Intelligence

Diana Mosley taught children Nazi salute, new MI5 files reveal

By Michael Evans
Files released by the National Archives reveal odd traitors and spies



DIANA MOSLEY, who died in August this year aged 93, was a “most dangerous character” who instructed her children how to do “Heil Hitler” salutes, according to MI5, which kept a file on her in the build-up to the Second World War.
Many of Lady Mosley’s most outrageous remarks in support of her “friend” Hitler were revealed secretly to MI5 by her governess, who faithfully relayed conversations in the family home to her security service handlers. However, it was Lady Mosley’s former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, who finally persuaded the authorities that she needed to be locked away, writing a character-assassination letter to MI5. She was detained in Holloway prison for much of the war.

Previously secret information about Lady Mosley, who was married to Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the “blackshirt” Fascists in Britain more than 70 years ago, were revealed yesterday among nearly 200 MI5 files declassified and released by the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew, Surrey.

The description of her as a dangerous woman was provided by Lord Moyne, the father of Bryan Guinness of the brewery family, to whom Lady Mosley was previously married.

In his letter he wrote: “When the situation was most perilous in Belgium, Lady Mosley said triumphantly to the governess that the British Army was now in a wedge and could not possibly be extricated. She added that it was perfectly obvious that the British Army would be caught in a pincer movement and made no secret of her delight in what was happening.”

Lady Mosley, one of the notorious and glamorous Mitford sisters, had other epithets: newspapers referred to her as a “dumb blonde”, and one MI5 file said she was “someone of no great brains”. But she was widely thought of as the most beautiful woman of her day, more lovely than Botticelli’s Venus, as she was once described. Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University and now also official historian of MI5, said yesterday that she was a classic example of “a celebrity behaving badly”.

The governess told MI5 that Lady Mosley had once said: “We are revolutionaries and we would kill.” She always referred to her new husband, Sir Oswald, as “the leader”, but when she was in Holloway trying to gain her release, her solicitor, Oswald Hickson, rebuked her for using such a term.

“You must say my husband,” he said. Their conversation was being bugged by MI5. At one point Mr Hickson “jokingly remarked that when Mosley was Queen of England, there would be a number of people whom she would like to imprison”. She agreed.

Before her detention, MI5 had been monitoring her frequent trips to Germany — at least seven times in 1938 — where it was known that she was meeting Hitler. She had planned to take her two sons from her first marriage to meet Hitler but it was cancelled at the last moment because of the imminence of war. Her governess told MI5: “The children would have known how to greet the Führer, for they had been taught to give the Nazi salute and to say ‘Heil Hitler ’.”

It was “our man in Berlin” (MI6 station chief) who in April 1937 tipped off MI5 that “Mrs Bryan Guinness” had married Sir Oswald Mosley “in the presence of Hitler”.

She and Sir Oswald were released in November 1943.

November 13, 2003 at 11:37 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home