My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywhole circle. Unity's suicide at the outbreak of war had a clear, simple, tragic cause;she loved England, her home and her country, but had developed a great love ofGermany. War between these countries was to her the supreme disaster; she walkedinto the 'English Garden' in Munich and shot herself. The gauleiter of the area, whowas a friend, had her followed, suspecting she might do herself some injury; she waspicked up and hurried to hospital. German surgeons saved her life, but were unable toextract the bullet from her head. Hitler caused her to be sent home throughSwitzerland, but the English surgeons could do no more. She partly recovered, butwas never again the same person; nine years later, the bullet moved and she died.Hitler had solemnly introduced me to Unity Mitford at the luncheon he gave me inApril 1935, as he was unaware that we knew each other; in fact, I had first met her ather coming-out ball in London, given three years before by Diana. At Hitler'sluncheon she was a girl of twenty, young, ingenuous, full of enthusiasm, in a waystage-struck by the glamour and panoply of the national socialist movement and themass admiration of Hitler. It was quite untrue that she had any kind of a love affairwith him. The only woman we ever heard of in connection with Hitler in this periodwas Eva Braun, whom he finally married. He effected her introduction to Diana andUnity in a highly individual fashion by giving them places next to each other in hisreserved seats at the Nuremberg Parteitag.He invited them to the Olympic Games of 1936, held in Berlin; I might have been aparticipant but for an odd chance. The following year, 1937, I represented Britain forthe last time in international fencing as a member of the British team in the worldchampionship at Paris, having twice been runner-up in the British epée championshipsduring previous years. I did not become a candidate for the British team in theOlympic Games in the previous year for a quaint reason. It was decided that theBritish team in the traditional march past should not give the Olympic salute, whichhad been invented by the Greeks more than two thousand years before Hitler orMussolini were born, and consequently long before anyone thought of calling it thefascist salute. As the French and nearly every other team decided to give the salute, itseemed on the one hand invidious that I should refrain, and on the other that it wouldshow a lack of the team spirit appropriate to the occasion if I had been the onlymember of the British team to give it. So discretion became the better part ofsportsmanship.It was the habit of Hitler to convey to me his view of events through Diana. The lasttime was at Bayreuth a month before the outbreak of war, when he invited her to hisbox at the opera. She found him in a state of extreme depression. He said that hethought England would persist in its attitude over Danzig and this made warinevitable. The idea that he did not think England would fight was always a completeillusion. He regarded the coming war between England and Germany as the supremetragedy of history, but he could not abandon Germans placed under Polish rule by thetreaty of Versailles. European disaster of every kind would ensue. He added that Iwould almost certainly be assassinated, as Jaures had been in France when war camein 1914. He had always a strong historic sense and my position of political oppositionto the war seemed to him similar to that of the French statesman.The occasion I remember best in these sporadic discussions of the years when Hitlergave me his views through Diana was at an earlier point in 1937. I had published in308 of 424