Helen Fry
Helen Fry and Susan Ronald Discuss Susan’s Book “Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941”
Summary
Join Helen Fry in conversation with Susan Ronald about “Hitler’s Aristocrats” - they discuss how a generation of aristocrats, industrialists and politicians in America & the UK in the 1920s & 1930s were influenced by Hitler and became part of his inner circle. Who were they and how dangerous were they?
Helen Fry
Helen Fry has authored and edited over 25 books covering the social history of the Second World War, including British Intelligence and the secret war, espionage, and spies, as well as MI9 escape and evasion. She is the foremost authority on the “secret listeners” who worked at special eavesdropping sites operated by British Intelligence during WWII. Helen is the official biographer of MI6 spymaster, Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick. She has also extensively written about the 10,000 Germans who fought for Britain during WWII. Helen has appeared in a number of documentaries and has provided advisory services for TV and drama. She also appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts. Helen is an ambassador for the National Centre for Military Intelligence (NCMI) and serves as a trustee of both the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection. She works in London.
I wrote an article that appeared last week in Salon magazine online, salon.com, entitled “History: An Inconvenient Truth.” And it is because I tried to get this story about Rex Benson, the man who was sent by MI5, MI6, to America to get America into the war, I have all of his diaries. And I was told by my publisher, Macmillan, that, “People aren’t reading history like they used to before, they’d rather make it up themselves,” okay? So I wrote the article, because if you don’t like the past, you want to change it, which everybody seems to be doing these days, why not? But it is an inconvenient truth, history matters, it matters that I grew up afraid that the Holocaust would happen again, it matters. It helped form me into who I am, all right? It matters that I lost family that I don’t know at all. It matters that I’ve met family who survived. My stepfather’s aunt was in Dachau, lost her first family completely. She survived by some miracle, but she lost her mind, okay? These are all things that help make us who we are. Do I want to change that? Well, yeah, I’d like to make sure that nobody has any pain, but it’s part of who I am, it’s part of the past, and for us to deny that is cheating ourselves of reality. And a lot of this talk has been about what is reality? And history matters, but more important than history mattering, context matters.