Michael's Reviews > Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII

This book is a catastrophe. Essentially a political rant about how the upper class is a threat to democracy, it is a case study in lazy research, cherry-picking methodology, and poor editing. Those who follow me on goodreads know that I will read almost anything to the end, once I’ve started, but this just wasn’t even worth it. You only live so long, and this book isn’t worth another hour of my life.

Although it claims to draw extensively from archives, checking the back verifies that almost every chapter is drawn from a limited supply of popular secondary sources, with an average of one or two archival citations per chapter. It looks to me like she sent an intern to look at some MI5 and Home Office records for a day or two, and then used a handful of whatever they looked at, whether or not it was really relevant.

It will be painfully obvious to any German speaker that no one involved with this project had any familiarity with the language. I only saw one German source cited, and that may have been a printing of an English-language essay, since the author was British. But it’s the use of German in this text that really gives it away. “Der Stürmer” is consistently referred to in the text as “Die Stürmer" (though it’s right in the citations). Umlauts are frequently dispensed with. Nouns are not capitalized. Amusingly, “Führer” is NEVER correct, but there are two versions: when the word appears in the main text it is “führer” (yes umlaut, no capitalization), and when it is in a quote it is “Fuhrer” (no umlaut, yes capitalization). The most egregious error is a misreading that renders “Parteitag” (meaning “Party Day”) as “Parteig,” a non-word that has never been in any other text. This word is sprinkled over dozens of pages without ever being caught by a proofreader.

Fact-checking is equally weak. She repeats Anne De Courcy’s error about Julius Streicher being NSDAP party member #2 (but without citing her source), for example. The point where I stopped reading was on page 101, where she says (again, sans citation) that the 1936 Berlin Olympics “began with a screening of the two-part, four-hour propaganda film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl.”

For those playing at home, “Olympia” was a documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics that was released on April 20, 1938. According to Young, the Nazis had developed time travel and were able to screen a movie at an event that hadn’t even been filmed yet (remarkable that they still managed to lose the war, with technology like that). That’s the kind of lazy writing I just don’t bother with.