Frank McDonough

The Munich Conference. Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini

In his study of Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War, published in 1998, McDonough outlined a 'post-revisionist' theory, which built on the work of R. A. C. Parker's 1994 book Chamberlain and Appeasement, by expanding it to include appeasement in society and looking at economic appeasement, the mass media and the opponents of appeasement. McDonough accepted that appeasement was probably the only choice for the British government in the 1930s, but unlike the revisionists he argued that it was poorly implemented, carried out too late and not enforced strongly enough to constrain Hitler. He suggested that appeasement must be analysed as a usable policy at the time it operated and focus on how Chamberlain's personality played a crucial role in the conduct of the policy, in particular, his errors of judgement, his failure to listen to opponents and his unwillingness to try any alternatives. McDonough argues that Chamberlain's version of appeasement, as operated by such an inflexible politician, unwilling to change direction, until events forced him to, actually contributed to Britain and France entering the war in 1939 in a much weaker strategic position, and passed the early advantage in the war to Hitler's regime, which meant that Germany only faced one European front until June 1944.

The study 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 has most recently completed a two volume book titled 'The Hitler Years'. The first volume (Triumph 1933–1939) is due to be published on 14 November 2019.[1]