In 1933, the German city of Nuremberg was given over entirely to spectacle. For four days, between August 30 and September 3, thousands of uniformed men marched, saluted, and cheered beneath enormous banners bearing the swastika. Torchlight processions filled the nights, and the sound of massed crowds filled the days.
It was the first Nuremberg rally held since Adolf Hitler came to power. It had been designed to overwhelm the senses and silence doubt about the newly established Nazi regime. Among the foreign visitors watching from the stands was a young English woman of exceptional beauty, recently divorced, traveling with her younger sister.
She had come out of curiosity, or so she would later claim. In the end, she would enter the inner circle of the German Nazis and British fascists. Her name was Diana Mitford, but she would become known as Diana Mosley.
Diana Mosley was born Diana Freeman-Mitford on June 17, 1910, in London. She was the fourth child and third daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney Bowles. She grew up in a family that would become collectively famous.
Six daughters and one son each carved a distinct and often extreme path through the upheavals of the 20th century. Nancy became a celebrated novelist. Jessica became a committed communist. Unity became an obsessive admirer of Adolf Hitler and would attempt suicide in a Munich park when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939. Deborah eventually became Duchess of Devonshire. Tom, who was sent to fight in the Pacific after saying he did not want to fight against Germany, was killed in action in British Burma.
Diana was considered by those who knew her to be the most beautiful of them all. A family friend, the writer James Lees-Milne, described her as the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus he had ever seen. She grew up in the family homes of Batsford Park and later Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire.
She was educated primarily at home, deeply connected to the English upper-class world of country houses, London seasons, and the assumption that beauty and birth together constituted a sufficient preparation for life. In 1929, Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne and the great brewing dynasty.
With an income of 20,000 pounds a year, equivalent to nearly 2.8 million United States dollars today, the young couple maintained houses in London and Dublin. They were known as organizers of the Bright Young Things social events, bohemian and glamorous parties for 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 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 successive political reinventions with loyalty and devotion.
None of this deterred Diana, who fell in love with Mosley. She left Guinness and moved with a reduced household staff of nanny, cook, house parlor maid, and ladies' maid to a house at 2 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. The now widowed Mosley continued to refuse to commit to Diana, continuing an affair with his late wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe. Nevertheless, in June 1933, some four years after their wedding, Diana divorced Guinness.
Her parents did not approve of her decision, and she became a social pariah, briefly estranged from most of her family. Despite this, in 1933, Diana 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, and 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 and attended the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 in a Mercedes-Benz he provided for her.
She became closely acquainted with Magda Goebbels, the wife of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and Winifred Wagner, 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 in which she supported fascism before her wedding to Mosley was a rally in Hyde Park in London in October 1935. When the rest of the crowd were singing God Save the King, Diana silently gave the Heil Hitler salute.
The wedding between her and Oswald Mosley on October 6, 1936, was kept secret for over a year. Its secrecy was partly a matter of practical discretion, as Mosley's wife had been dead only three years, but also partly a matter of deliberate concealment. 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 September 1, 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 defense regulation 18B on May 23, 1940, as German forces swept through France and the prospect of a German invasion of Britain began to appear as a real threat to the United Kingdom. On June 29, 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, who had become 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, but 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 were placed under house arrest until the end of the war.
Diana spent the years of imprisonment, by her own account, 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 was 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 virulent anti-immigration politics. After the war, Diana and Oswald Mosley established Euphorian Books in an attempt to publish the work of right-wing authors. Diana also 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 50 years together, Diana was devastated by his death. But she continued writing and continued receiving guests. A few years before his death, in 1977, she had published her memoir, A Life of Contrasts, 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 from listeners, 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, a British newspaper, 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, Oswald Mosley, the leader of Britain's fascist movement.
According to journalist Paul Callan's recollections, Diana Mosley 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 was referring to 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 August 11, 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 93 years old.