Diana Mitford

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Diana Mitford

Diana Mitford (born June 17, 1910 in London , † August 11, 2003 in Paris ) was the wife of the brewery heir Bryan Walter Guinness and later of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley . She was a colorful personality, very controversial because of her political views. She made the acquaintance of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels and became a close friend of the Duchess of Windsor .

Family environment

Diana Mitford was one of seven children of David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale , and Sydney Bowles. Her younger sister Unity Mitford became a personal friend of Adolf Hitler . Her older sister, Nancy Mitford , became a well-known writer in the UK. The Mitford sisters were also cousins ​​of Clementine Hozier , the wife of Winston Churchill . Diana, like her siblings, was mainly tutored by governesses at her parents' Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire . Only in 1926 was she sent to a school in Paris for half a year .

Diana is portrayed as an extremely attractive and charming figure. At the age of 18 she met the Irish aristocrat , writer and brewery heir Bryan Walter Guinness, who had the prospect of the title of Baron Moyne . Though her parents were against marriage, she married Guinness on January 30, 1929. The wedding was a major social event. Two sons were later born, Jonathan and Desmond. The couple had an annual income of 20,000 pounds sterling , an estate in Hampshire and houses in London and Dublin . The two were known as frequent hosts of glittering receptions attended by writers like Evelyn Waugh , Lytton Strachey , Dora Carrington and John Betjeman, as well as politicians like Winston Churchill . Waugh dedicated his story "Vile Bodies" to the couple, a satire on the "Roaring Twenties".

In 1932 Diana Mitford became the lover of Sir Oswald Mosley, who had a reputation for being a notorious womanizer. She shocked her family and caused a social scandal. Mosley's wife was Lady Cynthia Curzon , daughter of George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston , the former Viceroy of India . Diana soon separated from her husband, but Mosley did not want to leave his wife. In May 1933, Mosley's wife died of peritonitis after surgery, and Mosley began a relationship with another woman.

Living in Germany, closeness to the National Socialists

In 1933 Diana went to Nuremberg with her then nineteen-year-old sister Unity to attend the Nazi party rally. Unity had already met Hitler in Munich. From then on, she lived in Germany and became a good personal acquaintance of the German Chancellor, with whom she frequented.

In 1934 Diana's marriage ended in divorce and she went to Belgrade with her two sons , where Mosley visited them several times.

On another visit to Germany in March 1935, Diana was introduced by Unity to Adolf Hitler . The two became his guests, and in 1936, on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Berlin , Hitler provided Diana with a Mercedes-Benz and a chauffeur.

Diana continued to appear in public as Mosley's lover, although he kept having affairs with other women. On October 6, 1936, in a Berlin office of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , the marriage was finally concluded. Apart from the witnesses and the registrar, only Hitler and Goebbels were present. Hitler gave the couple a portrait of himself in a silver frame. The wedding was kept secret until the birth of the first child, Alexander, in 1938.

In August 1939, in the presence of Diana Mosley, Hitler said at lunch that war between Great Britain and the German Reich was inevitable.

After returning to the United Kingdom, the couple were interned at the outbreak of World War II because of their obvious National Socialist sympathies. Initially, the two were held separately, but after the intervention of Winston Churchill, Mosley became the only male prisoner in London's Holloway Women's Prison . In 1943, after two years in prison, the couple was released because of Mosley's poor health. The two were placed under house arrest until the end of the war. Diana Mosley said she was ill-treated and tortured while in detention.

Ireland, Paris and Death

After the end of the war Diana went to Ireland with her husband for a few years , later they moved to France , where they lived in Orsay near Paris in a large house called the "Temple de la Gloire". Their neighbors were the Duke (the then abdicated King Edward VIII ) and the Duchess of Windsor, with whom they soon became friends.

The war and the time of captivity hadn't changed Diana's worldview. In France, Diana founded the right-wing conservative magazine The European , in which she also published her own articles. Since her marriage to Mosley, she supported the British Fascists ( British Union of Fascists and the successor party Union Movement, founded after the war ). She continued to admire Hitler and the goals of the National Socialists, although she was thoroughly critical and differentiated; for example, she considered Hitler guilty of the annihilation of European Jews. Mosley's attempts to get back into politics failed.

A report published in 2002 by the British secret service MI5 shows that Diana was sometimes assessed as a "public danger" during her active time. She was thought to be much smarter and more dangerous than her husband: she was extremely ambitious and ready to achieve her goals by any means.

Gravestone of Diana Mitford (right) next to those of her sisters Unity and Nancy Mitford

Diana Mitford died in Paris in August 2003 at the age of 93.

In an obituary in the Daily Telegraph , she is described as "an irresistibly charming, incorrigible Nazi".

Publications

literature

  • de Courcy Anne, Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler's Angel , Morrow Publishing, 2003 , ISBN 0060-56532-2
  • Guinness, Jonathan, and Catherine Guinness, The House of Mitford , Hutchinson & Co., London, 1984, ISBN 0-09-155560-4
  • Dalley, Jan, Diana Mosley - A Life , Faber & Faber, London, 1999 , ISBN 0-571-14448-9
  • Dalley, Jan, Diana Mosley: A biography of the glamorous Mitford sister who became Hitler's friend and married the leader of Britain's fascists , Knopf, 2000 ISBN 0394587367
  • Mary S. Lovell, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family , WW Norton & Company, 2003 , ISBN 0393324141
  • Susanne Kippenberger : The red sheep of the family. Jessica Mitford and her sisters . Berlin: Hanser, 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24649-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. The family did not comment on the cause of death. France was then suffering from a heat wave . According to a private letter ten days before her death, Diana Mitford was also troubled by the heat. Mitford suffered a minor stroke a week before she died. See for example the Australian newspaper The Age