num_pages: 512
description: Chas Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born to power. Scion of an aristocratic family, Churchill's cousin, royal confidant, owner of vast coal fields &amp; landed estates, wed to the doyenne of London society, he was an ornament to his class, the .1% who still owned 30% of England's wealth as late as '30. But history hasn't been kind to 'Charley', as the king called him, because, in his own words, he "backed the wrong horse"--a very dark horse indeed: Adolf Hitler &amp; the Nazis. Londonderry wasn't the only aristocrat to do so, but he was the only Cabinet member to do so. It ruined him. In a final irony, his grand London house was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the blitz. Kershaw isn't out to rehabilitate Londonderry but to understand him, to expose why he was made a scapegoat for views that were much more widely held than anyone likes to think. H.L. Mencken famously said that "for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat &amp; wrong." The conventional explanation of the coming of WWII is a simple story of the West's appeasement of Hitler in the face of bullying. Thru the story of how Londonderry came to be mixed up with the Nazis &amp; how it all went wrong, Kershaw shows that behind the familiar cartoon is a much more complicated &amp; interesting reality, with miscalculations on both sides, fatal miscalculations.
language: English
title: Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis & the Road to War
titlecomplete: Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis & the Road to War
characters: Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Adolf Hitler
genres: European History, War, Nonfiction, World War II, History, Germany, 20th Century, British Literature, Biography
ratings_count: 157
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography
publisher: Penguin Press (NY)