Frank McDonough

Frank McDonough
Born	Liverpool
Nationality	British
Fields	History of Germany
Institutions	Liverpool John Moores University
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford

Professor Frank McDonough is a British historian of the Third Reich and international history.

Francis [Frank] Xavier McDonough was born on 17 April in Liverpool in 1957. 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 gained a PhD in History from Lancaster University, under the supervision of Ruth Henig. He is Professor of International History in the History Department of the School of Humanities and Social Science at Liverpool John Moores University. He is an avid Liverpool F.C. fan and still lives in Liverpool with his partner Ann.

His key areas of research are international history, particularly Anglo-German relations in the 20th century, especially the origins of World War I and World War II and increasingly the history of the Third Reich, including opposition to Hitler, the Holocaust and the Gestapo.

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.

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