At eighteen, Diana Mitford was widely regarded as the most beautiful and cleverest of the six legendary Mitford sisters. She married the extremely wealthy Brian Guinness, heir to the Irish brewing dynasty, and together the couple stood at the heart of London society. It seemed she was set for life. But Diana soon fell in love with another man, and her path would lead her into the inner circle of Nazi Germany, making her one of the most controversial figures of her era.
Diana Mitford was born on the 17th of June 1910 in London, the third daughter and fourth child of David Freeman-Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney, whose maiden name was Bowles and who came from a literary family. Her father was known as an eccentric, and her mother held political views that would later shape Diana’s life. She had two older sisters, Nancy and Pamela, and an older brother, Tom, who would be the only Mitford son. Three further sisters, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah, followed over the next ten years.
Like the other Mitford children, Diana grew up in an isolated world, homeschooled on her parents’ estates in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. In 1926, she was briefly sent to Paris to be educated for about six months. She could not have known at the time that she would live much of her later life in the French capital. Even by then, Diana had developed an easy charm that pulled people into her circle, and her younger sisters Unity, Jessica, and Deborah looked up to her rather than to Nancy and Pamela.
Eventually, the spell would break for Jessica and Deborah, but Unity’s adoration of her sister would contribute to her own tragic life story. The Mitfords had long remained secluded in Oxfordshire, but by the 1920s, the oldest sisters Nancy and Pamela had been introduced to the Royal Court and into London society, socializing with some of the most prominent writers and artistic figures of the era. In their youth, each of the Mitford sisters responded to these newfound freedoms in different ways. Diana, well noted by the late 1920s as the prettiest of the sisters, married almost as soon as she emerged from the restrictions of her Oxfordshire upbringing.
At just eighteen, she became engaged to the handsome and charming Brian Guinness. When she informed her parents, they were initially reluctant to allow the marriage due to her young age, but they eventually gave in. When Diana and Guinness married in January 1929, it was one of the weddings of the year in British high society. The marriage was something of a culture shock for Diana.
The family was incredibly wealthy, with armies of staff and servants at their homes in Ireland and England. Diana’s new mother-in-law expressed amazement at the fact that Diana was able to fry an egg. The couple lived on an allowance of twenty thousand pounds a year until Brian would come into his inheritance. Along with a mansion in London, they had a home in Dublin not far from the Guinness Brewery and a house in Hampshire.
Two sons, Jonathan and Desmond, followed in 1930 and 1931. But before they had even left infancy, Diana was being drawn elsewhere. In February 1932, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley at a party at the house of Emerald Cunard in London. Mosley was judged by many to be one of the most promising politicians in Britain in the 1920s.
He had previously been a member of the Conservative Party before crossing the floor to the Labour Party in the mid-1920s. When Labour entered government in 1929, he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. However, when the Labour Party membership rejected a memorandum he had drawn up in 1930, one which outlined a plan to reduce the massive unemployment that had emerged in Britain following the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, he left Labour too and started the New Party. In 1932, right around the time he met Diana, the New Party became the British Union of Fascists, with Mosley as its leader.
Despite the fact that Diana and Mosley were married to other people and there was a fourteen-year age gap between them, they were soon having an affair. Shortly thereafter, Diana decided to leave her husband and became Mosley’s mistress, horrifying her family and scandalizing British society. Oswald, on the other hand, refused to leave his wife, Lady Cynthia Mosley. But she died not long after, in 1933, due to complications arising from peritonitis.
Despite Diana’s divorce and the death of Lady Cynthia, the couple would not marry until 1936, as Mosley did not commit to the relationship for several years. For example, he was briefly involved in a relationship with his sister-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Metcalfe, after his first wife died. Oswald and Diana finally married on the 6th of October 1936. The ceremony took place in Germany, in one of the homes of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler was present at the event.
By that time, Diana had regularly been visiting Germany with Oswald to attend Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. Oswald forged ties to the German fascists, believing that his party would assume control of Britain one day. Two sons followed soon after their marriage, Alexander in 1938 and Max in 1940. Though her marital affairs had led to attention on the Mitford family, Diana’s mother Sydney, brother Tom, and sister Unity shared her affinity for fascism.
There is no doubting that Diana was a committed fascist; she was not blindly led into political extremism as a result of some infatuation with her new husband. Her views in later life on the racial policies of the Nazis and their genocidal actions were complicated. At certain times she expressed some horror at what had happened, but in others her statements were more neutral. Nevertheless, her politics in the 1930s caused a complete split with her elder sister Nancy.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, following Germany’s invasion of Poland, Diana and Oswald’s political and social position in Britain collapsed. This was in stark contrast to the summer of 1939 before hostilities began, when a British Union of Fascists rally in London had drawn thirty thousand attendees, one of the biggest political rallies in British history. Compromised by his early support for the Nazis, Oswald began calling now for a negotiated peace agreement with Germany. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given the danger it posed, the British government did not move to ban the British Union of Fascists until the 23rd of May 1940, following the passage of the Treachery Act that day.
Five weeks later, Diana and Oswald were arrested, on the back of undoubtedly well-founded fears that the British government had that the Mosleys and their followers would act as a fifth column for the Nazis in England if they were allowed to remain free. Diana was imprisoned in Holloway Prison in London. Oswald was held separately at first, but in December 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had known Mosley since the 1910s, intervened personally to allow Mosley to be moved to Holloway Prison as well. They remained there until late 1943.
By that time, the fate of the war was clear, and the Mosleys were no longer perceived as a great threat to British security. Consequently, they were released from prison but remained under house arrest for the remainder of the war. The Mosleys were effectively social outcasts in Britain after the war ended. Nevertheless, Oswald attempted to revive his political career, in large part by reimagining himself as an advocate of a pan-European state.
This was popular at the time, as several Western European states began the process of creating what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community and then the European Economic Community. He also established a union movement as a direct successor to the British Union of Fascists in 1948, but it did not gain traction in the short term. Ultimately, the Mosleys were unable to leave behind the shame that came with their association with the Nazis in the 1930s. Accordingly, once the government returned their passports in 1949, they began making plans to leave Britain.
Diana, Oswald, and her two sons left Britain in 1951, relocating first to Ireland, where they started in Galway and then at Fermoy in County Cork. Yet they spent most of their years in exile living at the Allée Saint-Charles in Paris, with occasional visits to South Africa as well, where their politics were far more acceptable to the far-right apartheid regime run by the National Party. It was a curious life in exile. Oswald was frequently unfaithful, and Diana was certainly aware of his affairs but ignored them for the most part.
When asked about her ties to the Nazis in the 1930s, she expressed outward revulsion for the Holocaust and the genocidal racial policies of the Nazi regime. But she also refused to entirely disavow her friendships with Hitler and the other senior Nazis. In one interview, she shared the following: “They’ll go on persecuting me until I say Hitler’s ghastly. Well, what’s the point in saying that?
We all know that he was a monster, that he did very cruel and terrible things. But that doesn’t alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. It was fascinating for me at 24 to sit and talk to him, to ask him questions and get answers, even if they weren’t true ones. No torture on Earth would get me to say anything different.
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In the many interviews she gave over the years, and in accounts provided by her friends and acquaintances, there is little doubting that she was antisemitic. Once, pondering in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, she suggested that Europe’s Jews should have been relocated to Uganda, a thinly disguised allusion to a Nazi plan to deport the continent’s Jewish people to the African island of Madagascar, which had briefly been considered in 1940. While the Mosleys were effectively unable to involve themselves in any substantial fashion in British politics after the war, both she and Oswald wrote and published extensively during these decades. To facilitate their work, they established Euphorion Books, their own publishing company, named after a character in Goethe’s Faust.
Mosley subsequently translated Goethe’s work and published it through Euphorion. Much of Diana’s writing was political. For instance, she edited The European for six years between 1953 and 1959 while living in France, a political and cultural magazine that tried to further many of the Mosleys’ political ideas. Curiously, the magazine was in favor of British entry into the newly founded European Economic Community.
More broadly, The European included contributions from the American poet Ezra Pound, who had been a fan of Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism, the South African poet Roy Campbell, and the British writer Henry Williamson, creator of Tarka the Otter, who had been a supporter of European fascism in the 1930s. Diana also published several books. One, published in 1980, was a biography of Wallis Simpson, whose marriage to King Edward VIII had caused the abdication crisis of 1936. By then, Wallis, as Duchess of Windsor, had lived next door to Diana and Oswald in Paris and had also seen controversy by visiting Germany in 1937 and meeting Hitler and other Nazi leaders after Edward lost his throne.
Two personal memoirs also appeared: A Life of Contrasts in 1977, which was a straightforward autobiography, and Loved Ones in 1985, in which she reflected on some of the famous figures she had known over the years, including her sisters and the author of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh. Finally, Diana wrote for several other prominent publications, including articles for The Tatler in the late 1960s and as a book reviewer for both the New Statesman and the London Evening Standard from the 1970s through to the 1990s. Her writings, including a defense of Magda Goebbels’ decision to give her six children poison in the Führerbunker at the end of the Second World War, caused controversy and infamous clashes with the late Christopher Hitchens and Max Hastings, a prominent historian of the Second World War and newspaper editor. Diana’s husband Oswald died on the 3rd of December 1980, in Paris.
Many obituaries and news reports noted the passing of the leader of the British fascist movement, but his death was not greeted with the sort of outpouring of anger at his political career that might have occurred had he died closer to the Second World War. Many people had simply forgotten the Mosleys or had not been alive in the 1930s and early 1940s. After her husband’s death, Diana remained in France and continued to write extensively, though she lost her position as a book reviewer at the London Evening Standard in the mid-1990s when Max Hastings determined that he did not want any more reviews by “bloody Lady Hitler” running the paper. Her reputation as a leading British fascist was still alive and well fifty years after the war ended.
Diana eventually died in Paris on the 11th of August 2003, following complications arising from a stroke she had suffered a week earlier. This was compounded by the heat wave that hit Western Europe that late summer, as temperatures topped forty degrees Celsius for ten days in a row in France. Diana was ninety-three years of age at the time. She was buried back in England, in Oxfordshire, in the Mitford family plot next to her sisters.
Obituaries were scornful of her ties to the Nazis, though they debated her own political views, which remain somewhat unclear and contested even today.