AFTER CIMMIE’S DEATH Mosley flung himself into establishing his new party in the public consciousness. Meetings began with fanfares, spotlights, the fascist salute and a fascist processional. In the expectant pause that followed, Mosley, dramatic in black shirt, breeches and riding boots, strode alone to the platform to the strains of ‘Salutation to the Leader’, gazed round with an air of arrogant, commanding menace until the shouts of the crowd died down, and then launched into a rousing oration. Special Blackshirt marching songs were composed, which today sound absurd and Germanic with their exhortatory earnestness and underlying violence. ‘The streets are still, the final struggle’s ended/Flushed with the fight we proudly hail the dawn/See! Over all the streets the fascist banners waving/Triumphant standard of a race reborn,’ ran one favourite.
The first large march was on 1 July 1933. It began outside the Eatonry – a private tribute from the Leader – and wound its way via Whitehall down to the Embankment with the now familiar mixture of para-military discipline and what sounded suspiciously like a call to arms. Though the 1,000-strong band consisted mostly of young and enthusiastic Blackshirts it included 100 girls, also in black shirts but with grey or black skirts. All were inspected by Mosley before setting off. At the Cenotaph the command ‘Eyes right!’ was given and the officers gave the fascist salute.
There were already several small fascist groups in Britain and from time to time amalgamation had been suggested. But this had always foundered on ideological or financial differences between the organisers. Mosley was determined that any fascist movement in Britain would be headed by him and the march on 1 July was intended as a pre-emptive statement that the BUF was the fascist party, and Mosley the only Leader. He first tried negotiating with various of these groups, but had as little success as his predecessors. Soon he had the excuse for more direct action.
On 23 July Diana had a narrow escape at a communist rally in Hyde Park. It was the only time she opened her mouth at a public meeting. The Nazis were already persecuting communists and those with left-wing sympathies. Speaker after speaker recommended cutting trade links with Germany as a protest. Diana first heckled the speakers, then, when some of the crowd started singing ‘God Save the King’, held up her arm in a fascist salute. It was a silly and provocative gesture and the people at the meeting rounded on her but luckily for her a tough young Mosley supporter pulled her to safety.
A few hours later, a van carrying members of one of the smaller, rival groups, the British Fascists Ltd, drove past BUF headquarters shouting abuse. This ‘provocation’ was exactly the pretext the BUF needed for a violent attack on their smaller rival. A fifty-strong mob of Blackshirts rushed round to the headquarters of British Fascists Ltd in Harrington Road, smashed the basement and ground-floor windows and poured in. Rapidly and systematically, they wrecked the offices. It was done with brutal efficiency and so fast that, although the police were summoned as the first Blackshirts climbed through the broken windows, by the time they arrived a few minutes later all the invaders had disappeared. Two of the leaders of the British Fascists Ltd had to be taken to hospital, a man with injuries caused by a ‘fluid’ thrown into his face and a woman beaten about the head. The cost of putting the damage right coupled with the fear of a repeat performance contributed substantially to the liquidation of British Fascists Ltd shortly afterwards.
There was in any event a drift away from these smaller organisations to the BUF. For the young men who formed the bulk of the membership, Mosley’s militaristic approach, magnetic personality and sense of theatre were far more glamorous. Implicit in the camaraderie, the discipline, the uniform and the sense of being one of a tough, well-drilled cadre was the promise of aggression and battle. Like soldiers, they were kept physically active, with games, jujitsu and drilling. The marches, the rousing and violent, if ludicrous, songs which accompanied them, all contributed to the idea of a political movement literally on the move – and ready, if need be, to fight for its goals and ideals. One who joined the BUF at that time was William Joyce (better known later as Lord Haw Haw), who served for three years as Mosley’s propaganda chief.
English Fascism, it should be repeated, did not then (in the early 1930s) have the connotations it rapidly assumed under the Third Reich. Many intelligent people felt that the conditions imposed upon Germany by the Treaty of Versailles were far too oppressive. If Hitler, who achieved the Chancellorship of Germany on 30 January 1933, could put Germany back on her feet again, the general feeling among many was good luck to him. In Geneva the Disarmament Conference ground slowly on; at home the pacifist movement was growing. Britain was still in the grip of the Depression, preoccupied with its own woes and inward-looking. Unemployment had barely started to fall. Many travellers who returned from Germany did so with stories of a country given new heart again, of a lowering of the pervasive unemployment, of a mood of optimism.
At that time, Hitler’s most uncompromising statements were often buried within turgid reams of German prose. As early as 1931 he had said (in his Guide and Instructional Letter for Functionaries of the National Socialists, published on 15 March): ‘The natural hostility of the peasant against the Jews, and his hostility against the Freemasons as a servant of the Jews, must be worked up to a frenzy.’ Few in Britain would have been aware of such a vicious piece of political dogma – or have taken it seriously. In general, it was the British left wing, and particularly those on the far left – themselves often regarded with suspicion as ‘Bolsheviks’ – who were most conscious of the dangers. But disturbing rumours were beginning to trickle out. Harold Nicolson, lunching at the Café Royal on 4 May, heard from Peter Rodd, just back from Germany, that conditions there were of ‘complete terror’.
One German in a hundred was Jewish. Think, Putzi told Diana, of the other 99 per cent of Germans who make up the real Germany. ‘Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for us Germans. If the Jews don’t like it – they can get out.’
It was enough for Diana. Like many people of her class and time, she had a vague mistrust of Jewish influence in high finance – even an ardent Zionist such as John Buchan made the villains in his novels ‘sinister international Jewish financiers’. Diana, conscious, as she had been since the General Strike, of the ever-growing gulf between rich and poor, had a generalised antipathy to ‘the City’ – in which she knew there were a number of Jewish financial houses. ‘One felt the City was feathering its nest while three million unemployed were starved,’ she wrote later. ‘You can have no conception of how totally divided the “two nations” were then.’
Much more powerful than her anti-semitic prejudice, however, was her predisposition in favour of Germany, common to many, perhaps most, upper-class English families until the outbreak of the First World War. Some were linked by blood or marriage to the German aristocracy, many were fluent German speakers. They venerated German poetry, philosophy and music and they sent their daughters to be ‘finished’ in the musical and cultural ambience of Munich and Dresden. It was a tradition that lingered on, aided by the fact that aristocratic German families impoverished by the First World War were delighted to take in the sons and daughters of those who had themselves completed their education in Germany.
In Diana’s family, this tradition was particularly strong. Her paternal grandfather had adored the music of Wagner and been an intimate of the Wagner family. Her brother Tom, the greatest single influence on Diana’s cultural judgement, was a fluent German speaker and had brought back rhapsodic accounts of the music, the people, the architecture and the beauty of Germany from his (pre-Hitler) visits there. In common with most of their friends and many politicians, both Diana and Tom believed that Germany had been unjustly penalised by the victorious Allies at Versailles. Now, when Hitler appeared to be achieving economic and social miracles in the country which she already admired through policies similar to those advocated by her beloved Leader, her ability to blot out unpalatable truths or questions came to the fore. The Nazis were a raw, young party unused to government; if a few people were harmed in the cause of the greater good – well, so be it.
As the summer of 1933 drew on, Nazi discrimination developed into straightforward brutality. The first concentration camps were founded; into them went those whom the Nazis considered political undesirables – Jews and communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons, gypsies and homosexuals.
Flights and expulsions began as oppression moved into the arts, science and education. Jewish conductors such as Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were deprived of their batons, the music of the composer Kurt Weill was proscribed and Jewish actors were allowed only to play ‘negative’ roles – thieves, murderers, gangsters or swindlers. Teachers had to join the National Socialist Teachers’ Union (Jews, of course, were excluded) and Jewish students as well as Jewish professors were driven out of universities; the experimental physicist James Franck, a Nobel prizewinner, was forced to take a ‘voluntary’ leave of absence because he was a Jew. At the University of Berlin there was the Burning of the Books – all those by Jewish authors were thrown into the flames. Amid the howling of the Nazis, the works of the world’s greatest scientist, Albert Einstein (a Swiss subject), were reduced to ashes because of both his race and his left-wing sympathies.
Little of this was seen by most visitors to Germany. They were shown the new housing and the spanking new maternity clinics, where smiling blonde mothers brought healthy, flaxen-haired babies for treatment. They were told about the praiseworthy social welfare schemes, the new hope and happiness of the people.
In August Mosley and Baba went off on their planned motoring tour through France. The launching of this illicit liaison – if they had not physically been lovers before, they became so almost immediately – had the blessing of almost everyone in Baba’s family except Baba’s husband Fruity. Mosley’s mother, the highly conventional Lady Mosley, terrified lest ‘the horror’ (as Diana was known among them), now divorced, would acquire an unshakable hold on Mosley, urged Baba to set off with him. Irene, who had felt ‘sick with horror’ when she discovered that Mosley had been dining in London with Diana, gave Fruity ‘a good stern talking to in his jealousy and brutality to Baba over her seeing Tom’, warning him that such behaviour would cause a deep rift between him and Baba. The unfortunate Fruity, no match for the Curzon sisters in full cry, had to subside. Irene herself took Mosley’s two elder children, Vivien and Nicholas, on a cruise to Madeira and the Canary Islands; the youngest, Michael, went with his nanny to the Isle of Wight.
Diana, at a loose end, trying to believe that Mosley had no more than a fraternal interest in Baba but aware of Baba’s infatuation with him, could not bear the thought of a month spent solitary and brooding in London. She had already been to Germany three times, once with Bryan and twice to visit Tom in Berlin; Putzi Hanfstaengl was back in Munich and she decided to take up his offer to introduce her to Hitler.
In one of the shifts of relationship so common between the Mitford sisters during their lives, Diana had become increasingly close to Unity. Her sister’s arrival in London and her frequent visits to the Eatonry on her way home from her art classes in Vincent Square meant that they saw more of each other than ever before, while Unity’s obvious admiration for Mosley reinforced their alliance. Diana now suggested that they take a holiday in Bavaria together. In Munich, she said to Unity, they could go to museums, look at the architecture and listen to the music for which the city was famous.
Unity, who had hoped that Diana would take her to France, was won over when she heard of Putzi Hanfstaengl’s promised introduction to Hitler. Unity asked for nothing more.
While Bryan, at Pool Place, was writing, ‘I hardly dare look out of the windows or go for a walk. Everywhere is haunted – the ditches, the hedges, the ploughed fields, the Downs in the distance, the sea near at hand,’ Diana was in Munich, trying to contact Putzi. He proved elusive, but eventually she managed to track him down. He told the sisters that if they wanted to meet Hitler they should come to Nuremberg for the Parteitag (Party Congress) and he would meet them at the station.
Putzi noticed immediately that the two attractive young women were made-up to the eyebrows in a manner which conflicted directly with the newly proclaimed Nazi ideal of German womanhood – the blonde, blue-eyed fra¨ulein with face bare of all cosmetics, a sharp contrast to the heavily lipsticked mouth fashionable in the 1930s.
On their way to the Deutscher Hof Hotel, where Hitler was staying, there were so many frank comments from passers-by that the embarrassed Putzi had to duck behind a building with the girls. He pulled out a large, clean handkerchief and said, ‘My dears, it is no good – to stand any hope of meeting him you will have to wipe some of that stuff off your faces.’
They did so, but it was only a temporary yielding. ‘It’s no good,’ exclaimed Unity as they sat waiting, ‘I can’t possibly do without lipstick.’
Several times daily during the four days the Parteitag lasted she asked Putzi when he would introduce them to Hitler, but the nearest they got was the lounge of the small hotel where he was staying. Official after official passed by their table until eventually Hitler sent word by Hess that he was too busy to come out and meet them.
The Parteitag, which began on 1 September, was the first major Nazi rally after Hitler came to power. Many of his followers had believed that it would be the last, as the so-called ‘immutable points’ of Party doctrine had proclaimed for twelve years that, once power was achieved and consolidated, the Party could be dissolved. But the theme of Hitler’s speech, ‘The State is the Party and the Party is the State’, was an ominous pointer to what was to come. There were few foreigners to hear it among the 1,000 privileged guests in the main grandstand; Great Britain, France, Poland, Russia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Holland had all refused invitations to send an official representative.
On the ancient town of Nuremberg almost 400,000 Party members converged, brought from all over Germany by 400 special trains. There were 80,000 Hitler Youth alone – a smallish proportion of the 3.5 million boys aged 12–18 already enrolled. Files of brown-uniformed Storm Troopers, knapsacks on their backs, marched from the station to the seven enormous camps set up around the town. Five hundred men slept in each huge tent. The streets were hung with bunting and blood-red Nazi banners emblazoned with black swastikas. The tread of marching feet was everywhere, the streets were filled with the sound of military bands. Uniformed men rapped out staccato ‘Heil Hitler!’ salutes as they passed each other. The parades, the speeches, the marching were ominous, terrifying and relentless, part revolutionary triumph, part political circus, but mostly, and unmistakably, a display of militaristic might. After it, Duff Cooper said, ‘The whole of that country is preparing for war on a scale and with an enthusiasm that are astounding and terrible.’
Hitler’s speech was on Sunday 3 September. Diana, unable to understand a word, recorded that an ‘electric shock’ ran through the multitude at his appearance. It was a dizzying atmosphere: the thunderous, rolling cheers, the waves of crashing, reverberating Sieg Heils, took on the incantatory quality of obeisance to a godhead. Unity, wildly excited, determined to return the following year and, somehow, to meet her hero then.
The sisters parted, Unity back to the confines of Swinbrook, Diana travelling on to Rome to stay with her friend Lord Berners.
Diana’s parents were under no illusions about the Nazis. They were appalled and furious that she had taken Unity to the Parteitag. ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests,’ David wrote to her on 7 September. ‘That you should associate yourself with such people is a source of utter misery to us.’
Diana, reading these trenchant and uncompromising views in the golden Italian sunshine, was unmoved. She was still on extremely bad terms with her parents and if anything glad that she had annoyed them; and she discounted all their views as old-fashioned and prejudiced. She had found the Nuremberg Rally not only extraordinarily interesting but living evidence that fascism, the chosen political creed of her beloved Leader, could replace despair and chaos with hope and efficiency. What she saw of Italy only confirmed her in her view of the benefits of fascism: here was another country in which it was a proven success.
In any case, she was far too busy absorbing the beauties and splendours of Rome, to which the cultured and witty Gerald Berners was the perfect guide. Every afternoon, after he had finished his morning’s work, he would take her sightseeing. They walked or drove from one beautiful building to another, or wandered through museums and galleries. In the evenings, there would be dinner at some splendid villa: Lord Berners was a popular figure in Roman society, enjoying its combination of style and vivid, catty gossip. The visit concluded with a leisurely drive to Paris at the beginning of October.
While Diana was in Rome, a small but significant book, the Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, compiled by a body called the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism and with an introduction by Lord Morley, was published by Victor Gollancz, a respected publisher. It described how many of the top German scientists had been driven out either for left-wing leanings or for ‘reasons of ancestry’, and it detailed acts of brutality and torture, often with accompanying photographs of the victims. An appendix listed 250 murders perpetrated by the Nazis since 3 March 1933.The Mitford family reacted to it according to their political leanings: Jessica seized upon it, while Unity and Diana ignored or dismissed it.
Diana also dismissed, though affectionately, Bryan’s pathetic little note from Swan Court on 6 October, the first of many urging her to return to him. ‘If the situation ever changes you will let me know, won’t you? A wire saying “Come” would enable me to make preparations to take you to China. All this is madness because it doesn’t arise and is only a way of sending my love.’
That autumn the BUF bought the lease of the Whitelands Teachers’ Training College in Chelsea and turned it into their headquarters, renaming it the Black House. As well as the Party administrative offices, it housed a small printing press which turned out BUF posters and leaflets, a theatre and a large restaurant and canteen. These were always crowded, since the Black House also served as a barracks for young Blackshirts, the number varying between 50 and 200, who lived there under strict military-style discipline, drilling in the large courtyard.
Steadily the Party hierarchy took shape, attracting further followers. One of these was John Beckett, by now coming round to fascist doctrines. His final conversion occurred when Robert Forgan, a man he much admired who was now Deputy Leader of the BUF and its Director of Organisation, assured him that Mosley ‘took his mission extremely seriously and was now grown up’.
Mosley’s Blackshirts were becoming ever more pugilistic towards what they saw as ‘the opposition’. While Harold Nicolson was learning at the Travellers Club that ‘the anti-Jewish atrocities in Germany were far worse than even the American papers supposed’, Mosley’s young Blackshirts were breaking up a meeting of the Imperial Fascist League, the last British fascist group which could be viewed as serious competition.
The fracas was quickly over. With rubber truncheons, knuckledusters and chairs, these fit, well-trained young men made short work of their so-called political allies. Henceforth it was clear that any group which wanted to promote fascism in Britain had to put itself under Mosley’s leadership.