Un Amigo de Hitler

s/t: Inglaterra y Alemania Antes de La 2b: Guerra Mundial
Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born to power & command. Scion of one of Britain’s most aristocratic families, cousin of Churchill & confidant of the king, owner of vast coal fields & landed estates, married to the doyenne of London’s social scene, Londonderry was an ornament to his class, the .1% of the population who still owned 30% 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,” & a very dark horse indeed: Adolf Hitler & his Nazi Party. Londonderry was hardly the only British 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 German Luftwaffe in the blitz.
Ian Kershaw is not out to rehabilitate Lord Londonderry but to understand him & 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 & wrong.” The conventional explanation of the coming of WWII is a simple story of the West’s craven appeasement of Hitler in the face of his bullying. Thru the story of how Lord Londonderry came to be mixed up with the Nazis & how it all went horribly wrong for him, Kershaw shows us that behind the familiar cartoon is a much more complicated & interesting reality, full of miscalculations on both sides, miscalculations that proved to be among the most fateful in history.