"By the clever and continuous use of propaganda, a people can even be made to mistake heaven for hell, and vice versa." So said Adolf Hitler, whose phalanx of "elite appeasers" in Britain and America, according to historian Susan Ronald (The Ambassador; A Dangerous Woman) in Hitler's Aristocrats, ably assisted him in resurrecting a war-ready Germany. In the shadow of World War I, many of the Allied nations swore such slaughter should never happen again, but this "magnificent obsession" became a propaganda cudgel that Hitler and his Nazi Party wielded to great effect. Ronald magnifies the countless dupes--European high society, international industrialists and the British and American political elite--who aided Hitler's rise by acting (wittingly or not) as the dictator's "listening posts" and mouthpieces, constantly working to "burnish Hitler's halo as a 'man of peace.' "
Through memoirs, diaries, letters and postwar testimonies, Ronald reveals the uncomfortable pro-Nazi and often antisemitic attitudes of such controversial luminaries as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Diana and Unity Mitford, Lady Nancy Astor, Charles Lindbergh and many others who believed appeasing Hitler was the only way to avert another war. Edward, Duke of Windsor, comes in for particular disdain as a man who was "never a deep thinker" and who fervently (and misguidedly) believed a close relationship between England and Germany was "essential for the security of Europe." Hitler's Aristocrats is an absorbing study of the ubiquitous nature of propaganda and the "murky puppeteers" who actively worked to blind the world to Hitler's crimes. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver