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  • Published: 26 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780241959213
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

Making Friends with Hitler

Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War



One of Penguin's most important and best-selling authors, Kershaw is the world's leading authority on Hitler

Britain, as the most powerful of the European victors of World War One, had a unique responsibility to maintain the peace in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The outbreak of a second, even more catastrophic war in 1939 has therefore always raised painful questions about Britain's failure to deal with Nazism. Could some other course of action have destroyed Hitler when he was still weak? In this highly disturbing new book, Ian Kershaw examines this crucial issue. He concentrates on the figure of Lord Londonderry - grandee, patriot, cousin of Churchill and the government minister responsible for the RAF at a crucial point in its existence. Londonderry's reaction to the rise of Hitler-to pursue friendship with the Nazis at all costs-raises fundamental questions about Britain's role in the 1930s and whether in practice there was ever any possibility of preventing Hitler's leading Europe once again into war.

  • Published: 26 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780241959213
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

About the author

Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw is Professor of Modern history at the University of Sheffield. For services to history he was given the German award of the Federal Cross of Merit in 1994. he was knighted in 2002 and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2004.
He was historical advisor to three BBC series: The Nazis: A Warning From History, War of the Century and Auschwitz.
His most recent books are Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and 1936-1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year, and was joint winner of the inaugural British Academy Book Prize; Making Friends with hitler: Lord Londonberry and Britain's Road to War, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography in 2005; and, most recently, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941.

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