PUT BALDLY, A friendship between the most powerful man in Germany and an unknown young foreign woman picked up in a restaurant sounds extraordinary. But the idea that Unity might have been ‘planted’ never seems to have entered Hitler’s head, despite his paranoid suspicion of political plots. Hitler never feared assassination attempts – during the Parteitag, when he noticed that the pavements had been cleared for this reason as he drove through the narrow Munich streets, he at once rescinded the order so that people could see him more closely.
Unity and Diana were exactly the type of beauty that Hitler admired, so much so that both sisters got away with wearing the make-up of which he so disapproved. They were young, upper-class and socially at ease. Hitler was always impressed by women who had the sophistication, assurance and polish which he knew he himself lacked – he did not, for instance, know how to dance. Among the Party wives, his favourites were the two most socially adept: Annaliese Ribbentrop and Magda Goebbels. Diana, independent, self-confident, elegant in her Paris clothes, familiar with many of the great cities of Europe, a music lover with a family history of reverence for Hitler’s own favourite composer, and with the social gloss conferred by six years of constant entertaining, epitomised such women.
Above all Diana, who had never been afraid of anyone in her life, was not, unlike most of those around Hitler, in awe of him. Unity, too, though she regarded him as the incarnation of her deepest beliefs, had all the Mitford confidence. Hitler enjoyed their unafraid manner; they appealed to his penchant for the English aristocracy; they were pretty, stylish, frank and amusing. Chatting away with all the Mitford inconsequence and insouciance, they made him roar with laughter. It was not long before he was inviting them to tea, to dinner at the Chancellery, to festivals, to see films or just to come and talk; and he gave them each a swastika badge with a facsimile of his signature on the back. For Diana and Unity, twenty-four and twenty respectively, it was all very exciting, and ‘sweet Uncle Wolf’ did not seem at all the ogre depicted in the British press. ‘The truth is that in private life he was exceptionally charming, clever and original, and that he inspired affection,’ Diana wrote many years later.
The truth also was that she found Hitler fascinating. To understand his appeal, it is necessary to look at him from the standpoint of someone living at the time. With hindsight, he is a man of incalculable wickedness, with the blood of millions on his hands, the atrocities he ordered depicted in all their hideous detail for the world to know; then, these black deeds were in the future.
People who met him could understand the magnetism and charisma that inspired blind faith and devotion in the German people. Those near him spoke of how he aroused their protective instincts. This monster had a modest and simple demeanour, such that, even when his more upright followers could not shut their eyes to some terrible misdeed, they somehow persuaded themselves that it had been done not at their führer’s behest but by his advisers. General Wilhelm Groener, whose record as War Minister was one of moderation, thought of Hitler as someone who was essentially decent in contrast to many of those around him. Lloyd George referred to him as ‘the George Washington of Germany’ and a ‘bewitcher’. Robert Birley later described him as the most extraordinary phenomenon in all European history.
Perhaps the most telling example of the unique spell he cast was his effect on Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel, apolitical and admitted by everyone, British and German alike, to be of undoubted integrity and a soldier to his fingertips, was a faithful believer in Hitler’s genius. ‘For a hardbitten, successful and principled man to succumb, as Rommel periodically did, to the enchantment of Adolf Hitler, implies strong magic,’ writes Rommel’s biographer David Fraser, who recounts numerous occasions when Rommel’s tactical and strategic judgements were overturned by Hitler’s charm.
It was a magic that overcame rational thought, logic or suspicion. Even after Hitler had flatly rejected Rommel’s military advice that it was no longer possible to hold Alamein, even after he had stormed at Rommel and accused him of the worst of soldierly sins, cowardice, Hitler was still able to win Rommel back. Fraser writes:
On 8 May, the day after the British captured Tunis, Rommel was ordered to report to Hitler in Berlin. Hitler wanted to reassure Rommel, to renew the bonds of trust and devotion which had held Rommel. He succeeded. Two months later Rommel, still with Hitler, was commenting to von Mannstein, whom he had just met for the first time, ‘I am here for a sunray cure and soaking up sun and faith.’ Both of them understood that the sunray lamp was Hitler.
Like Rommel, Albert Speer, the Goebbelses and countless others around Hitler, Diana found the German leader’s charm overwhelming. When she realised that Hitler had become deeply fond of her she was not only touched but immensely flattered. When she also realised that he was very attracted to her – though he never made any overt move – their relationship was further strengthened by this subterranean sexual link.
It was exhilarating to enjoy the friendship of the man on whom the eyes of the entire Western world were fixed. ‘What is he really like?’ Diana’s friends would ask her. Winston Churchill, who had just written (in Great Contemporaries) that Hitler had ‘succeeded in restoring Germany to the most powerful position in Europe’, invited her to lunch to ask her about Germany’s leader and she was able to tell him that Hitler found negotiating with democracies disconcerting. ‘One day you are speaking to one man, the next day to his successor.’ She found Hitler’s aura of power profoundly exciting or, as she put it, ‘He was the person in control – the person that everyone was interested in.’ Hitler was, as he told her again and again, a great admirer of the English. Because she could now speak German, she could communicate with him spontaneously and therefore directly, picking up nuances, jokes or asides lost through the medium of the interpreter.
Diana stayed in Munich only two days after the first meeting; the purpose of the visit had been achieved. She drove Unity to Paris, where Bryan and the boys were staying in the rue de Poitiers flat, for Jonathan’s fifth birthday (on 6 March), remaining there with the children after Bryan had gone back to Biddesden and Unity had returned to Munich. Diana was still in Paris when, on 18 March, the darker side of her lover’s fascist credo made another appearance. In Leicester, Mosley made a second, more overt anti-semitic speech.
‘For the first time I openly and publicly challenge the Jewish interests of this country commanding the press’ – this was a none-too-veiled dig at Rothermere’s defection – ‘commanding the cinema, dominating the City of London, killing London with their sweat-shops,’ he began, continuing in a vein so outspoken that Julius Streicher, the Nazi for whom anti-semitism was vocation and religion, sent him a telegram of congratulation.
Mosley’s reply, belated because of his absence travelling, was published in the 10 May issue of Die Sturmer, the newspaper Streicher had founded the year before to further his campaign against the Jews. It was all that the most virulent anti-semite could have wished. ‘I value your advice greatly in the midst of our hard struggle. The power of Jewish corruption must be destroyed in all countries before peace and justice can be successfully achieved in Europe. Our struggle to this end is hard, but our victory is certain.’
In April Mosley had met Hitler for the first time. It was a private meeting and Hitler gave a luncheon for him; the guests included the Kaiser’s daughter, the Duchess of Brunswick, Frau Winifred Wagner and Unity. For Unity it was a milestone: her first formal invitation from the führer – Hitler, unaware of her connection with Mosley, had asked her as a fellow guest who shared both Mosley’s nationality and his fascist convictions. Afterwards, Mosley described his host as ‘ein ganzer Kerl’ (quite a man); later still he wrote, ‘He seemed to me to be a calm, cool customer, certainly ruthless, but in no way neurotic. I remember remarking afterwards if it be true he bites the carpet, he knows to a millimetre how far his tooth is going.’
Now that they were on terms of friendship, Unity’s obsessive infatuation with Hitler was increasing, and with it the simplistic, headstrong urge towards extremism that was so much part of her character. ‘Hitler is so kind and so divine I suddenly thought I would not only like to kill all who say things against him but also torture them,’ she wrote in June.
She had also dispatched a letter to Die Sturmer. It was a gesture of crass stupidity that was to brand her publicly as a Nazi sympathiser and racist in the eyes of her compatriots.
Unity adored Streicher, though in true Mitford fashion she thought him ‘a terrific joke’. But there was nothing amusing about the sentiments she expressed in his newspaper. ‘The English have no notion of the Jewish danger,’ she wrote. ‘Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes . . . I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’
It was the letter of someone whose personal ignorance of such matters was equalled only by her violent, unreasoning prejudices. To Streicher it was a propaganda coup; and though he did not publish her letter until July he got in touch with Unity at once.
Streicher had been a loyal worker from the inception of the Nazi Party – his membership number was 2 (Hitler’s was 7). His mild manner and appearance concealed an obsessive fanaticism devoted to the total removal or elimination of Jews from the Fatherland. It was impossible to speak to him for five minutes without becoming aware of these views. When, on 29 March 1933, Hitler made him Chief of the Central Committee of the Defence against Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Agitation, he had a virtually free hand; from then on, a policy of terror became inevitable. Though Streicher himself neither needed nor wanted justification for his actions, he was aware that anything that could help present them to the outside world in a more favourable lightwould please the führer. The fervent enthusiasm of a young, photogenic, aristocratic and obviously Aryan foreigner might help to sway the opinion-forming classes in her own country as well as impressing the German people.
He invited Unity to a midsummer festival near Nuremberg; ‘we marched through the crowd, band playing, between cordons of S.A. men with torches, to the speakers’ stand,’ she wrote. Streicher addressed the crowd; during his speech, he turned towards Unity and read out from her as yet unpublished letter:
They [the Jews] never come into the open, and therefore we cannot show them to the British public in their true dreadfulness. We hope, however, that you will see that we will soon win against the world enemy, in spite of all his cunning. We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews!
Diana, reading Unity’s outburst in the London papers, regarded it with the eye of one accustomed from the nursery onwards to Unity’s headstrong convictions and her desire to shock. Diana was neither alarmed, nor outraged, nor even mildly disgusted; it was, she thought, ‘a piece of silliness – a wild thing to say’.
Her sympathies were largely with her sister. Though she would never have dreamed of admitting that she was anti-semitic – she had far too many Jewish friends for that – Diana was so deeply committed to Mosley and his ideological attitudes that his views on ‘the Jewish problem’ were also hers.
She was not so indulgent towards another sister. Nancy’s novel, Wigs on the Green, was due out on 25 June. After their luncheon at the Ritz Nancy had removed some of the material to which Diana objected but, as publication date approached, she became increasingly apprehensive about Diana’s reaction to her parody of fascism. A week before the novel’s appearance she wrote to Diana explaining that she had found it impossible to eliminate everything Diana and Mosley had disliked, but that she had removed almost three entire chapters relating to her hero Colonel Jack.
‘There are now, I think, about four references to him & he never appears in the book as a character at all. In spite of this I am very much worried at the idea of publishing a book which you may object to.’ She went on to argue that the sort of people who read her books were exactly the sort Mosley did not want in his movement and – rather disingenuously – that her book was far more in favour of fascism than against it. ‘Far the nicest character in the book is a fascist – the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view that fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all.’
She was right. Diana, believing that her beloved Leader had been held up to ridicule, was coldly angry. Sentences such as, ‘If your husband is an Aryan you should be able to persuade him that it is right to live together and breed; if he is a filthy non-Aryan it may be your duty to leave him and marry Jackshirt Aspect,’ or, ‘I’m sure Hitler must be a wonderful man. Hasn’t he forbidden German women to work in offices and told them they never need worry about anything again except arranging the flowers? How they must love him,’ were, Diana felt, a frivolous rubbishing of everything she and Mosley believed in. For the next few years, relations with Nancy were strained to non-existent.
Two weeks later, as Diana was dressing for a dinner party one hot evening in late July, her telephone rang. It was Mosley. They had planned to drive down to Savehay together on her return from the party, leaving at about midnight; now he said that he could not leave London until the following morning.
It was to be their last weekend together for two or three weeks, as Mosley was going away with his children, with Andrée to care for them, for their annual month’s summer holiday together. Through Irene, Mosley had rented a villa at Posillipo which belonged to Sir Rennell Rodd, the British Ambassador in Rome. It stood on the cliffs – there were 1,000 steps down to the beach – looking across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius, with Capri lying like a jewel in the blue waters below. With the family for the first fortnight would go Baba, the intensity of whose love affair with Mosley showed no signs of dying down.
Only after everything was arranged had Mosley revealed that, the day after Baba had left, Diana was to join them for the following two weeks (‘that miserable Diana Guinness follows Baba out there’, noted Irene). To Diana, he had explained that it was essential to keep the children’s aunt happy and Diana, who knew that she was the one Mosley truly loved, cheerfully fell in with this plan.
The evening of the telephone call, Diana put down the receiver, having agreed with Mosley that she would drive down to Savehay by herself that night. It was too hot to sleep in London, she explained, and the air at Savehay would be fresher and less oppressive; would he ask them to leave a door unlocked for her? She finished changing into her coolest, and coolest-looking, outfit, a long skirt and coat in cream silk, and went off to her dinner party, where she sat next to Lord Beaverbrook. Enthralled by his conversation and thirsty because of the heat, she drank champagne liberally. Back at the Eatonry, she quickly collected a few clothes, picked up her spaniel and set off.
She had got only to the five-road intersection of Lowndes Street and Cadogan Place when she was hit by a large Rolls-Royce. It splintered the side of the little Voisin and flung Diana forward into the windscreen, which broke with the force of the impact.
She was pulled half-conscious out of the car by two young policemen passing on their beat. She presented a horrific sight. Her dress was soaked with blood, which stood out so vividly against the pale silk that two women who were passing thought she must be dead. ‘Poor thing!’ she heard them murmur in her confused state. ‘So young, too.’ The dog, unharmed – though she did not realise this – was whimpering in the back.
She was taken by ambulance to St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, enquiring constantly if her dog was all right. ‘Yes, he’s been taken home,’ she was told soothingly (in fact, he spent the night at the police station which, with the shock of the crash, left him nervous for the rest of his life). At St George’s the cuts on her face were quickly stitched up by a young doctor in the Casualty Department. Because the fine thread had been locked up for the night, this was done with thicker thread, an agonising process that felt as though rope was being pulled through raw flesh. Terrified that Mosley would read of her accident in the morning papers and fear the worst, she demanded to ring him and, after a battle, was allowed to do so at two a.m.
Next morning her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, sent for the country’s leading plastic surgeon, the brilliant New Zealander Sir Archibald Macindoe (famous for his pioneering work in the reconstruction of damaged faces in the First World War). Horrified at the thick thread used to stitch up her wounds, which would have left permanent scars, Macindoe removed it. He sewed her face temporarily into position with two huge stitches and, telling her that she must not talk or laugh for a week, admitted her straight away into the London Clinic. Here he deftly stitched each wound with the finest thread, working wherever possible from the inside, with such skill that in a few months there was no trace of even the smallest scar.
As she lay in the clinic, face painful and swollen, letters poured in. ‘I am reading the news with a confident faith in your speedy recovery,’ wrote her dinner partner Lord Beaverbrook. Decca, surrounded by her files of the Daily Worker in the Swinbrook sitting room she shared with Unity, wrote to ‘Darling Cord’ to sympathise. ‘I do hope you’re better now and not in too much agony – it sounds too frightful.’ It was one of the last affectionate letters Diana would receive from this younger sister. Cecil Beaton, out of touch all summer, wrote, ‘My last vision of you was a radiant one, in a large picture hat, but you were whisked on as the lights went green before I had been able to catch your aquamarine eye.’
Most compelling of all was the letter from Mosley in Posillipo, where his thirty-foot, three-cabin yacht, the Vivien (named after his daughter), lay in one of the bay’s inlets. ‘Hurry up and get better, as this place is lovely – no great horrors have been revealed except the ancient truth that “Rodds never wash”. We . . . run up the steps now, saying, “Won’t they be fun when Diana arrives!”’
The image of sun, sea, sand and love conjured up by this brief message made Diana, already bored and wretched, determined to leave the clinic despite strict orders to stay there until her face had finally healed. But how to get out? She was too weak to manage it alone and every request was brushed aside by both staff and her visitors.
Then came inspiration – her father. When she begged him for help, he agreed. It was just the sort of plot he loved, outwitting authority in the shape of doctors and nurses and at the same time pleasing his favourite daughter.
Her escape, they decided, should take place at the time of day it would be least obvious: when the day and night nurses were changing shifts and everyone else was asleep. Accordingly, David arrived at five a.m., to find Diana dressed and waiting. To lessen the chance of detection, they did not take the lift but walked down the stairs, Diana clinging to the banister on one side and her father’s hand on the other. Once outside, he drove her through the empty streets to Croydon, where she sent Mosley a telegram to announce her imminent arrival. From Croydon she flew to Marseilles, thence to Italy in a seaplane, finishing her journey by train.
She arrived at the villa in the middle of a grand dinner party at which the Crown Prince and Princess of Italy were the guests of honour. Baba had known the Crown Princess, daughter of King Albert of the Belgians, since childhood: during the First World War, her father Lord Curzon had given a home to the Belgian royal family at Hackwood. When the footman entered the dining room to announce Diana’s presence, Baba, furious, was restrained from a recriminatory outburst only by the presence of her guests. Seething with jealous fury, she had to keep the party going while Mosley went to see Diana, who had gone straight to bed. ‘I didn’t realise you were coming,’ he said, though without anger. ‘I’m so sorry, but I did send a telegram,’ said Diana placatingly. A few minutes later the telegram arrived.
When the last Altissima had gone, Baba turned on Mosley, moral outrage serving as a pretext for livid anger. Mosley managed to pacify her by telling her that he was furious with Diana. He had, he told Baba, wired Diana not to come until the Thursday, but she said she had not received his telegram. He continued that he had commanded Diana to stay in her room and not dare to appear as Baba would not meet her and he himself did not wish to speak to her. ‘Poor Diana has had a bad car accident,’ he concluded, ‘and she has only come to recuperate.’
Next day he took Baba and his children for a three-day trip in the Vivien to Amalfi. The beauty and glamour of the cruise, Mosley’s charm and undivided attention, their lovemaking during the nights they spent in a clifftop hotel while the children slept in the boat, convinced Baba of his devotion. When she finally took a taxi from Amalfi to the airport to catch her flight, the status quo that so suited Mosley both temperamentally and physically had been satisfactorily restored.
Back at Posillipo, Diana, left in the charge of the servants, was installed in the bedroom just vacated by Baba.
At first her presence took Mosley’s children unawares. One morning Nicholas, devoted to his aunt and accustomed to visit her in her bedroom after breakfast, was walking down the passage to her room when he was stopped by Andrée. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘To say good morning to Auntie Baba.’ ‘It’s not Auntie Baba in there, it’s Mrs Guinness,’ replied Andrée bitterly.
At the time, neither Vivien nor Nicholas thought the presence of Mrs Guinness on holiday was particularly unusual. Both of them knew that their father was very fond of her, yet at the same time they were aware that Auntie Baba also loved him but did not like Mrs Guinness. They did not know, and they did not want to know, what it all meant; neither discussed it with the other. Better to treat it all as just another aspect of ‘grown-up’ behaviour and go on enjoying the holiday.
What they did understand, and appreciate, was that their father was extraordinarily happy during those weeks, full of jokes, fun, quotations and ideas for games.
As Diana recovered, she began to come down to the beach, sitting under a sunshade as the faint scars on her face healed. The children approached her cautiously. Both were very conscious of her beauty; she, for her part, was determined that they would like her. She taught them poker and Bridge, she sang plaintive German songs while accompanying herself on a ‘squeezebox’ accordion so old it had buttons instead of piano keys.
Unlike their mother, they noticed, she never argued with their father. Sometimes he would imitate her voice and her swooping Mitford intonations and she would smile. If she disagreed with him, she would simply close her enormous blue eyes, and both she and Mosley would laugh. When she opened her eyes again, the conversation would have changed and whatever was disagreeable would have disappeared.
On Mosley’s return home, his affair with Baba continued as before. Its effect on the Metcalfes’ marriage was devastating: Fruity sank into a slough of jealous misery, while Baba vented her disenchantment with her husband in displays of temper and rudeness. ‘Fruity almost in tears’, ‘Baba in a vile mood’, ‘Fruity in a pitiful condition, half-crazed’, are typical entries that autumn in Irene’s diary.