Young capably discusses many of the right-wing groups proliferating at the time as well as the long-running currents of antisemitism in Britain and the defeatist nature of Neville Chamberlain’s government. The author also wonders how Unity, followed by British intelligence, could have met “with Hitler more than 140 times between February 1935 and September 1939, espousing Nazi vitriol, without the British government ever taking a real interest.”

A pertinent historical study of “a dangerous combination of complacency and complicity.”