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For her friendship towards Adolf Hitler and the loyalty to her husband, Lady Mosley suffered the rupture of family relationships, ordeals in prison, the humiliation of social isolation and, above all, the anguish of losing her children’s babyhood while she was detained in Holloway.

From Daily Mail, London, October 20, 2003, page 36/37

The Woman Who Loved Hitler

 

From Daily Mail, London, October 20, 2003, page 36/37

She worshipped Adolf Hitler and adored her fascist husband. But did Diana Mosley REALLY deserve to rot in prison?

Diana Mosley, who died in August, was one of the great beauties of her age – but threw away life of privilege to become the lover of fascist leader Oswald Mosley and intimate friend of Hitler. …

For Lady Mosley, being jailed was an ordeal from which she would never recover; for years afterwards she would wake up in the middle of the night shaking with fear that she was once again going to be torn away from the two young sons she’d had with Mosley.

The youngest, Max, was just 11 weeks old the day the police came to take her away. She was sitting in the garden with him when two officers strode across the lawn saying they had a warrant for her arrest. …

Like her husband, she had been bitterly opposed to the war against Germany, believing a negotiated peace was the only way to ensure the survival of the British Empire. …

Her wartime imprisonment, and the years of public execration that followed it, were the price she paid for love – and a headstrong, reckless spirit that delighted in defying conventional opinion.

On arrival at Holloway, Diana was locked inside a metal cage measuring 4ft by 4ft to await the humiliating prison ritual of a delousing bath and an inspection for scabies.

Afterwards she was taken to join her fellow fascist sympathisers in the jail’s notorious E wing, which had not been used for ten years. The conditions came as a savage shock.

Diana was a child of the nobility, accustomed to linen sheets, excellent food, servants, exquisite furniture and pictures. She was naturally fastidious and required space – mental, emotional and physical – in which to flourish.

Instead, as she later wrote: “I was taken to a completely dark, airless and very dirty cell. The tiny window was entirely blocked by sandbags. There was no light or air.

“They swilled the floor with water in an attempt to remove some of the dirt. There was no bed. They put a mattress on the floor, dumped some dirty blankets and grubby sheets on it and locked me in for the night.”

The whole prison was bitterly cold, with an icy chill emanating from the walls even in summer. The lavatories were nearly always blocked and the floor around them covered in human filth. …

Nor was the cuisine what she was used to. The fish pie was so putrid even the prison cats refused to eat it. Cocoa came covered in a layer of grease that prisoners would leave to cool before skimming it off and using it as face cream.

Added to all this was the torment Diana felt at being separated from her sons. …

Besides such mental anguish, she was suffering acute physical pain from not being able to breastfeed her baby. “My breasts were very swollen and sore,” she wrote. “I was terrified to touch them because everything was begrimed with dirt.”

The pain was so great that she could barely move her arms when ordered to mop the jail’s stone floors with a bucket of cold water and an ancient rag.

But she was determined not to break down in front of her captors. Defiantly she tried to maintain her own aristocratic standards, insisting her ration book be used to send fudge and chocolate from Harrods to her sons, and swathing herself in a grey fur coat to walk in the prison yard. …

However, as would often be the case with Diana Mosley, the defiant pride and obstinacy which helped her cope with her ordeal also stopped her escaping it.

Four months after her arrest, she was given the chance to appear before a Home Office committee to appeal against her incarceration. …

She told them that her feelings of friendship towards Hitler were unchanged – indeed -, that absence had made her heart grow fonder – that she liked his henchmen Heinrich Himmler “very much” and that she did not believe what she had read of the Nazis’ alleged atrocities.

She also stated that she agreed “up to a point” with the German policy towards Jews, while expressing the nonsensical view that Britain had been “dying for a war”.

“If you had the power, would you displace the present form of government in this country with a fascist regime?” she was asked. “Yes”, she replied.

“You have a great contempt for democracy?” a member of the panel suggested. “Yes”, she replied again.

Her arrogant refusal to concede the slightest point sealed her fate. Then again, she was hardly helped byher husband who had agreed during an earlier appeal that his wife was one of the three women Hitler most admired in the world. …

The authorities kept Diana incarcerated long after other fascist women with young children had been released. Not only that, but the heating in the Mosley’s quarters, instead of being switched on in November as everywhere else in the prison, was kept off until mid-January, contributing to a steady decline in the couple’s health.

Diana grew emaciated and rundown, while Mosly plunged into depression and began suffering ever more painfully from phlebitis, a serious blood condition. …

It was one of Mosley’s mistresses who finally secured their freedom – even though she would have been happy for Diana to rot in jail indefinitely.

Baba Metcalfe was one of two sisters of Mosley’s first wife Cynthia, known as Cimmie, who had died tragically young at 34. All three sisters had at one time been deeply in love with him.

Before Cimmie’s death, the rivalry between the sisters was intense, but afterwards the remaining two united in their loathing of Diana, the woman they blamed for breaking Cimmie’s heart and driving her into an early grave.

Hungry for revenge, Baba took Cimmie’s place in Mosley’s bed, but she had reckoned without his extraordinary sexual stamina and his ability to juggle the emotions of several women at a time. “All through the Thirties it was as if I had two wives,” he once commented.

Despite her fury when she discovered that Mosley and Diana had secretly married in Germany, Baba’s devotion to him survived his imprisonment, and – while studiously ignoring her rival -she visited him behind bars.

As the daughter of Lord Curzon, a former Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, she had powerful contacts and used them to pass an impassioned letter to Winston Churchill in 1943, insisting that Mosley was at death’s door and should be freed without delay.

She did not, of course, mention Diana who, as far as she was concerned, did not exist. But her words had their effect on Churchill, who had no wish for Mosley to become a fascist martyr – and accepted he no longer posed any risk to national security.

The couple were released one dark November dawn through a side door of the jail known as “the murderers gate”. The prison authorities were well aware of the loathing in which they were held, and despite the early hour a large crowd had already gathered at the front of the building to bay for their blood. …

Surprisingly, the Home Office later revealed that according to their postbag, “Lady Mosley’s release is an almost greater source of aggravation than her husband’s. Both were now viewed as malign, almost satanic figures.

Such was the level of public hostility, unremitting down the years that followed, that they eventually decided to leave the country. Their time was divided between homes in Ireland and France. …

Neither ever gave up their extreme beliefs, and Mosley even attempted a political comeback with a new political party he called the Union Movement. Its aim was to bring about a form of European government, with the “civilised” white races seizing control of Africa to exploit its vast raw materials [NJ: which is exactly what the good-doers and democrats are still doing].

To the relief of everyone except Mosley’s die-hard admirers, the project was a complete failure. He diverted himself by reverting to the sexual habits of his pre-war years, conducting two or three affairs that caused great pain to the unfailingly loyal Diana.

He died in December 1980, having suffered from Parkinson’s disease for some years. Diana’s diary records poignantly how on the night of his death, as she put on the bedsocks he needed for warmth, the couple told each other and over again: “You’re all the world to me.”

Her grief was wild and overwhelming, for months her sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire,feared she might commit suicide. Ever afterwards, she reacted like a spitting cat to anyone who voiced even the mildest criticism of her husband’s memory. …

Her total lack of repentance did not endear her to the public. When she was invited to appear on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, it caused such a furore that the show had to be postponed three times.

Such was the level of suspicion against her that even her choice of A Whiter Shade Of Pale as her only non-classical piece of music was interpreted as racially motivated.

Diana, as usual, did not help herself by exhibiting the stubborn defiance that had served her so badly in front of the prison appeal committee all those years before. …

Questioned on the issue of the Holocaust by Sue Lawley, she replied: “I don’t really, I’m afraid, believe that six million people were killed.”

Her languid upper-class drawl gave the words an especially chilling overtone. To her dying day, just over two months ago, Diana remained faithful to Mosley’s beliefs, likening him to a prophet who had cried vainly in the wilderness.

She regarded Britain’s economic decline, the collapse of the Empire and the growth of immigration (“think of the blackamoors here in their millions”) as proof that he had been right all along, and that World War II had been a betrayal of our national interest. …

What she had done, she had done for him. If Mosley was the one true voice, this gave meaning to the sacrifices she had made. …

The alternative was unthinkable; that it was for a flawed god she had suffered the rupture of family relationships, the humiliation of social isolation and, above all, the anguish of losing her children’s babyhood while she was detained in Holloway.

Thus she could say (and mean it) only shortly before she died: “I’m so proud to have been in prison, to have done however little it was to stop that ghastly war. All that has happened was foreseen by my husband. So I don’t feel prison as any stain on me – quite the opposite. I am very proud that we did what we could.” (end Daily Mail)