Making Friends with Hitler

By: Ian Kershaw

Narrated by: Gildart Jackson

Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born to power and command. Scion of one of Britain's most aristocratic families, cousin of Churchill and confidant of the king, owner of vast coal fields and landed estates, married to the doyenne of London's social scene, Londonderry was an ornament to his class, the 0.1 percent of the population who still owned 30 percent of England's wealth as late as 1930. But history has not been kind to "Charley", as the king called him, because, in his own words, he "backed the wrong horse", and a very dark horse indeed: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Londonderry was hardly the only British aristocrat to do so, but he was the only Cabinet member to do so, and it ruined him. In a final irony, his grand London house was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in the blitz.

Ian Kershaw is not out to rehabilitate Lord Londonderry but to understand him and to expose why he was made a scapegoat for views that were much more widely held than anyone now likes to think. H. L. Mencken famously said that "for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." The conventional explanation of the coming of World War II is a simple story of the West's craven appeasement of Hitler in the face of his bullying. Through the story of how Lord Londonderry came to be mixed up with the Nazis and how it all went horribly wrong for him, Ian Kershaw shows us that behind the familiar cartoon is a much more complicated and interesting reality, full of miscalculations on both sides, miscalculations that proved to be among the most fateful in history.

©2018 Ian Kershaw (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A Whole New Perspective

This book is excellent - Kershaw is the expert on this period and expanded my understanding of the period well beyond all of the other books I’ve read by Kershaw, Feist and Shirer - along with many others. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to better understand appeasement and the dilemmas that still face us today.

Secondary Character View Of WW2

Just as interesting in its own way as Kershaw’s Hitler Biography. Some historical figures and episodes that merit a footnote in the larger works on the period get center stage in this book. Appeasement seen as a process that many favored and not the retrospective evil it has come to symbolize.

Unusual book

I think it would help to know some of the history of the Nazi and WW2 years but not necessary. The book tells the story of an English aristocrat during that period of time.
So well written and excellent narration, fascinating to learn something of his reactions and struggles.

The book goes on and on

While Ian Kershaw is a good writer, elements of the story — especially the main character’s endless rehashing of how badly he was treated and how much his feelings were hurt — became as wearisome to me as they were to everyone who had to listen to him. While I did learn some interesting things about the run up to World War II and the beginning of the war, I would have appreciated a tighter narrative.

How did the Marquess of Londonderry become “Lord Haw-Haw?

I knew very little about the British lord who turned traitor and became Hitler’s radio cheerleader during World War II. Ian Kershaw explains how this came about and how Lord Haw-Haw was far from the only upper class Brit who thought the Nazis were onto a good thing.