The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (30 page)

After the cruise Unity shot back to Munich, where she was living more or less permanently now, in a flat in the Pension Doering. She had her two white pet rats there and even a dog, a black Great Dane, called Flopsy as a puppy, but later Rebell. At the end of June she went to stay with Janos von Almassy in Austria for a week. Her time in Munich was spent in a ceaseless circle of waiting to be invited by Hitler to join him for lunch, tea or dinner – sometimes in his flat. ‘The greatest moment in my life,’ she told a friend, ‘was sitting at Hitler’s feet and having him stroke my hair.’
²⁸
She gave alcoholic parties in her apartment for her friends from ‘the heim’, and her favourite storm-troopers. One of the SS men, Erich Widemann, she regarded as a boyfriend for some years, but it is unlikely that there was any sexual activity between them. If she was ‘in love’ with anyone it was Hitler, in her naïve, adolescent way.

When they went to the Olympics later that summer, Diana and Unity were invited to stay with the Goebbels at their country house Schwanenwerder, just outside Berlin on the Wannsee Lake. The party was taken each day to the stadium by limousine, and, fortunately, Diana felt, she and Unity were not given seats next to their hosts – they found it boring to sit and watch track events for hour after hour: they preferred to get up and walk around. In the evenings there were social events, state banquets, and parties at which leading Nazis vied with each other to provide the best entertainments: von Ribbentrop gave a decorous ‘embassy-style’ dinner party; Goering held a dinner for eight hundred guests who were entertained by a ballet company, dancing in the moonlight, followed by a vast
fête champêtre
. Two days later Goebbels entertained two thousand guests on an island on the lake: guests reached the site across pontoons strung from the shore, guided by the light of torches held aloft by lines of Nazi maidens (the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler Youth movement).

When the Games ended Diana and Unity were driven to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, in a Mercedes provided by Hitler, for performances of
The Ring and Parsifal
. The latter was Diana’s least favourite of Wagner’s works and she said so to Hitler when he asked how she had enjoyed it. ‘That is because you are young,’ he told her. ‘You will find as you get older that you will love Parsifal more and more.’
²⁹
She states that his prediction was accurate.

The relationship between both women and Hitler had now progressed to a stage where they could even hector him gently. At one luncheon party at Goebbels’ home, he sat with Unity on one side and Diana on the other while they ‘attacked’ him for appointing Ribbentrop as ambassador to London. Ribbentrop was absolutely the wrong man for London, they told him. Such
lèse majesté
did not go down well with Nazi officials who were always on their guard in the presence of Hitler. No one
ever
contradicted him. For these two ‘over made-up British women’ to dare to do so did not make them popular. Increasingly Unity found them blocking her access to Hitler. Meanwhile Hitler appeared to enjoy their company, and there is one eyewitness account of them, both dressed in powder-blue jumpers, blonde and striking, sitting on either side of him while they all discussed the reason for the Mitfords’ peachy skin. The English rain was responsible, they told him. In their presence Hitler could be tempted into one or other of his party pieces, either an elaborate pantomime of himself carefully rolling and smoking a cigarette, or an impersonation of Mussolini strutting and bellowing and receiving the gift of ceremonial sword which he drew from its scabbard and flourished dramatically. Hitler usually finished this mimicry by saying in a self-deprecating manner guaranteed to draw good-humoured applause, ‘Of course I’m no good at that sort of thing. I’d just murmur, “Here, Schaub,
*
you hang on to this.”’
³⁰

But despite appearances, a more serious purpose than mere junketing lay behind Diana’s four visits to Germany in 1936.
³¹
The BUF required huge sums of money to run its headquarters with full-time staff, its advertising and promotion, and the cost of Mosley’s hectic programme all over the country. Its revenue, which consisted of the combined income from BUF subscriptions and donations from wealthy sympathizers, were proving insufficient. Eventually, Mosley used virtually all of his own fortune propping up his party, but in 1936 he was confident he could find some way to provide for the necessary shortfall in income. Several schemes were floated but Mosley settled on the only really serious one, which, if it could be brought off, was the equivalent of a licence to print money.

In essence it was to start a commercial radio station, based in Germany and broadcasting in Britain. The BBC held a monopoly on radio transmission for the UK in the thirties, and there were no commercial stations. There were, however, two overseas radio stations that provided what the audiences wanted, and which the BBC staidly refused to offer: evening programmes offering popular music. The most famous of these, the foreign-owned Radio Luxembourg, which played modern recordings hour after hour, interspersed with advertisements, was the only commercial station available in most of England and Scotland, and even though reception was patchy at times it was extremely popular until well into the 1960s. The other station was owned and run by Captain Plugge, a Tory MP, who had obtained a wavelength from the French government. He called his station Radio Normandie and though it could only be received in southern England he made a small fortune from it. Bill Allen, a senior figure in the BUF, was in the advertising business and knew all about Radio Normandie. He backed the idea enthusiastically for he knew that large national companies were looking for alternative advertising platforms to the traditional ones of newspapers and magazines, and the huge success of radio advertising in the USA had pointed the way.

What was required was a medium-band wavelength, powerful enough to reach most of the United Kingdom, so Diana, whose German was by now fluent, was asked to use her friendships and contacts with top Nazis to try to secure permission for the establishment of such a radio station. Apart from the much-needed revenue that would be generated from advertising commercial products on such a station, Mosley and Diana planned a range of own-label cosmetics and other domestic items. And despite the station’s declared aim of being strictly commercial, and relaying only sport, sweet music, beauty hints and similar domestic delights, the opportunity for covert propaganda to the mainly young audience that such a station would attract was incalculable, though Diana refutes this was ever on the agenda. As bait Diana offered payment in hard currency to aid the Reich’s serious balance-of-payments deficit.

To ensure that advertisers would not be put off advertising on a station that was so firmly allied politically, no mention of Mosley’s name was ever made in connection with it. However, the directors of the company, Air Time Ltd, formed to float the idea were senior members of the BUF. The secrecy over Mosley’s involvement was not mere paranoia: in the previous year Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
complied instantly when a Jewish industrialist threatened to withdraw all advertising from the newspaper if it continued to support Mosley. For this reason absolute confidentiality concerning Diana’s mission was maintained, and even Unity – perhaps especially Unity, who was a chatterbox – was not party to the plan.

Immediately Diana ran up against a major hurdle. Her friendship with Joseph and Magda Goebbels might have led her to assume some support from the propaganda minister who was the person who most mattered in the scheme, but Goebbels was implacably opposed to any broadcasting from Germany over which he did not have ultimate control. Diana knew, however, that the right word from Hitler could change Goebbels’ mind and she was working to this end, while at the same time cementing other friendships that might prove useful. But although her friendship with Hitler was now a matter of record, ‘occasionally . . . we dined and watched a film or talked by the fire. We did not discuss the radio project,’ Diana wrote. ‘It was the sort of thing that bored him and was left to his ministers.’
³²

She did not get far with the radio station project in 1936, but one positive thing for her came out of the series of visits. Diana got on well with Magda Goebbels, and the two women spent a good deal of time together and were close enough for Magda to confide her unhappiness in her marriage. The women had something in common: Goebbels was a notorious womanizer and at one point the marriage almost ended in divorce over his affair with the beautiful Czechoslovakian film star Lida Baarova. On that occasion Magda appealed to Hitler asking for a divorce, but Hitler insisted the couple remain married and that Goebbels give up his lover. Press photographs of the apparently happily married couple with their six beautiful blond children projected too powerful an image of a perfect German family to be discarded. Furthermore, as Hitler had no wife, Magda occupied the position of ‘first lady’ in the Nazi administration. She complied on this occasion as on others, the chief reason, she said, being her children. In turn Diana told her about the problems she and Mosley had experienced in keeping their marriage ceremony secret from the British press. Here, Magda was able to help: she invited Diana to hold her marriage ceremony at her Berlin home. When this proposal was put to Hitler he agreed to ensure that no news of the ceremony would reach the German press, and furthermore that he would attend as guest of honour. Goebbels was less than enchanted by the arrangement, especially when he found that Mosley proposed Bill Allen as his witness. Allen was one of the directors of Air Time Ltd and Goebbels did not trust him (probably he was aware that Allen was an MI5 agent). He did not like or trust Mosley either, and quarrelled with Magda about the forthcoming wedding,
³³
but with Hitler’s sanction the plan went ahead

Diana and Mosley were married in the drawing room of the Goebbels’ apartment on 6 October 1936. In her autobiography Diana recalled that she wore a pale gold silk tunic dress.

Unity and I, standing at the window in an upstairs room, saw Hitler walking through the trees of the park-like garden . . . the leaves were turning yellow and there was bright sunshine. Behind him came an adjutant carrying a box and some flowers . . . The ceremony was short; the Registrar said a few words, we exchanged rings, signed our names and the deed was done. Hitler’s gift was a photograph in a silver frame with [the initials] A.H. and the German eagle.
³⁴

Apart from Hitler, Unity and their hosts, the only people present at the ceremony besides the bride and groom and the registrar were Mosley’s witnesses, Bill Allen and Captain Gordon-Canning, an officer in the 14th Hussars. The British consul had been advised of the marriage, for the sake of legality, but was asked not to publish information about the wedding, which he was not obliged to do since it was not performed under British jurisdiction. He was also invited to attend but declined owing to a previous engagement.
³⁵
The small party went straight from the ceremony to a wedding feast organized by Magda Goebbels, and there was no time for Mosley and Hitler to speak privately as Diana had hoped there would be. Afterwards they attended a meeting at the Sportsplatz where Hitler addressed a crowd of twenty thousand. Although Mosley spoke no German Diana thought it would be interesting for him to see Hitler’s technique. Hitler then left on a special train for Munich and the newly-weds went to their hotel, the Kaiserhof. It had been a long day and they were both tired. What should have been a romantic occasion was spoiled by a quarrel, ‘of which, try as I will, I cannot remember the reason,’ Diana wrote, ‘and we went to bed in dudgeon. Next day we flew home to England.’
³⁶

Apart from Unity, only David, Sydney and Tom were told of the marriage, under a strict vow of secrecy. Although David was not reconciled to Mosley, both the Redesdales were relieved that at least Diana was no longer living in sin and the rule that he must never be mentioned was relaxed. However, Sydney realized shortly afterwards that the world still thought Diana was living in sin, and that therefore she could still not allow Debo to visit Diana at Wootton. ‘The poor thing was quite distraught about it,’ Unity wrote to Diana, ‘and . . . did hope you would understand.’
³⁷

There was still no change in the relationship between Nancy, Diana and Unity. And the singular thing about this quarrel is that Nancy, the queen of all teasers, was deeply hurt by Diana’s continuation of the ‘non-speakers’ rule, and from this hurt grew an increasing bitterness. Perhaps she was not even aware of it herself, but it shows in waspish comments in her correspondence. During the summer she and Prod had taken Decca on holiday to Brittany. Decca enjoyed herself, especially as they treated her as a grown-up and took her to nightclubs, but it was traumatic for Nancy because Prod was in the middle of an emotional love affair, one of many but this one seemed more serious than the others. The girlfriend, Mary Sewell (née Lutyens, she was married for a short time to Unity and Decca’s ‘white slaver’), lived a few doors from Rutland Gate, and the Sewells and the Rodds used to meet regularly to play bridge together. Mary followed the Rodds to Brittany and stayed in the same hotel, causing an aura of emotional tension to pervade the holiday. The Rodd marriage, which had started off so well, was already a sham whose front was wholly maintained by Nancy. She might have accepted the infidelity, for she saw so much of it in the circles in which she moved, but Prod had also started to drink heavily, which made him unpleasant and aggressive. Also Nancy desperately wanted a child, and tried for years. It was altogether an unhappy period for her as the Rodds moved from their first married home, Rose Cottage, at Strand-on-the-Green, into a small Victorian house at 12 Blomfield Road in Maida Vale. The tiny garden backed on to the Grand Union Canal, which was ‘enchanting’ and the saving feature of the otherwise poky little house.