When my younger sister Jessica learned that her husband had been killed in an air raid during the war, the first words out of her mouth were not grief or tears. They were a demand that my husband and I be put against a wall and shot. I was Diana Mitford, and by then, I was already the most hated woman in Britain. But let me go back to the beginning, before the hatred, before the war, before everything fell apart.
I was born into the British aristocracy, the daughter of a lord, raised in rambling estates with servants and rigid etiquette. At seventeen, I was presented as a debutante at the court of King George V. They called me the most beautiful of the famous Mitford sisters, and I don’t think anyone who saw me that night would have disagreed. A few years later, Brian Guinness, the heir to a brewing fortune and one of the most eligible men in England, proposed to me.
I was eighteen. He was twenty-two. The papers called our wedding in January 1929 the wedding of the year. There was only one shadow over that day.
My two youngest sisters came down with scarlet fever and had to be quarantined. They missed the ceremony entirely. I tried to smile through the reception, but I felt their absence like a physical ache. Brian and I became fixtures of London’s glittering post-war scene.
The tabloids called us the Bright Young Things. We threw outrageous fancy dress parties, staged midnight treasure hunts, chased thrills with reckless abandon. Writers like Evelyn Waugh wrote about us, barely bothering to change our names. He once said my beauty ran through a room like a peel of bells.
I gave Brian two sons, one in 1930 and one in 1931. He was content with that life, happy to stay home with his growing family. I was not. The cracks were invisible to everyone else, but they were already there.
At a garden party, our hostess seated me next to a man named Sir Oswald Mosley. He was dashing, ambitious, charming in a way that made other men seem dull. He was about to take leadership of a new political movement called the British Union of Fascists. I was fascinated.
Then obsessed. Then consumed. I followed him politically, absolutely blindly. The pull of love was strong enough for me to upend my entire life, all for a married man with increasingly extreme beliefs.
My family begged me not to leave Brian. I ignored them. Brian, to his credit, behaved like a gentleman about the whole thing. He even faked evidence of his own infidelity so the divorce would go through quickly.
But Mosley refused to leave his wife Cynthia. She was the daughter of a former viceroy of India, and he wouldn’t let her go. I wasn’t fazed. I moved into a London house just around the corner from the flat where he met his mistresses.
I waited. Cynthia knew about the affairs. She couldn’t pretend otherwise anymore. Her health was failing too, exhaustion from a difficult pregnancy and ongoing illness.
But she stayed dutifully at Mosley’s side, even attending his rallies as he stirred up crowds that often turned violent. One day, at their country house, Cynthia confronted him about me. Mosley stormed out and left her in tears. The next day, she was rushed to the hospital with acute appendicitis.
She died. The public turned sharply against me. People whispered that I had contributed to Cynthia’s poor health. The social invitations that were my lifeblood dried up.
I was isolated from the very society I had dazzled. And then, just weeks after his wife’s funeral, Mosley began an affair with her younger sister. I was furious. But I was also certain he would come back to me.
He always came back. While he went off to France with his new mistress, I decided to find my own adventure. In 1934, I traveled to Germany with my nineteen-year-old sister Unity. A friend of ours was close to Adolf Hitler, and she got us VIP tickets to the Nuremberg Rally.
When Hitler appeared before the four hundred thousand spectators, I felt like an electric shock had passed through the crowd. I had only one regret that day. I hadn’t met him in person. When we returned to England, Unity told our father all about it.
He was livid. He told us he was horrified that we had accepted hospitality from a dangerous group of pests, that associating with such people brought nothing but shame. Unity didn’t care. She plunged even deeper into the far-right movement, joining Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
By the following year, she introduced me to the Führer himself. Mosley and I had grown closer over the years, still passionate, still united by our politics. But he hadn’t changed his womanizing ways. I tried to look past it, but I once admitted to a friend that I suffered agonies of jealousy.
Then I discovered I was pregnant. An illegitimate baby meant social ruin and political disaster for Mosley. So I made a dangerous decision. I ended the pregnancy.
In England in the mid-1930s, that was a crime. Unity and I returned to Nuremberg, this time as personal guests of Hitler himself. We posed for photos beneath towering banners and rows of stormtroopers. The images circulated in the English press, including shots of Unity saluting.
In 1936, I attended the Berlin Olympics as Hitler’s personal guest. When I returned to England, I received an invitation to lunch with the prime minister. Winston Churchill was actually my cousin, but he didn’t invite me to scold me. He wanted to know everything about Hitler.
Ironic, isn’t it? When I spent time with Hitler, he wanted me to give him the scoop on Churchill. And now Churchill wanted the scoop on Hitler. Mosley and I decided to marry that year.
But Mosley wanted it kept top secret. He still hadn’t quit his womanizing ways and didn’t want his other lovers to find out. If I wanted to be his wife, I had to get creative. I confided in Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister.
She was the unofficial first lady of the Reich, since Hitler himself was unmarried. When I told her about my problem, she made an extraordinary offer. She would host the wedding in her Berlin living room. Joseph Goebbels hated the idea.
He disliked Mosley and didn’t trust him. But it didn’t matter. Someone higher up had already approved it. Hitler himself.
On October 6th, 1936, I married Mosley in the Goebbels’ apartment. The ceremony was brief. The guest of honor was the Führer. For two years, only a handful of people knew I had married him.
Then I gave birth, and the story exploded. The headlines screamed that Hitler had been the best man at my secret wedding. Unity, meanwhile, wasn’t just another admirer of the dictator. She called him Wolf.
He called her Kind, which meant child. They exchanged gifts and shared private jokes. In August 1939, Unity and I lunched with Hitler in Bavaria. He told us that war with Britain was coming.
I insisted that Mosley would fight for peace. Hitler warned me that men like that often met violent ends. I was pregnant again. I knew what was best for me.
I withdrew to my farm in the English countryside the very next day. Unity stayed in Germany. When war broke out a few weeks later, she was deeply troubled. Overwhelmed and alone, she tried to take her own life in Munich’s English Garden, using the pistol that Hitler had once given her.
She survived, but the bullet lodged in her brain. She would never fully recover. In May 1940, undercover officers came for Mosley. He protested that he hadn’t broken the law.
It didn’t matter. The Emergency Powers Act allowed for indefinite detention without charges and without trial. A month later, the state came for me too. The British government didn’t care that I had a toddler and a three-month-old baby at home.
It was my own sister Nancy who had informed on me. She called me an extremely dangerous person. Once the golden girl of high society, I was now one of the most reviled women in Britain. They sent me to Holloway Penitentiary.
I was thrown into a dark basement cell with a thin mattress on a damp floor. After eighteen months, my connections came in handy. I pulled some strings with my cousin Winston, who approved my request that Mosley and I be imprisoned together. After eighteen months of separation, we were moved to a small cottage inside Holloway’s walls.
We had a garden, music, books, and even other inmates who served us. While the war raged outside, we lived in relative comfort. When we were released in 1943, more than forty thousand people marched on the House of Commons, demanding that Mosley be sent back. My sister Jessica, a committed communist, wrote an open letter to Churchill calling our release a betrayal.
Jessica and I had always stood on opposite political extremes. After our early twenties, we saw each other only once, at our sister Decca’s bedside when she was dying. When Jessica learned that her husband had been lost in an air raid, Churchill had to be the one to tell her. She was shattered.
And then she learned that I had received special privileges while in detention. That was when she screamed that Mosley and I should be put against a wall and shot. Mosley died in 1980. I mourned him for the rest of my life.
I died in 2003, at the age of ninety-three, during a heatwave in Paris. A historian wrote afterward that I showed a total disdain for equivocation. Even after all the suffering caused by fascism, even after everything I had lost and everything I had done, I could never bring myself to admit that my devotion to one of the most evil figures in history had been a mistake.
I never once said I was sorry.
