No One Betrays You Like Your Sister

It wasn’t the only involvement by a Mitford sister with one of the monsters of the age. Around the same time, another Mitford, Unity, spent a fateful year abroad in Germany, managing to charm her way into a personal friendship with Adolf Hitler himself, sort of a pet English fangirl with strikingly Aryan looks and the middle name “Valkyrie.” And often, Diana was right there with her. The pair stayed with Joseph Goebbels during the 1936 Olympics and were sent off in style to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth in a Mercedes courtesy Hitler. The Third Reich was an obvious ally for the BUF to cultivate, and Diana spent a great deal of time lobbying German officials in a scheme to get a radio license that would allow the BUF to operate a station broadcasting from Germany into the United Kingdom, which was perhaps less about propaganda than the pure money-making opportunity to fund the party’s activities.

When Mosley and Diana decided to marry—after his wife died unexpectedly—the Goebbels helpfully provided their parlor for the ceremony. Hitler attended.

Diana stuck with Mosley after the 1934 Olympia rally, when Blackshirts dragged protestors out of the crowd and beat them; she married him two days after the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, an attempted Blackshirt march through the heavily Jewish East End of London, thwarted by locals who rioted to keep the fascists out. Mosley and the Blackshirts withdrew at the police’s request, but the next week a group Blackshirts went on an East End rampage, attacking Jews.

Diana’s connection with Mosley drew many of the Mitfords into his orbit; only her sister Jessica was totally, completely repulsed—in fact, to the point that it probably helped push her leftward, and she ran off with a Communist cousin who’d fought in Spain and had been one of the protestors at Olympia. (She ended up in the United States where she wrote the highly respected The American Way of Death, an exposé of the funeral industry.) Nancy had at one point subscribed to The Blackshirt and been at Olympia alongside Diana. But she’d already begun to turn on her sister with the 1935 publication of Wigs on the Green, a satire of the BUF that got her disinvited from the Mosley home for the next several years. She went to Spain, helping Republican refugees, which helped galvanize her further against the Nazis.

On May 23, 1940, Mosley was arrested under Rule 18B of the Emergency War Powers Act, which gave the government sweeping powers to arrest and hold anyone indefinitely, without a trial. Afterward, it was perhaps a matter of time for Diana. Unity wasn’t imprisoned, because when Britain declared war on Germany, she shot herself in the head, and while she didn’t die, she was never the same after the traumatic brain injury. But the fact that Unity had been so publicly, revoltingly devoted to Hitler probably didn’t help Diana’s cause. Then there was the testimony of her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, who’d formerly adored her and now had her Guinness son’s governess watching for any signs of Nazi sympathies: “It has been on my conscience for some time,” Laura Thompson quotes his letter to the Chairman of the Defense Security Executive in her book The Six, “to make sure that the authorities concerned are aware of the extremely dangerous character of my former daughter-in-law, now Lady Mosley.”

Nancy didn’t know about the attempts to wrangle a radio license, according to Mary Lovell in her book The Sisters, but she knew that her sister had been traveling to Germany frequently. And she, too, informed: “I advised him to examine her passport to see how often she went. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behavior but in such times I think it one’s duty,” she wrote to a confidant.

There are a number of ways to read the relationships between the various Mitfords and their respective ideologies. Laura Thompson, in The Six, goes into great detail about the miserable conditions in Holloway Prison—where Diana would spend more than three years—and her dignity in the face of awful circumstances. Jessica is portrayed as a bit of a bolshie brat, which seems unfair considering that, again, her family was full of people who fully went Nazi. I personally cannot discuss Diana without screaming “HITLER WAS AT HER WEDDING!” at the top of my lungs. Presumably, Nancy did not regret betraying her sister as the bombs rained down on London, night after night, at the height of the Blitz. It’s that multiplicity of readings that has attracted the fascination of so many over the years—and a testament to the seductiveness of Diana that so many have been willing to make the excuses for her that Nancy didn’t in 1940.

In fact, her relationship with Nancy thawed out over the course of her time behind bars. Nancy eventually began visiting, and once the authorities let Diana’s children make occasional visits, they sometimes stayed overnight with their aunt. After the war, she was released; Mosley tried periodically to revive his political fortunes, but the period where British aristocrats could speculate that perhaps the United Kingdom might make common cause with Hitler was long gone. They settled in France, where Nancy already lived; the two sisters remained close to the end of Nancy’s life. When she got sick, Diana drove from Orsay to Versailles for visits constantly—despite the carping of Mosley, who wanted her to himself. (Shocker.)

Diana didn’t find out Nancy had testified against her until after Nancy died. In 1989, she went on Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio interview program structured around what records the guests would choose to be stranded with. Asked about Hitler, she admitted forthrightly: “I admired him very much.”

Who knows you better than your sister?