When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, public reaction in Britain was not that of unalloyed horror. Instead, it lay somewhere between disinterest, snobbish, if inaccurate, contempt (“the man’s a house painter!”), and, in some circles, quiet satisfaction that a vigorous reformer had shaken up his country in an apparently effective and forward-looking fashion. The evils of the Nazi regime were obvious to anyone with either a social conscience or a knowledge of history, but it was more convenient either to ignore them, or, in the case of a group of well-meaning but misguided society figures, to attempt to mitigate them by means of the so-called Anglo-German Fellowship.
