Frank McDonough | |
---|---|
Born | Liverpool, United Kingdom | 17 April 1957
Occupation | Historian |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History of Germany |
Institutions | Liverpool John Moores University |
Frank McDonough is a British historian of the Third Reich and international history.
Francis (Frank) Xavier McDonough was born on 17 April 1957 in Liverpool. He read modern History at Balliol College,Oxford,as a Senior Status Scholar. He was at Balliol at the same time as Boris Johnson and knew him. He later earned a PhD in history from Lancaster University,under the supervision of Ruth Henig. He was Professor of International History in the History Department of the School of Humanities and Social Science at Liverpool John Moores University until his retirement in 2021. He is an avid Liverpool F.C. fan and still lives in Liverpool with his partner Ann. [1]
His key area of research is international history,particularly Anglo-German relations in the 20th century. He has published significant works on the origins of World War I and World War II. McDonough is increasingly publishing his research on the Third Reich,including opposition to Hitler,the Holocaust and the Gestapo.
His study of Neville Chamberlain,Appeasement and the British Road to War,published in 1998,was reviewed in academic journals. Parker described it as "very well written,with a lively argument,which explores appeasement in society too". [2] Andrew Thorpe,a leading authority on foreign affairs,described the book as "a cogent and stimulating analysis of appeasement which will take the debate still deeper". [3] A leading US historian of foreign affairs from the Reed College,Edward B. Segel,commented:"The book brings out effectively how the British government manipulated the mass-media,the press and especially the BBC to exclude public criticism of Chamberlain's policies and convey the impression of overwhelming support". [4]
McDonough is one of the most prominent 'post-revisionist' experts on Neville Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement,along with Parker,who was,as Sydney Aster points out,his "academic mentor while he was at Oxford". [5]
In McDonough's 2007 monograph,The Conservative Party and Anglo-German Relations,1905–1914,published by Palgrave Macmillan,he moved the focus of analysis to the Conservative Party's role in the outbreak of the First World War. The study was described in a review in the journal The Bulletin of the German Institute of Historical Research by a German foreign policy scholar as "a thorough and thought-provoking analysis,which draws on over thirty archives and provides a powerful and overdue corrective to the traditional depiction of the Edwardian Conservative Party as 'Scaremongers' and the chief promoters of Germanophobic views among British political parties in the years that led to the outbreak of the First World War". [6]
In addition,to his research on Anglo-German relations,McDonough has written a number of publications on the related subject of the history of the Third Reich,most notably,Hitler and Nazi Germany (1999);Opposition and Resistance in Nazi Germany (2001);and Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party (2003).
Among his other books are:The Origins of the First and Second World Wars (1997);The British Empire,1815–1914 (1994);and Hitler,Chamberlain and Appeasement (2002). In 1998,McDonough was commissioned by the Oxford and Cambridge Examinations Board to write a set text entitled Fascism,Conflict and Communism:European History:1890–1945. [7]
In recent years,McDonough's published work has been focused on aspects of the history of the Third Reich.
In 2008,McDonough published The Holocaust ,with John Cochrane. This book is a new introduction to both the events and the complex international response to the Holocaust and examines the grim reality of life and death in the death camps,the scholarly debates and the impact on popular culture since 1945 of the most horrific aspect of the history of the 20th century.
McDonough is the author of an English-language biography of the German resistance heroine,Sophie Scholl,entitled Sophie Scholl:The Woman Who Defied Hitler,published by the History Press in February 2009.
In September 2011,McDonough published The Origins of the Second World War:An international Perspective,about the outbreak of the Second World War.
In April 2012,the second edition of "Hitler and the Rise of the Nazi Party" was published.
In August 2015,McDonough's study The Gestapo:The Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police was published by the Hodder and Stoughton imprint Coronet. The book is based on original Gestapo files and tells the story of the victims of Nazi Terror. The book has been published in translated versions in Italy (March 2016),Spain (June 2016),Norway (August 2016),Sweden (September 2016),Finland (2016) [1] and Romania (2019).
The paperback version of the Gestapo book was released in September 2016 [1]
McDonough completed a two volume book titled 'The Hitler Years'. The first volume (Triumph 1933–1939) was published in 2019 and the second volume (Disaster 1940-1945) was published in 2020. [1]
McDonough has appeared on TV and radio. He appeared on CrossTalk on Russia Today in 2010,debating whether the Second World War could have been prevented. [8] He featured in the BBC 1 documentary A Tale of Two Rival Cities,which was part of the BBC's "History of the World" project,for which he also acted as Historical Consultant; [9] the documentary won a Royal Television Society Award. [10] He was interviewed in two special programmes on French National Television to mark the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle's 18 June 1940 speech when he said the "flame of French Resistance cannot be extinguished". McDonough appeared as an historical commentator on France 2 and in a special documentary featuring historians on de Gaulle,broadcast on France 3 on 18 June 2010. [11] He also appeared in the BBC 1 programme Inside Out commenting on a story presented by the actor Paul McGann that looked at whether or not Adolf Hitler visited Liverpool between November 1911 and May 1912. McDonough argued that evidence from Austrian police records,eyewitness accounts from Vienna,and shipping records all strongly indicated that the young Hitler had lived in Vienna at this time,not Liverpool,thus confirming what Hitler claimed in his autobiography, Mein Kampf . [12] In 2012,McDonough appeared in a series on the history of the Third Reich on National Geographic channel entitled Nazi Secrets. He appeared in three episodes:"Hitler's Damned Women","Hitler's Family Skeletons" and "Hitler's Millions". [13] In November 2013,McDonough was featured in a BBC 1 documentary called The Story of the Swastika and a Channel 5 documentary called 7 Days That Made the Führer. In 2014,McDonough appeared in a 10-part documentary series called The Rise of the Nazi Party on Quest TV,part of the Discovery Channel. [14]
McDonough has a Twitter account called @FXMC1957. It examines key facts in history every morning. McDonough often does Twitter lectures that cover issues such as the JFK assassination,D-Day and the outbreak of WW1 in great depth. He rarely tweets much about his work,his private life or his opinions. The History News Network ranked McDonough's Twitter in the Top 20 History Twitter accounts. [15]
The Geheime Staatspolizei,abbreviated Gestapo,was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940 and Leader of the Conservative Party from May 1937 to October 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement,and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938,ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939,which marked the beginning of the Second World War,Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
The Nazi Party,officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party,was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor,the German Workers' Party,existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist,racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture,which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially,Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business,anti-bourgeois,and anti-capitalist rhetoric;it was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s,the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression,when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.
Sicherheitsdienst,full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS,or SD,was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931,the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization and the Gestapo was considered its sister organization through the integration of SS members and operational procedures. The SD was administered as an independent SS office between 1933 and 1939. That year,the SD was transferred over to the Reich Security Main Office,as one of its seven departments. Its first director,Reinhard Heydrich,intended for the SD to bring every single individual within the Third Reich's reach under "continuous supervision".
The Cliveden set were an upper-class group of politically influential people active in the 1930s in the United Kingdom,prior to the Second World War. They were in the circle of Nancy Astor,Viscountess Astor,the first female Member of Parliament to take up her seat. The name comes from Cliveden,a stately home in Buckinghamshire that was Astor's country residence.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938,by Nazi Germany,Great Britain,the French Republic,and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland,where more than three million people,mainly ethnic Germans,lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal,because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Hans Bernd Gisevius was a German diplomat and intelligence officer during the Second World War. A covert opponent of the Nazi regime,he served as a liaison in Zürich between Allen Dulles,station chief for the American OSS,and the German Resistance forces in Germany.
Appeasement,in an international context,is a diplomatic policy of making political,material,or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald,Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure,appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
Karl Rudolf Werner Best was a German jurist,police chief,SS-Obergruppenführer,Nazi Party leader,and theoretician from Darmstadt. He was the first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo,Nazi Germany's secret police,and initiated a registry of all Jews in Germany. As a deputy of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich,he organized the World War II SS-Einsatzgruppen,paramilitary death squads that carried out mass-murder in Nazi-occupied territories.
"Peace for our time" was a declaration made by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in his 30 September 1938 remarks in London concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration. The phrase echoed Benjamin Disraeli,who,upon returning from the Congress of Berlin in 1878,had stated,"I have returned from Germany with peace for our time." The phrase is primarily remembered for its bitter ironic value since less than a year after the agreement,Hitler's invasion of Poland began World War II.
The Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. was a secret list of prominent British residents to be arrested,produced in 1940 by the SS as part of the preparation for the proposed invasion of Britain. After the war,the list became known as The Black Book.
Many individuals and groups in Germany that were opposed to the Nazi regime engaged in resistance,including assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler or by overthrowing his regime.
Robert Gellately is a Canadian academic and noted authority on the history of modern Europe,particularly during World War II and the Cold War era.
Robert Alexander Clarke Parker was a British historian who specialised in Britain's appeasement of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. Fellow historian Kenneth O. Morgan called him "perhaps the leading authority on the international crises of the 1930s,appeasement and the coming of war".
Kirchenkampf is a German term which pertains to the situation of the Christian churches in Germany during the Nazi period (1933–1945). Sometimes used ambiguously,the term may refer to one or more of the following different "church struggles":
Norman Ebbutt (1894–1968) was a British journalist. In 1925 he was sent to Berlin,where he became chief correspondent for The Times of London. He warned of Nazi warmongering but The Times censored his reports to promote appeasement. He was expelled by the Nazis in August 1937,following accusations of espionage.
Colonel Wilfrid William Ashley,1st Baron Mount Temple,PC DL was a British soldier and Conservative politician. He was Minister of Transport between 1924 and 1929 under Stanley Baldwin.
The European foreign policy of the Chamberlain ministry from 1937 to 1940 was based on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's commitment to "peace for our time" by pursuing a policy of appeasement and containment towards Nazi Germany and by increasing the strength of Britain's armed forces until,in September 1939,he delivered an ultimatum over the invasion of Poland,which was followed by a declaration of war against Germany.
Niklas Frank is a German author and journalist best known for an intimate and strongly accusatory book about his father,Hans Frank,a lawyer who became Governor-General of the General Government in German-occupied Poland during World War II.
The following events occurred in September 1938: