HITLER’S ARISTOCRATS

THE SHADOWY WORLD OF ARISTOCRATS, INDUSTRIALISTS AND POLITICAL ELITE WHO BECAME HITLER’S SUPPORTERS IN THE DRAWING ROOMS, COCKTAIL PARTIES AND WEEKEND RETREATS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA

Author: Susan Ronald Publisher: Amberley Publishing Price: £25 Released: Out now

Given Adolf Hitler’s humble origins, there is a grotesque irony in the fact that this son of a small-town Austrian customs official would one day bask in the adulation of some of Europe and America’s highest-ranking aristocrats and captains of industry. In Hitler’s Aristocrats, Susan Ronald explains how hundreds of influencers and enablers actively worked to blind their countries on both sides of the Atlantic to what the dictator and his cohort of criminals were doing.

Some of these collaborators rallied round Hitler as a safeguard against a perceived rise of communism in the wake of the Soviet revolution. Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, stands out as the most prominent ally of Nazism in the UK. Lesser known was David Freeman-mitford, father of writer Nancy Mitford, who became one of

Hitler’s outspoken aristocrats, gong so far as to promote the Führer in the House of Lords.

Across the Atlantic, the list of Hitler’s admirers was packed with powerful names. Scions of business, from Henry Ford to Thomas J Watson of IBM, were all, according to the author, “in one form or another, paid-up members of the American aristocrats who supported Adolf Hitler”.

Along with the fear of a Bolshevikinspired uprising, there was more than a whiff of anti-semitism fuelling the aristocrats’ espousal of Hitler. Henry

Ford ranted in newspaper articles against the Jews, quoting passages about conspiracies from the discredited Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It was a case of mutual admiration: in the early 1930s a large portrait of Ford hung over Hitler’s desk in his Munich office.

Ronald’s meticulous research brings to light how an influential segment of US and British society defended a dictator whose aim was to crush the democratic traditions of their countries.