Secrets of Hitler's friend Diana Mosley: new biography

[emad]

A new biography of the fascist Englishwoman Diana Mosely, who died earier this year, claims she found Hitler's responsibility for the Holocaust hard to believe: "The man I knew could not have done that. Perhaps he went a little mad'."

From BBC News Online:
<snip>

The wife of the UK's leading fascist and a staunch friend of Hitler, Diana Mosley confided her secrets on condition they would not be aired in her lifetime. Now, following her death in August, her extraordinary life has been laid bare. Published in 1977, Diana Mosley's autobiography presents a highly selective account of a highly controversial life. There was much she wanted to hide. It took the veteran journalist Anne de Courcy to peel off the layers of concealment in which this British aristocrat had enveloped her life. Speaking to BBC News Online, de Courcy, who became her official biographer, reveals an enlightening exchange between the two women.

"One day when I was talking to her, I noticed she looked a tiny bit uneasy," de Courcy says. "I found myself saying, 'Diana, would you rather this was not published in your lifetime?' And with an air of great relief, 'Oh, I really would, that would make me much happier.' From then on she talked much more freely." This understanding gave de Courcy exclusive access to Diana's correspondence as well as her memories, shining light on her associations with the likes of Evelyn Waugh and casting a glittering party veneer over the ominous gloom of the 1930s. Mosley's death in August finally lifted this self-imposed embargo and de Courcy's book hits the shops this month. "What I hoped was to create a really intimate, personal portrait of this woman and her life, this woman who had known this monster, Hitler, so extremely well. To explain how, in spite of everything, how she became such a friend of his, and how she maintained this all her life," says de Courcy.

Readers are treated to hitherto unpublished photographs of Diana among top Nazi brass, from her attendance of the first Nuremburg rally ("I can't possibly do without lipstick") to her marriage to Mosley in Berlin - at Joseph Goebbels' residence - in October 1936. Hitler himself was one of the guests. His wedding gift: a framed photo of himself. Diana Mosley was, of course, no ordinary errant Englishwoman. One of the famed Mitford sisters, she married Bryan Guinness, poet and heir to the brewing fortune, in 1929, aged 18. Four years later, as the nation foundered in the midst of the Great Depression, she fell in love with Oswald Mosley, later the founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), for whom she left her husband.

It was on Mosley's behalf that she began travelling to Germany. Befriending Hitler, Goebbels and other members of the Nazi inner sanctum, Diana worked to help establish a BUF radio station in Germany, before war was declared in 1939. Both she and Mosley were then imprisoned - Diana in Holloway - for the rest of the war, after which they moved to France for the duration of their lives. De Courcy credits much of fascism's seductiveness for Diana with that of her paramour. Mosley was a hesitant entry into political life, and at first opposed thuggery for political ends. She describes him as being drawn from the numbers of parliamentary democracy to the rule of one: "Originally he began as an independent conservative, then he crossed the floor of the house to the Labour Party," says de Courcy. "He was a young man in a hurry. When the Labour Party wouldn't put his Mosley Memorandum through, he left it and founded the New Party, which was founded as something fairly left-wing, which was how he managed to draw a lot of his fellow Socialists over to him." He gradually veered more and more towards fascism, first on the Italian model, with a uniformed force to quell unrest at meetings, and thence to correspondence with Nazi high command, German money flowing into BUF coffers, and numerous trips to Germany itself. So did Diana ever condemn Hitler's atrocities? "I pressed her and pressed her, and said, Hitler did do these terrible things, he brought about the Holocaust. Her reply was that the Holocaust was murder, all murder is wicked. She was categorical about that. She also said, 'The man I knew could not have done that. Perhaps he went a little mad'."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3218923.stm

[number six]

1. There were a hell of a lot of anglo aristos

that thought Hitler was just the bees knees. Stupidity knows no borders.

[pansypoo53219]

2. not to forget

edward the prince of wales.
who gave up the crown because he was a nazi,NOT for the woman he loved.

[number six]

3. oh, if the public knew half the stuff we know about him...

I despise the monarchy, but thank god Edward VIII had a reasonable brother to replace him. He'd have sold us to Hitler within about five minutes of his coronation, him and his despicable-social whore-fascist wife.

[emad]

4. She was a niece of Harry S Truman's wife and successfully sued

along with her husband all those who tried that assinine slur on them. The origin of the slander was subsequently found to have been generated by the late Queen Mother and Archbishop Cosmo Lang and bankrolled by Goering, with input from Pius XII. This is a matter of historical record, verified by authernticated documents. Some of the secret war work that Wallis undertook for the US is still classified under the aegis of US State Secrets constraints, which attest to the subsequent vilification she and her husband underwent as a direct result of her work.

Harry S Truman himself was a witness in Supreme Court lawsuits and testified that the same Goering supporters who tried to assassinate Wallis and David in Spain later tried to daub them with the fascism/Nazi crap. The aim of the murder attempt was to recover documents that they had proving money laundering between the Vatican and Nazis who relocated to South America, as well as collusion between various European royal families and Hitler.

The records of those lawsuit hearings are still available via the Harry S Truman Memorial Library and Archive. The family hold the actual court papers.

The details of the massive damages won by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in these hearings are also a matter of historical record. Some are accessible via authorised request from the UK's Public Records Office, others are personally held by the Duke and Duchess's legatee. A small number are under a MOD D Notice which effectively gags them, to protect the duplicity of the late Queen Mother and the damages she had to pay out for repeating the same slanders.

Subsequent UK and US Supreme Court rulings have all upheld the above lawsuits and found that an orchestrated campaign of libel and slander by members of Opus Dei from the 1960s onwards was responsible for later attacks on Wallis's family members, who along with Truman family members keep a huge archive of the original papers.

As a matter of record, Edward VIII abdicated for personal as well as matrimonial reasons. Anyone who actually knew him well - for instance Winston Churchill - attested to the sustained republican targeting that resulted in him making a choice for sanity and democracy. His legatee is due to publish all the classified material on this business some time early next year. It slates UK politicians such as premiers Baldwin and Chamberlain and implicates various US republicans with Cathoilc conncections.

[number six]

5. Good case, hadn't heard half of that. I must investigate further

However, I've also seen pretty good evidence for the fascist angle, such as the trip to Germany and meeting various nazis and fascist sympathizers.

[emad]

6. Wallis got a medal from the US president for the work she did

in outing European money launderers working for Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Much of the historical documents relating to that are under secrecy curfews, as a result of requests from her family in the US as well as in the UK, who were also systematically targeted by Opus Dei members looking for links to the trail of the Goering money laundering documents.

The family has deliberately kept a low profile about related subsequent cold war atrocities - covered up by Bush 1 when he was CIA director - that implicated various US families - including the fascist Sharp family and Jackie Kennedy's sister Caroline Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwill. Senator Teddy Kennedy, for instance, has a lot to be thankful for; that low profile was what sustained him through his own nightmare of Mary Jo Kopechne's death at Martha's Vineyard when his own political career hung by a thread.

[number six]

7. Interesting, you're clearly a mine of information

on the subject. Best to agree to differ on the fascist / not fascist argument. I get the feeling it's a fairly major fault-line.

[emad]

9. The real fault line lies on the 'axis of evil' of George H Bush

and his defence of Prescot Bush, his father, who was involved in orchestrating the fascism smear on Wallis, as is evident in the court testimony of Harry S Truman, to protect his felonious ass.

That testimony, as well as copius written evidence from Winston Churchill, and Wallis's medal citation, will be avaulable on-line in a pre-publication website prior to the launch of the official biography of Wallis, written by her family members, early next year.

Some of the material was classified for both UK and US security considerations as being too damaging to the late Queen Mother as well as key republican families in the US, such as the Shsrps. Much of this concerns the Goering/Pius XII link and the Queen Mother's involvement with fascist organisations that laundered money to keep Nazi war criminals alive in South America. There were repeated attempts by the Vatican to destroy many such documents and countless assasination attempts of Wallis herself and her family members, from the 1960s onwards, who testified in court against the P2 Lodge and Opus Dei members.

The most recent fascism smears against Wallis have come from (surpirse!) Opus Dei members who had been involved with the Queen Mother's entourage and have now panicked after her death, knowing that much classified material can no longer be gagged. So much spin went into sanitising her image as a cute and cuddly 'nation's grandmother' because the reality was so disgusting, vicious and downright criminal, it was thought it would bring down the rest of the so-called House of Windsor and make the Tory Party unelectable for the next hundred years. They should have listened to their only voice of sanity, Winston Churchill, who warned that the further a lie was lived, the worse it would become not for the few but for the many.

[Bridget Burke]

8. This is all very interesting.

Is any of this information available online? At all?