A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  Cousin Winston wanted to hear about Hitler. There was also talk of Italy and sanctions and the Abyssinian war. Echoing M., I asked if it might not be dangerous for our fleet in the Mediterranean, where home-based Italian aircraft could attack our ships if oil sanctions provoked Italy into war.

  ‘No,’ said Churchill. ‘An aeroplane cannot sink a battleship. The armour is impenetrably thick.’ I remembered his words a few years later, when against the advice of the Admiralty, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sent from Singapore into the China seas with no air cover and were sunk by Japanese torpedo-carrying aircraft. During the war Hans-Ulrich Rudel sank the Soviet battleship Marat single-handed in his Stuka, with bombs.

  Gerald came back from Rome that year with stories of the fury of the Romans against Mr. Eden and England’s policy of sanctions. The Duchess of Sermoneta told him she wished she could open a vein and let out every drop of her English blood.

  After settling into Wootton in July I left for Berlin where Unity and I went to the Olympic Games. Hitler gave us tickets and we stayed with the Goebbels at their lake-side villa at Schwanenwerder. I became very fond of Magda Goebbels and her children. She had a handsome son, Harald Quandt, by her first husband, and several Goebbels infants. Dr. Goebbels was intelligent, witty and sarcastic; he had an exceptionally beautiful speaking voice. Magda called him ‘Engel’. We taught them to play Analogies. Dr. Goebbels was being questioned: ‘What colour does he remind you of?’

  ‘Fiery red!’ said Goebbels. He had chosen the Führer for his subject.

  Every day we motored to the Games. Fortunately Unity and I had seats far away from our hosts so that we could wander from the stadium from time to time. I have never been a great enthusiast for watching athletics, men throwing discs or tossing cabers and so on. The running and jumping were less dull. There was an American negro, Jesse Owens, who dashed along much faster than anybody else; it was a pleasure to watch him. After Owens came the runners of other countries, bunched together, and far behind them all an Indian with his hair done up in a bun. ‘Oh!’ cried the Germans near us as Jesse Owens got further ahead and the Indian further behind, ‘Oh, der Inder! Der arme Inder!’, the poor Indian!

  M. thought it wise to keep our marriage secret, as I was living at Wootton, often alone, and politics were rough. We had meant to be married in Paris, but we discovered that notice of the marriage would have to be posted up on the wall of the consulate so that it was no better than a London registry office as far as journalists were concerned. I asked the advice of the Munich consul and he told me that under a reciprocal arrangement between England and Germany British subjects were married by the ordinary registrar in Germany, and vice versa. Hitler said he would ask the Berlin registrar to keep the marriage quiet, and while we were staying with her Magda helped me with all the form-filling; the wedding was arranged for October.

  Unity and I also went to Bayreuth that summer; we had been invited to the Festspiele, an experience as heavenly as the Olympic Games were boring. The Ring, which I knew well from Covent Garden, was splendidly sung and for the first time I heard Parsifal. I confessed to Hitler that I liked it least of all Wagner’s operas and he said: ‘That is because you are young. You will find as you get older that you love Parsifal more and more,’ a prediction which has come true.

  We had supper in the long intervals at Hitler’s table in the restaurant near the Festspielhaus, and we made the acquaintance of his great friend Frau Winifred Wagner and of her four children. Wieland, Wolf and Friedelind—Maus, as she was called—looked like Richard Wagner. The youngest and most charming, Verena, was the image of Cosima.

  M. and I were married on the 6th October 1936 in the drawing-room of the Goebbels’s Berlin house in Hermann Goeringstrasse. I was dressed in a pale gold tunic. Unity and I, standing at the window of an upstairs room, saw Hitler walking through the trees of the park-like garden that separated the house and the Reichskanzlei; the leaves were turning yellow and there was bright sunshine. Behind him came an adjutant carrying a box and some flowers. M. was already downstairs.

  The ceremony was short; the Registrar said a few words, we exchanged rings, signed our names and the deed was done. Hitler’s gift was a photograph in a silver frame with A.H. and the German eagle.

  We all drove out to Schwanenwerder where Magda had arranged a wedding feast. The little girls, Helga and Hilde, came in afterwards to ‘gratulieren’ and give more flowers. Magda and Dr. Goebbels gave me a leatherbound edition of Goethe’s works in twenty volumes.

  That evening we went to the Sportpalast where Hitler and Goebbels opened the Winterhilfswerk (a vast organization, the Winterhilfswerk ensured that everyone had coal, blankets and so forth). M. at that time understood no German but it interested him to see the meeting, and the technique of the speeches. We dined at the Reichskanzlei. This was the second and last time M. ever saw Hitler. We stayed the night at the Kaiserhof, and after a quarrel of which, try as I will, I cannot remember the reason, we went to bed in dudgeon. Next day we flew home to England.

  M. and I were married all over again in 1974. Our marriage certificate had been in M.’s safe at Grosvenor Road, and had disappeared into the maw of the Home Office when its officials burst everything open and removed the contents in 1940. Years later we needed it, and they appeared unable to find it. As to Berlin, the Hermann Goeringstrasse must certainly have been re-named, probably Beriastrasse or something of the sort, and the whole district blotted out and unrecognizable. It seemed simpler to re-marry, and we did so at Caxton Hall.

  I could now speak and read German. I learnt by listening to speeches, reading the newspapers, learning poems by heart and reading trash. Detective novels, which I never cared for in English, taught one the language of every day. Wagner’s nineteenth-century-archaic style Tom, Unity and I used to one another, but this was a joke few Germans would share.

  I told my parents, and of course Tom, that M. and I were married, but nobody else. During the next two years journalists, who strongly suspected the marriage, could not lay their hands on documentary evidence and therefore did not print the story. Several times Tom telephoned me from London to say they had been asking him and other relations about it. One of the most persistent journalists was Randolph, who pestered Tom continually on the subject.

  Within a few months of my marriage to M. two of my sisters were married, Pam to Derek Jackson and Decca to Esmond Romilly. Derek was and is a very remarkable man; one would say unique, except that he had an identical twin as brilliant and unusual as himself. Vivian was a great friend of mine; he often came to Eaton Square and I stayed with him and Stella in the country. The twins were notable physicists (among the best in the world, Prof. Lindemann once told M.). Vivian worked in London, Derek at Oxford. They both loved horses and hunting and steeplechasing, they were as fearless as they were clever. Just at the time of Pam and Derek’s marriage Vivian was tragically killed in a sleigh accident at St. Moritz. His loss was a sorrow to Derek that time could never heal; part of himself died with Vivian. It was unbearably sad to think that never again, after the twins had argued everyone else to a standstill, would one hear the triumphant shout: ‘I agree with Derek!’ and ‘I agree with Vivian!’

  Decca and our cousin Esmond Romilly, aged nineteen and eighteen, ran off to the Spanish Civil War; Esmond was a communist. As they were under twenty-one they had to get their parents’ consent in order to be married. This was reluctantly given and they were married in France with Muv and Nelly Romilly as wedding guests. Soon afterwards they went to live in America.

  In 1937 Tom came with us to the Parteitag, and also his old friend Janos von Almasy. Janos had become a great friend of Unity’s; she constantly stayed with him at Bernstein, his castle in the Burgenland, and also at nearby Kohfidisch with the Erdödys. She brought Baby to stay with me at Wootton. Every year there were more foreigners at the Parteitag, and the world press waiting for Hitler’s speech. Several Paris friends were at Nuremberg that year. We were lodged in an
hotel that had been built for guests and was not a bit like the inns of our first visits.

  Tom and Janos were very impressed, not only by the extraordinary beauty and clockwork precision of the parades but by the speeches giving details of progress in every sphere of the economy. England seemed stagnant by comparison, and shortly after this Tom joined our movement. Janos, a Hungarian whose property had become part of Austria under the peace treaties in 1919, hoped for the Anschluss, which, rightly as it turned out, he thought could not be long delayed. This was my last Parteitag; the following year I was seven months pregnant and the year after that war had begun.

  In 1938 Unity had my parents with her at Nuremberg. Ever since 1934 they had visited her from time to time, and she often took them to see Hitler. She persuaded Farve to send him a present, a life-size, life-like bronze eagle, Japanese. The great bird was alighting on a bronze rock. Did it ever arrive on the Berg? Was it blown up by American soldiers after the war? Or looted? I have no idea. Perhaps it now adorns a garden in Little Rock, Arkansas, or some similarly exotic address. It was heavy for looting purposes, but it is astonishing what Americans managed to put in their knapsacks.

  For several years we had seen neither of the Acton brothers. Harold was in China; William with his parents at Florence. In 1938, however, William came to London and painted enormous pictures of all his friends. He painted me in a Wagnerian setting of rocks and stormy sky. He also did a pencil drawing which Muv liked so much that she asked him to make drawings of her entire family. William drew all six sisters; Muv put them in narrow red brocade frames and hung them in her room at Inch Kenneth. Everybody said it looked like Bluebeard’s chamber.

  When he could spare a few days M. and I went to Paris, and occasionally we motored across France to Provence which we both loved, but Wootton was a place one was reluctant to leave. All seasons there were wonderfully beautiful and perhaps winter supreme. Early in December 1936 Jim Lees-Milne happened to be staying the night and we listened to the King’s abdication broadcast with Nanny on the nursery wireless. We felt very sad. Everyone had known for a long time that he was in love with Mrs. Simpson but nobody imagined such a dénouement. If Decca or Debo had mentioned the affair at home Muv had dismissed the whole thing as absurd nonsense and told them they must not speak of the King in such a way. This was the origin of their saying: ‘Of course, Muv doesn’t believe in love.’

  When I had to go to London I stayed with friends, usually with Gerald at Halkin Street, or with the Dunns near Regents Park. M. left Ebury Street for a house on the river in Grosvenor Road. It had formerly been a night club and it became a restaurant. The Thames washed the walls and at high tide the wide river looked brilliant, at low tide less so; one saw strange horrors imbedded in mud. The enormous room we painted pale blue, with white pillars which held up the roof. In this house my son Alexander was born in 1938; his birth obliged us to announce our marriage. From my bed I could see across the black November water to the wharves on the far bank; they were blanketed in snow. So hard was the winter that birds were famished, flocks of sea gulls swooping down if bread was thrown; there was a wild turmoil of wings and beaks just outside our windows. The nurse terrified me by putting the baby in his basket on the balcony, I thought the great gulls might attack him. She treated my fears as nothing but fevered fancy; she was one of those severe, unbending and stupid puritans who hardly exist now as children’s nurses and whose passing no one need regret. The idea that a newborn baby needed ‘fresh air’ and was better off in the bitter snow-laden wind than he would have been indoors in his cot was a typical puritanical aberration of those days; virtue was equated with Spartan treatment of the young.

  Early in the new year—1939, fatal year for Europe—we took the baby to Wootton and he was handed over to Nanny Higgs. My happiness was complete.

  15.

  BERLIN

  Ever since 1932 M. had never ceased, in speech and in articles he wrote for his weekly paper, to demand rearmament for Britain. The disarmament conferences at Geneva and elsewhere had always had the same result; a measure of disarmament was decided upon and the only country which seriously complied with the decision was England. Hitler offered parity; that is, he said that if France and the other countries which together encircled Germany would disarm he would not re-arm. Nobody was prepared to disarm.

  In my lifetime, despite League of Nations and United Nations, little has ever come to pass as a result of reasonable men sitting round a table, at least when the strong passion of nationalism is awakened. It is now the Middle East which threatens to become the theatre of war and draw the great powers into its conflict. Who can assert that the slightest attention would have been paid to the problem of the dispossessed Palestinians if they had confined themselves to asking the United Nations to consider the justice of their cause? They tried this for a number of years and the result was zero. Only when they began to behave outrageously did the world listen to them.

  The Versailles, Trianon and St. Germain treaties were universally criticized and in many of their provisions almost universally condemned until Hitler came to power, when quite suddenly they became articles of faith to be defended if necessary by throwing our country and Empire into a fight to the death. The Munich settlement whereby the formerly Austrian inhabitants of Bohemia were permitted to join the Reich, thus righting a wrong done in 1919 by those who, hoping to encircle Germany, had listened exclusively to the powerful Czech lobby, was denounced as shameful surrender by warmongers in England and France. According to them it was so shameful that only the blood of millions would suffice to wipe it out. When Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a faraway country of which we know little he spoke but the bare truth. English politicians are notoriously ignorant of the history and geography of Europe; already at the Congress of Vienna their ignorance surprised everyone. They, and the journalists, are very partial to ‘small nations’ and quickly build up a chivalrous attitude which can be quite dangerous. To listen to them anyone would have imagined that Czechoslovakia was an historic though small country and nation under threat from a great predatory neighbour, instead of an invention of the peace treaties incorporating not only Czechs and Slovaks, who detested one another, but also a large German-speaking minority, chunks of Hungary and an area where the majority of the inhabitants were Poles. The fact that this rickety country fell apart was no more surprising than that trouble came in Northern Ireland from similar causes.

  Europe lurched from crisis to crisis and war seemed possible, yet our dilatory rulers failed to re-arm. It was left to M., and a little later to Winston Churchill, to call for re-armament. Churchill himself was partly responsible for the poor condition of our defences. The 1923 ‘ten-year rule’ under which it was assumed that there would be no war for ten years, was altered by him when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer so that the ten years, instead of dwindling as had been intended in 1923, became a constant, each year the possibility of war officially receding one more year. ‘This cunning political device naturally left the Service departments almost helpless in face of a hostile Treasury, which had only to murmur the master formula: “no major war for ten years” to provide an unanswerable counter to any request for an increase in the Service estimates.’15 It is one of the ironies of ‘history’ that Churchill, author of the ‘cunning political device’ is supposed to have been the far-seeing patriot who could blame the unprepared state of our country upon others.16 It must be remembered that at that time Britain was a ‘great power’ with commitments the world over and that the very extent of these commitments made it uniquely vulnerable. The difference between M. and Churchill was that M. wanted Britain to be strong in order to keep the peace unless any part of our possessions was threatened, while Churchill genuinely hoped for war. As Lloyd George put it: ‘Winston likes war. I don’t.’ The Conservative majority in Parliament included a handful of devoted adherents of Churchill such as Boothby and Bracken, and a number of M.P.s who thought along much the same lines as M. and
British Union. In between was every gradation of opinion. Re-armament was expensive and unpopular and Mr. Baldwin admitted that although he knew it was of over-riding importance he did not make it an issue for fear of losing elections. Labour was enthusiastic for war everywhere, provided (as M. said) that the war was not in the interest of Britain, that we had no arms to fight with and that none of the Labour leaders was expected to join the army.

  When from time to time I happened to be in Berlin I would telephone the Reichskanzlei to say I was at the Kaiserhof hotel. Occasionally, in the evening, Brückner would ring up. ‘Gnädige Frau, wollen Sie zu uns hierüber kommen?’ I crossed the Wilhelmplatz and was shown in. Hitler was generally sitting by an open fire; quite a rarity in centrally heated Berlin. Sometimes we saw a film, sometimes we just talked. During these evenings at the Reichskanzlei I got to know him fairly well. In conversation he was quick and clever, and of course very well-informed, and he had that surprising frankness often found in men at the top in contrast with mystery-making nonentities.

  It goes without saying that I saw on these occasions a very different Hitler from the man possessed by daemonic energy who had changed the face of Germany in so short a time. Obviously you do not ‘get things done’ by sitting chatting before a log fire. His Umgebung or little court was always concerned not to stir him up. ‘Den Führer nicht aufzuregen’ was the unwritten law of the Reichskanzlei; no doubt once stirred up he made their life unendurable for a while. He was in Berlin to work; he greatly preferred Munich and the Obersalzberg, Probably my visits, rare enough because I was almost always in England, filled a gap now and again because his cronies were in the south.