Using the past as a road map to navigate the complexities of today’s turn toward authoritarianism, this riveting book is a disturbing history of 1930s Britain, revealing how prominent Fascist sympathizers nearly succeeded in overturning democracy.

“Confirms not only the danger British Fascists posed to the nation but also the government’s embarrassing, often inexplicable unwillingness to take steps against them. . . . A cautionary tale for today, when Democratic institutions are fragile and many of the problems roiling the waters of the ’30s are ascendant again.”—Library Journal

Hitler’s Girl is a groundbreaking history that reveals how, in the 1930s, authoritarianism almost took hold in Great Britain as it did in Italy and Germany. Drawing on recently declassified intelligence files, Lauren Young details how sympathy for the Nazi cause pervaded the British aristocracy, with significant factions of the upper class actively and methodically pursuing a pro-German agenda. Young exposes the involvement of secret organizations such as the Right Club, which counted the Duke of Wellington among its influential members; the Cliveden Set, which ran a shadow foreign policy supporting Hitler; and the shocking relationship between the socialite Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler.

Eye-opening and instructive, Hitler’s Girl reevaluates 1930s England to help us understand our vulnerabilities today, including the Russian oligarchy and the invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump. These threats to our postwar democratic traditions mirror aspects of England’s own prewar clandestine reality and raise disturbing questions: At what point does complacency become complicity, posing a real risk to the democratic norms that we take for granted? Is a cataclysmic event like World War II needed to reassess and ensure democracy’s survival? Will we, in our own defining moment, stand up for democratic values—or will we succumb to political extremism?