The Palace and the Bunker: Royal Resistance to Hitler

By Frank Millard

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The Palace and the Bunker is more ideological tract than history. Frank Millard, armed with a PhD in history from the University of London, grinds two axes: 1) constitutional monarchies are good, and 2) had there been a German monarchy, World War II wouldn’t have happened. His proof mainly consists of a few would-be heirs to eliminated thrones and their disapproval of Hitler. For balance, Millard a couple of times admits to the existence of “hoodwinked” aristocrats. “It is true that a few princes allied themselves with, or were ambivalent towards, the Nazis,” he writes. In fact, an embarrassing number of German aristocrats became Nazis very early on, and Britain’s aristocracy included a number of Nazi sympathizers.

For a reasonable book on the subject, Royals and the Reich, by Jonathan Petropoulos (a professor at Claremont McKenna), has gotten good reviews.