Authors: Jim Wilson
They had indeed. It was the bloody rally at Olympia that was the catalyst for the 1936 Public Order Act which banned the wearing of uniforms during political rallies and marches, and required police consent to be obtained for any political marches to take place. Nevertheless, the
Daily Mail
’s Ward Price, who regarded Mosley as a more eloquent and persuasive speaker than Hitler, Mussolini or Goebbels, chose to put a different gloss on the rally in the next day’s paper.
If the Blackshirt movement had any need of justification, the Red Hooligans who savagely and systematically tried to wreck Sir Oswald Mosley’s huge and magnificently successful meeting at Olympia last night would have supplied it. They got what they deserved. Olympia has been the scene of many assemblies and many great fights (the sporting version) but never had it offered the spectacle of so many fights mixed up with a meeting.
13
That was one view, but it was not the conclusion most shared, and it led to the BUF largely being publicly discredited.
The anti-fascist disruption of the Olympia rally was debated in the House of Commons and there was surprising support for the BUF among some Conservative MPs.
14
Michael Beaumont, Conservative member for Aylesbury, said of the British Fascists: ‘a lot were respectable, reasonable and intelligent people’. Another Conservative, H.K. Hayles, member for Hanley, said the BUF contained ‘some of the most cultured members of our society’. But MI5 took a more proportionate view. Their report to the Home Office in October 1934 said:
It is becoming increasingly clear that at Olympia Mosley suffered a check which is likely to prove decisive. He suffered it, not at the hands of the Communists who staged the provocations and now claim the victory, but at the hands of Conservative MPs, the Conservative press and all those organs of public opinion which made him abandon the policy of using his ‘Defence Force’ to overwhelm interrupters.
15
The riot at Olympia finished Rothermere’s brief support for the Blackshirts, but opposition to the fascists became even stronger following an event in Germany two weeks later. On 30 June 1934 the brutal violence that came to be known as The Night of the Long Knives marked out the true terror of National Socialism. Hitler’s colleague and long-time supporter Ernst Röhm, together with some seventy-seven of his SA followers, were butchered in the most chilling circumstances. It became clear that Hitler was personally implicated. When the full horror of what had happened at Hotel Hanslbauer at Wiessee dawned, it was clear that fascism was not just a political campaign for economic reform and national re-dedication; it was an organisation capable of orchestrating terror on a horrific scale. In Britain, Mosley and the BUF never really recovered from the backlash.
Rothermere began to face pressure from his Jewish advertisers over the
Daily Mail
’s pro-Blackshirt campaign. Important businesses were threatening to withdraw their support from his papers which would have represented a serious commercial blow to him. He wrote to Mosley listing his reasons for cutting off his relationship with the BUF: he deplored the term fascist; he feared the growing anti-Semitism of the movement; he disliked the policy of a corporate state run by officials and industrialists in place of Parliament; and he now believed a dictatorship would not work in Britain.
16
But his disillusion with Mosley and the Blackshirts did not curtail his pursuit of closer relations with Hitler.
In August 1934 he received an intriguing letter from Princess Stephanie, designed to draw him deeper into an ever-closer relationship with Hitler:
I have seen both your friends and have much of interest to tell you … Please let me impress upon you that you ought to see H now. I know he already has some doubts as to your sincerity. I hope you have not forgotten that you assured him in your last letter you would see him in the latter part of August … He intends to discuss his present and future plans with you, and I think it is, for the first time, more in your interests than his, for you to see him.
17
In the way she phrased the letter, and baited the hook, it seems Stephanie was well aware of Rothermere’s thinking following the Olympia riot and the horrifying events in Germany. The message she conveyed seemed more concerned with fulfilling Hitler’s interests than serving Rothermere’s. It disclosed an intoxicating mix of double-dealing, and in her increasingly intimate relationship with Hitler’s right-hand man, Fritz Wiedemann, sexual attraction was now added to the excitement of political intrigue. In London the British secret service, at the request of the Foreign Office, asked the Home Office to renew the warrant which allowed them to intercept and read the princess’ correspondence. In January 1935 the Foreign Office expressed further concerns over her activities, asking the Home Secretary to restrict her visits to the UK. Documents in her MI5 file indicate that the Home Office foresaw ‘considerable difficulties with taking such a move because of the milieu in which the princess moved in this country’.
18
In other words, the intelligence services knew that she had powerful friends in the Establishment who could exercise influence in her favour.
A document in her MI5 file, prominently marked ‘most secret’, states that she first came to the notice of British intelligence as a visitor to the country in 1928, ‘exercising considerable influence on Lord Rothermere’.
19
One of those instrumental in introducing her to Rothermere, the files note, was an individual named Andre Rostin, ‘not of good repute and strongly suspected of being a German secret agent’. It may well have been Rostin who first advised Princess Stephanie to find a way of getting close to Rothermere, suggesting that the perfect conduit would be her friendship with my Great-Aunt Annabel. In her son’s biography of her, he makes it clear that it was through Annabel Kruse that she met the press baron. But neither Prince Franz Hohenlohe nor Stephanie herself would have wanted to credit a known German agent as having any hand, however minor, in her subsequent alliance with the newspaper proprietor. Her MI5 files go on to record that British agents were conscious of her wooing wealthy and influential members of the British aristocracy. In 1933/34, the file states, she became acquainted with Lady Oxford, Lady Cunard and Lady Snowden, with whom she had formed ‘a most intimate friendship’. Through introductions by these individuals, the file records, she had ‘wormed her way into society circles in London’.
A personal invitation to the princess from the Führer to attend the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally arrived in London in 1935. It was the occasion on which Hitler announced the notorious Nuremberg Laws, which launched legislation restricting the basic human rights of German Jews; laws that led inevitably to the concentration camps and the gas chambers. Others who received personal invitations to the huge Nazi jamboree included Lady Ethel Snowden, wife of Philip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929, and an intimate friend of Stephanie. Lady Snowden was also a writer and journalist who had frequently contributed articles for the
Daily Mail
at Rothermere’s request.
Among other British supporters at the rally worshipping the ceremony, the passion with which the crowd was being whipped into a frenzy and hanging upon every word the Führer uttered, was Unity Mitford. Unity was jealous of Hitler’s fondness for Princess Stephanie, and of the compliments he paid her. She had complained loudly to him about his relationship with the princess and she was said to have told Hitler: ‘Here you are, an anti-Semite, and yet you have a Jewish woman, Princess Hohenlohe, around you all the time.’ Hitler apparently made no response. It was an indication of what was now widely suspected across Europe: that the princess was working for German intelligence and supplying the Nazis with important information and influential contacts in Britain. The link the princess provided to Rothermere, his newspapers and to right-wing elements in British society was a propaganda tool Hitler greatly valued. Unity hated Stephanie. She referred to her as a ‘
rusée
’, a wily manipulator; she feared the influence Stephanie was exerting on Hitler, and was furious when she learnt that the Reich Chancellor had presented the princess with a large, signed photograph of himself. It was a memento Stephanie treasured and she kept it in pride of place on her desk at her London flat, as British intelligence noted in her MI5 file. The portrait was personally signed by Hitler and was dedicated ‘To my dear Princess’.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and close friend, believed Unity was in love with Hitler. She was often included in the Führer’s party when he travelled, and she referred to him in correspondence as ‘the greatest man of all time’. Unity herself, though, was not trusted by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler; in fact, he could not stand her. But he had no such distrust of Stephanie, despite those rumours of her Jewish background. By 1937 Unity was under active surveillance by the SS. She was also being closely watched by British intelligence who described her as ‘more Nazi than the Nazis’. Significantly, Stephanie was never placed under similar surveillance by the SS. Wilhelm Brückner, one of Hitler’s adjutants, so disliked the close relationship between Hitler and Unity that on one occasion he broached the subject directly with his boss: ‘What if she’s an agent of the British secret service, cleverly placed right under our noses?’ he asked. ‘We should be more cautious.’ The suggestion was rejected in Hitler’s close circle, but no such suspicions seem ever to have been voiced about Hitler’s other admirer, Stephanie, until later. Indeed, she received VIP invitations on the Führer’s instructions to the huge annual rallies of the Nazi Party in 1936, 1937 and 1938.
Stephanie was deeply impressed by the hypnotic and quasi-religious character of these spectacular events. Later in life she described the ‘tribal excitement of Nuremberg … a shrine of Nazidom … an orgy of dedication’ to the Nazi creed.
1
Lady Snowden accompanied her again in 1937, and that year Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘Lady Snowden writes an enthusiastic article on Nuremberg. A woman with guts. In London they don’t understand that.’ In 1938 Stephanie was on the dais for the Reich Party Congress of Greater Germany. She was distinctly unhappy at having to share the privileged seating area set aside for Hitler’s personal guests with Unity Mitford and Unity’s parents Lord and Lady Redesdale. There was an intense jealousy growing between them, each of them angling for the Führer’s favours. Much to Stephanie’s annoyance, it was she who had been instrumental in enabling Unity to meet Hitler in the first place. Back in 1935 she had told Unity that Hitler frequently patronised the Osteria Bavaria, his favourite Munich restaurant. It was there that Unity first met him. Determined to get herself noticed and introduced to him, Unity did so by the simple expedient of sitting quietly at a table by the door, day after day, wearing her British Blackshirt uniform and waiting for Hitler to spot her when he walked in. After that first meeting she rapidly became part of the Osteria Bavaria circle, and later of Hitler’s close court. Hitler was well aware of the propaganda value of having a faithful follower drawn from the ranks of the British aristocracy. Stephanie blamed herself for initiating the relationship, and it made the jealousy she felt for Unity all the more bitter. Two of the Mitford girls, Unity and Diana, in private called Hitler ‘Sweet Uncle Wolf’. For his part, the Führer was totally fascinated by them.
The exchange of letters between Rothermere and Hitler continued throughout 1935. The press baron made sure that when it was appropriate, Hitler’s views were communicated to government ministers and even, on some occasions, to the king. In a long letter in May 1935, Hitler wrote:
An Anglo-German understanding would form in Europe a force for peace and reason of 120 million people of the highest type. The historically unique colonial ability and sea-power of England would be united to one of the greatest soldier-races of the world. Were this understanding extended by the joining up of the American nation, then it would indeed be hard to see who in the world could disturb peace without wilfully and consciously neglecting the interests of the white race. There is in Germany a fine saying: that the Gods love and bless him who seems to demand the impossible.
2
Hitler set his sights high, but while he was writing in this reasonable and apparently peaceful vein to the owner of the
Daily Mail
, and signing his letter ‘with sincere friendship’, he was simultaneously launching his first steps towards the Final Solution – the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the twentieth century. He was enacting the Nuremberg Laws that would take away the citizenship of Jews, prohibit marriage between Jews and Aryans, and exclude Jews from leading professions, depriving them of their livelihoods. From burning thousands of books by Jewish authors, he was in the process of making the chilling leap to incinerating human beings in their millions.
The invasion of Abyssinia by Italian troops in October 1935 caused a storm of protest in England. The Italian dictator, Mussolini, was intent on seizing the whole of that vast country and turning it into an Italian colony. Rothermere was anxious to exert pressure to stop the conflict, or at the very least to prevent it spreading. He wanted to find out Hitler’s views so he could write with authority about Germany’s stance in his newspapers and pass on first-hand information to the British government. He asked Stephanie, once again, to be his go-between. Initially Hitler sent word, via the princess, that he had no time to answer detailed questions on the matter. He was possibly stalling for time because he was playing a devious hand in the conflict. On the one hand, Hitler was seeking closer relations with Mussolini and supplying him with coal and steel. On the other, he was secretly prolonging the war by supplying war materials to the Abyssinians, as a means of further increasing Mussolini’s dependence on him. When Hitler did respond to Rothermere, in December, it was to emphasise his belief that a time would come when England and Germany would be the solid pillars in a worried and unstable world: