On 30 August 1933, Diana Mitford sat in the stands at Nuremberg and watched thousands of uniformed men march past beneath enormous swastika banners. For four days, torchlight processions filled the nights and massed crowds filled the days with sound, all of it designed to overwhelm the senses and silence doubt about the newly established Nazi regime. Diana had come, so she would later claim, out of curiosity, traveling with her younger sister Unity. She was a young Englishwoman of exceptional beauty, recently divorced, and by the end of that week she would be drawn into a world that would define—and eventually destroy—the rest of her life.
She was born Diana Freeman-Mitford on 17 June 1910 in London, the fourth child and third daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney Bowles. Her family would become collectively famous: six daughters and one son, each of whom carved a distinct and often extreme path through the upheavals of the twentieth century. Nancy became a celebrated novelist. Jessica became a committed communist.
Unity became an obsessive admirer of Adolf Hitler who would attempt suicide in a Munich park when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. Deborah eventually became Duchess of Devonshire. Tom, who said he did not want to fight against Germany, was sent to fight in the Pacific and was killed in action in British Burma. Diana was considered by those who knew her to be the most beautiful of them all.
The writer James Lees-Milne, a family friend, described her as the nearest thing to Botticelli’s Venus he had ever seen. She grew up at Batsford Park and later Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, educated primarily at home, deeply connected to the English upper-class world of country houses and London seasons, where beauty and birth together were assumed to constitute a sufficient preparation for life. In 1929, Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne and to the great brewing dynasty. With an income of twenty thousand pounds a year—the equivalent of nearly 2.
8 million US dollars today—the young couple maintained houses in London and Dublin and became known as organizers of the Bright Young Things, the bohemian and glamorous parties that entertained the British elite of the time. They had two sons, Jonathan and Desmond. From the outside, the marriage appeared to be everything a young woman of her background and ambition could want. From the inside, Diana found it insufficient.
Tensions arose between the sensitive and diffident Guinness, who preferred to remain at home with his family, and Diana, who wanted to travel and to fill the house with her friends. In February 1932, at a garden party at the home of the society hostess Emerald Cunard, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley, who was then in the process of founding the British Union of Fascists. Mosley was already married to Lady Cynthia Curzon, daughter of the former Viceroy of India, a woman widely liked and respected, who had followed Mosley through his successive political reinventions with loyalty and devotion. None of this deterred Diana.
She fell in love with him, left Guinness, and moved with a reduced household staff of nanny, cook, house parlor maid, and ladies’ maid to a house at Two Eaton Square, a short distance from Mosley’s home, prepared to wait for him. Mosley, however, refused to leave his wife. But in 1933, Cynthia quite suddenly died of peritonitis. Even then, the now-widowed Mosley continued to refuse to commit to Diana, carrying on an affair with his late wife’s younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.
In June 1933, some four years after their wedding, Diana divorced Guinness. Her parents did not approve, and she became a social pariah, briefly estranged from most of her family. Despite this, in 1933 she took her younger sister Unity to Germany, where they attended the first Nuremberg rally held under Nazi rule. Unity became obsessively fixated on Hitler and eventually succeeded in placing herself in his social circle.
In March 1935, Unity introduced Diana to Hitler. From that point, Diana became a regular presence in the inner circle of the Nazi regime. She was entertained at Nuremberg again in 1935 as Hitler’s personal guest. She attended the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 in a Mercedes-Benz he provided for her.
She became closely acquainted with Magda Goebbels, wife of the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and with Winifred Wagner, the composer Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law. During these years, Diana was also working on a commercial project intended to solve the chronic financial problems of Mosley’s fascist movement: she was negotiating with Nazi officials for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from German territory. Goebbels ultimately refused to permit it, preferring to control German airwaves himself, but the episode demonstrated the practical use Diana had become to the fascist cause she had adopted as her own. One of the most famous acts of her support for fascism before her marriage to Mosley came at a rally in Hyde Park in London in October 1935.
While the rest of the crowd sang “God Save the King,” Diana silently gave the Heil Hitler salute. Her wedding to Oswald Mosley on 6 October 1936 was kept secret for over a year. The secrecy was partly a matter of practical discretion—Mosley’s wife had been dead only three years—but it was also a matter of deliberate concealment, because the wedding took place in the drawing room of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, with Adolf Hitler among the witnesses. Their first son together, Alexander, was born in 1938, and only then did the marriage become publicly known.
In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war between Germany and Britain was now inevitable. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Second World War began, the Mosleys found themselves in an increasingly exposed position as known supporters of Nazi Germany. Oswald was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B on 23 May 1940, as German forces swept through France and the prospect of a German invasion of Britain appeared as a real threat. On 29 June 1940, eleven weeks after the birth of their son Max, Diana was also arrested and taken to a cell in F block in London’s Holloway Prison for women.
She and her husband were held without charge or trial under the provisions of 18B, on the advice of MI5, the British counterintelligence and security agency. MI5 documents described Diana Mosley as a public danger in a time of crisis. Even her sister Nancy actively encouraged the British government to keep her imprisoned during the war, and her sister Jessica, by then a communist, was also in favor of her continued detention. Only Deborah and Diana’s first son, Jonathan, from her marriage to Guinness, maintained that she posed no real threat to the United Kingdom.
The Mosleys were initially held separately. Following the personal intervention of Churchill, who had known Diana and affectionately called her “dynamite,” they were permitted in December 1941 to share accommodation in a house within the prison grounds. They were released in November 1943 on grounds of Oswald’s deteriorating health, a decision that provoked outrage in the press and in Parliament, and they were placed under house arrest until the end of the war. By her own account, Diana spent the years of imprisonment with composure.
She read extensively, organized the small community of interned fascist women around her, and did not allow imprisonment to disturb either her manner or her convictions. She emerged in 1943 as committed to fascism as she had been when she entered Holloway in 1940. No evidence, no defeat, no revelation of the Nazi crimes altered what she believed. After the war, the Mosleys were effectively exiled from respectable British life.
They lived first in Ireland, then settled permanently in France at the Temple de la Gloire in Orsay, south of Paris, a house that became a gathering point for old friends and new admirers. Among their social circle were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—the former King Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson—who had taken a similar path of wartime controversy and postwar semi-exile. Mosley continued to pursue political revival through the Union Movement, which combined pan-European nationalism with virulently anti-immigration politics. Diana and Oswald established Euphorian Books in an attempt to publish the work of right-wing authors.
Diana edited the fascist cultural magazine The European for six years and contributed regular columns to Tatler, the British magazine focusing on fashion and lifestyle. She also wrote book reviews in which she expressed sympathy for figures associated with Nazi Germany, such as Magda Goebbels. When Oswald Mosley died in December 1980, after nearly fifty years together, Diana was devastated. But she continued writing and continued receiving guests.
She had published her memoir, A Life of Contrasts, in 1977, followed by Loved Ones in 1985, a collection of pen portraits of friends and family, and a biography of the Duchess of Windsor in 1980. In 1989, she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, and the broadcast became one of the most controversial episodes in the program’s history. She questioned whether Adolf Hitler had been aware of the extent of the Holocaust, expressed doubt about the figure of six million Jewish victims, and described her friendship with Hitler as something that had occurred before the killings, as if the timing of an acquaintance might function as a form of moral alibi for her pro-fascist actions. The episode prompted hundreds of complaints to the BBC, and in 2016 was identified by a BBC writer as the most controversial Desert Island Discs ever broadcast.
In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, she suggested that European Jews might have been settled in Uganda, which she described as very empty and offering a lovely climate. One incident suggests that Diana Mosley’s views may have been even more extreme than those of her husband. According to the journalist Paul Callan’s recollections, Diana reacted visibly when, during an interview with her husband, she learned that Callan was Jewish. In Callan’s words, she went ashen, snapped a crimson nail, and left the room.
No explanation was offered at the time, but she later wrote to a friend: “A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom, but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes. ” By Tom, she meant her husband, Oswald Mosley, who had been known by that nickname from a young age, partly to distinguish him from his father and grandfather, who were also named Oswald. Diana Mosley died on 11 August 2003 in Paris, from complications following a stroke she had suffered a week earlier.
She was buried at St. Mary’s Church in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, alongside her sisters Unity and Nancy in the churchyard of the English village from which they had all set out into the world. She had been given more than almost any woman of her generation—beauty, intelligence, charm, wealth, and the freedom to use them as she wished. She used them to serve a movement that martyred millions, and she died without ever finding reason to regret it.
She was ninety-three years old.
