Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany By Will Wainewright Published Biteback Publishing, £20

FEW readers of the Hampshire Chronicle can lay claim to having a relation who was said to have been able to hold Adolf Hitler’s stare.

Winchester-born and raised Will Wainewright can do so. His great-grandfather’s cousin was Rothay Reynolds, the Daily Mail Berlin correspondent in the 1920 and 30s.

Reynolds was one of the first foreign journalists to interview the Nazi leader, a few days before the Munich Beer Hall putsch in 1923 and worked in Germany until 1938.

Wainewright has access to his distant relation’s letters and books and paints a vivid picture of the difficulties the journalists faced of operating in a totalitarian regime and for a newspaper, the Daily Mail, that was keen to maintain good relations with Hitler.

It is easy to criticise reporters such as Reynolds for the role they played, that with hindsight can be seen to have been largely pandering to a uniquely-evil regime.

There was pressure from both sides. The Nazis and also the British Government in the 1930s expected the press to toe the line in fostering good relations with the Nazis.

We largely view history as a linear progression and it is easy to forget that life is lived forwards into the unknown. It is easy to be critical of Reynolds and the Daily Mail for its appeasement stance on Nazi Germany knowing what we do now. But back then Hitler, certainly before 1938 and the Munich Crisis, portrayed himself as a German nationalist interested in righting the wrongs of the Versailles Treaty, the harsh peace imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War.

It is a fascinating book, given legs when Wainewright widens his gaze to see how the foreign press corps dealt with the difficulties of reporting from within a totalitarian regime. Few come out with much credit.

The author goes on about the difficulties of working for a pro-Nazi newspaper and assauging one’s conscience. But at the end of the day no one forced Reynolds to work for the Daily Mail, then, as now, a ferociously partisan paper. He could at any moment have resigned and found a more congenial employer.