During one of our periodic visits to Paris M. had given me a pretty and elegant Voisin car. I went back when it was ready, and accompanied by a driver from the Voisin works I set out for Munich. Although it was March there was a heavy fall of snow in the Black Forest and we got stuck fast in a drift of soft new snow. The thought of spending the night in the car with the poor old chauffeur who was grumbling away under his breath was almost more than I could bear. After a bad quarter of an hour, when the sun had already set and light was fast fading I saw, quite a long way off across the snow, a peasant with a team of horses. I got out and shouted to him as loudly as I could. By great good luck he heard; he turned towards us and his horses pulled us out of the drift and set us on the road once more.
Country men and sailors will always help the traveller in distress; townsmen more often pass by on the other side. They dread becoming involved. There is a terrible description in one of Montherlant’s diaries: feeling deathly ill he was obliged to lie down on the pavement of a busy Paris street. Nobody offered to help. Probably they imagined he was just another drunk.
The rest of our journey was without adventure, and when we got to Munich I sent the old Frenchman back to Paris. Soon after my arrival Hitler came to the Osteria and we lunched with him.
During the next four years I saw him fairly often, though not nearly as often as Unity did. Since she is no longer here to tell what he was like in private life I will do my best to describe the man I knew. It is only what the French call ‘la petite histoire’; but even in small matters the truth is sometimes interesting.
Hitler, at this time aged forty-five, was about 5 feet 9 inches in height and neither fat nor thin. His eyes were dark blue, his skin fair and his brown hair exceptionally fine; it was neatly brushed; I never saw him with a lock of hair over his forehead. If he was out of doors in the sun and wind all day, as he was for example the last day of the Parteitag every year, he quickly got sunburnt, but it did not last for his skin was pale. His hands were white and well-shaped. He was extremely neat and clean looking, so much so that beside him nearly everyone looked coarse. His teeth had been mended with gold, as one saw when he laughed. At the Osteria he was generally in civilian clothes, he wore a grey suit and a white shirt and a rather furry soft hat which he called ‘mein Schako’. His most unusual feature was the forehead. He had a high forehead which almost jutted forward above the eyes. I have seen this on one or two other people; generally they have been musicians. At this little bistro he was in relaxed mood; if he had not been so he would have lunched at his flat. Besides the adjutant, usually Brückner or Schaub, there were often a few old friends, mostly men but also some women; Frau Troost, wife of the architect, was there occasionally. Frequently Hoffman the photographer and Herr Werlin of Mercedes Benz were with him. We rather dreaded the conversation turning to motor-cars, for the Führer took a deep interest in engines and was apparently expertly knowledgeable on the subject, very boring to us. However like most politicians he enjoyed talking politics, and often Reichspressechef Dietrich would give him a sheet of paper with a résumé of the news, which set him off on more interesting themes. One of his abiding interests was architecture. Without ever having visited Paris, for instance, he knew its beauties and where they stood in relation to one another. Albert Speer was quite often at Hitler’s table; at that time a young architect he has grown into an old writer. On the occasions when I saw him he gave a wonderful imitation of being fascinated by his host; or perhaps he really was fascinated.
I never heard Hitler ‘rant’ and almost never heard the famous monologue, though I should have been interested to listen to it. In my experience he liked conversation. In certain moods he could be very funny; he did imitations of marvellous drollery which showed how acutely observant he was.
Although I often saw him at luncheon and dinner and in the afternoon when Germans drink coffee, I never once saw him eat a cake of any sort, let alone a cream cake. His food was dismal. He was a vegetarian, he ate eggs and mayonnaise and vegetables and pasta, and compote of fruit, or raw grated apple, and he drank Fachingerwasser. At the Osteria they knew exactly what he liked, he had been there for years past.
His guests ordered whatever they pleased. In his flat, if one was invited, delicious food was sent along from Walterspiel, one of the world’s greatest restaurants, but this was for the guests: his own menu did not vary.
He was extremely polite to women; he bowed and kissed hands as is the custom in Germany and France, and he never sat down until they did. Such trivialities would not be worth recording were it not for the acres of print about Hitler in which his rudeness and bad manners to everyone are emphasized. I have read books by dons as well as by sensation-seeking journalists in which it is asserted that he had no idea how to behave in company, or that he always hogged the conversation so that nobody but he could say a single word, or that he had no sense of humour, or that he guzzled cream cakes. Novelists have now taken up the theme, and possibly—just possibly—it may be worth while to set down the truth about these little things in so far as I know it from my own observation.
Unity decided to come back to Paris with me and we took it in turns to drive the Voisin. Bryan was at the rue de Poitiers flat with Nanny and the boys, and I wanted to be there for Jonathan’s fifth birthday.
While we were in Paris Unity and I visited Brancusi in his studio, of which there is now a model in the Musée de l’Art Moderne. We were taken there by Marie-Laure de Noailles with whom we had been lunching at the place des États Unis. Brancusi was a beautiful god-like old man with a flowing beard. He showed us his sculptures; Unity was entranced and knew at once what they represented. She went from one to another, naming them. ‘Mai oui, c’est ça, c’est exactement ça,’ said Brancusi. Many of the marvels we saw that day I admired again not long ago in New York. Brancusi’s Muse endormie is an object of veneration to me.
I was still in Paris with the children and Unity had gone back to Germany when M. went to Munich to see Hitler for the first time in April 1935. It was a private visit and he was received at the flat in Prinzregentenplatz. After their talk they went into the drawing-room where a number of people were gathered before luncheon. Hitler had invited three ladies to meet M., all of them with English connections: the Duchess of Brunswick, only daughter of the Kaiser and a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Frau Winifred Wagner, the English-born daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, and Unity. He hoped thus to give Unity a great surprise, the thrill of meeting M., but of course they knew one another already. This was the first time she had been formally invited, and not just asked to join Hitler at the Osteria. She asked him afterwards what he thought of M. and he replied: ‘Ein ganzer Kerl!’
It is sometimes suggested that there was something deeply wrong, in 1935, in having wished to lunch and dine and talk with Hitler. The war and its attendant horrors were in the far future, but there are those who say: ‘Ah, but Roehm had been shot in 1934. Surely that in itself was a reason for avoiding him?’ Hitler came to power when his party polled more votes than any other; nevertheless he was a revolutionary who emerged from a violent society. From the time when the NSDAP was started again after his release from Fortress Landsberg, early in 1925, until he became chancellor almost eight years later, one of his followers was killed on average every nine days, in fights with the red front. There were six million unemployed. In 1932 a conservative M.P.6 wrote in his diary: ‘Europe is on the brink of starvation and bankruptcy.’
In 1934, seventeen months after Hitler took office, unemployment was dwindling and order had been restored. This did not suit everyone. The head of the Sturmabteilung, Ernst Roehm, was a professional revolutionary who looked with distaste upon the potentially stable country which was taking shape. He had no wish to see his hundreds of thousands of S.A. men reduced to performing boring tasks of reconstruction. He hoped to stir up the nether world. Hitler, faced with threatened civil war, had Roehm and his co-plotters shot. His prompt and violent way of dealing with
a situation as dangerous for Germany as for himself was rightly condemned in the law-abiding democracies, where politicians in modern times had not been faced with any such dilemmas. Despite the circumstances prevailing in Germany, Roehm should have had a fair trial.
Winston Churchill wrote soon afterwards:7 ‘It is not possible to form a just judgment of a public figure who has attained the enormous dimensions of Adolf Hitler until his life-work as a whole is before us… History is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim and even frightful methods.’ He went on: ‘… he has succeeded in restoring Germany to the most powerful position in Europe’ and ‘It is certainly not strange that everyone should want to know “the truth about Hitler”.’
Churchill wrote these words at the time I first made the acquaintance of the extraordinary individual whom he thus described.
Lloyd George went to Germany to meet Hitler in 1936. Two years previously he had said to Frances Stevenson8 that he considered him ‘a very great man’. The visit has been described by A. J. Sylvester9 and Thomas Jones,10 who wrote: ‘Hitler was forty-six, Ll G was seventy-three, alike only in their perfect grooming and the brilliance of their blue eyes, these two actors exchanged courtesies.’ Hitler gave his guest a signed photograph, and Lloyd George said ‘how honoured he was to receive the gift from the greatest living German.’ Back in England, Lloyd George wrote:11 ‘He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality… The old trust him. The young idolize him.’
All this by no means implies that Lloyd George approved of everything in Germany. He applauded Hitler’s economic measures, the way he had dealt with unemployment, his land reclamation, but he surely condemned the concentration camps which still held men in prison without trial. Lloyd George himself, in the early years of the century, had denounced in many a fiery speech the concentration camps set up by the British in South Africa. Four thousand Boer soldiers were killed in battle, and more than twice that number of Boer women and children died in the camps. Nor did he approve of Hitler’s attack on the Jews. ‘We put up with them in our country,’ he said to Sylvester, and some years previously he had this to say of anti-Semitism: ‘Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason.’
Many years after the time I am describing, millions died as a result of orders given by Hitler. In his book My Life, M. writes ‘How did this man come to be responsible for one of most execrable crimes in all history? For to kill prisoners in cold blood, whether Jew, Gentile or any other human being, is a vile crime… Hitler must, in the end, bear responsibility for it.’
No one who has been a prisoner can fail to imagine in the very bones the horror of it. To be killed in circumstances where you have no hope of defending yourself is frightful. Our century has been the most violent and bloody in history.
More millions died in Stalin’s camps, in peace time; and most of all were killed by Mao Tse-Tung in China. ‘Foreign specialists… estimate that since October 1949 at least twenty million Chinese have been “deprived of existence”. This does not include 23 million who are believed to be held in forced labour camps. In no previous war, revolution or holocaust from Tamerlane to Hitler, have so many people been destroyed in so short a period.’12
When I knew Hitler the Russian crimes were actuality, the Chinese holocaust was in the future and so was the German. Yet recently, long after the facts about Mao Tse-Tung were well known, respected politicians from the west visited him and found a delightful old poet. The fact that they went to see him shows that ‘morality’ has nothing to do with the case. When the Chairman died, the obituaries and messages from heads of state were fulsome.
Possibly the truth is that only men of compelling and unusual charms and gifts acquire the power to commit crimes of such magnitude. With regard to atrocities, Hitler was not unique.
13.
ACCIDENT
One hot evening in July 1935 I was dressing for dinner when M. telephoned. We had planned to motor down late to his house at Denham, but he found he could not leave till next day. I told him I would drive myself down and sleep in the country air.
I was dining with the Dunns where I sat next to Lord Beaverbrook. There was amusing talk, and it was after midnight when I got home. Everything was ready, I changed in a trice, put my spaniel in the motor and was off. At the junction where five roads meet between Belgrave Square and Cadogan Place an enormous Rolls Royce loomed up and crashed into me. I was only half unconscious, a strange sensation. A little crowd gathered and two policemen dragged me out of the battered car and laid me on the pavement; one of them held my head in his lap. Voices faded, and then came back, and faded again. I half opened my eyes. Two women went by, they were taking their dog to a lamp-post. ‘Don’t look, it’s too horrible,’ I heard one of them say. This struck me as comic; I was an ‘accident’, too horrible to look at, drenched in blood.
‘My dog,’ I said to the policeman. ‘Please take him home. He’s very nervous.’
‘All right, all right,’ said the policeman soothingly. After a while an ambulance drove up and they lifted me in. I was unconscious during the drive, which was very short, but just before the waves engulfed me I managed to say:
‘Take me home, please. It’s near. Two Eaton Square. And my dog. Please take us both home.’
‘All right,’ said the policeman, but they were carrying me up the steps of St. George’s Hospital.
‘Where’s my dog?’
‘He’s all right, he’s gone home,’ said the policeman. This was untrue. He spent a frightening night among strangers at the police station. What with the crash and seeing me covered in blood, this dreadful experience affected his nerves for the rest of his life.
At the hospital I heard them say cheerfully: ‘We’ve brought you another street accident.’ I was lifted on to a table and they found no broken bones but a very battered face.
‘Where’s the thin thread?’ ‘Night Sister’s locked it up.’ ‘Well, haven’t you got a key?’ ‘No, and she’s gone off.’
One of those bright institutional conversations was taking place over my body. My head was dizzy but thoughts came and went. My anxiety about the spaniel had been calmed by a lie and I began to worry about M. Suppose he saw it in the morning paper, and suppose nobody at Denham or at home knew where I was, or knew whether I was alive or dead?
‘We must use the thick thread then,’ the voice was saying. ‘This is going to hurt,’ he went on putting his face close to mine. ‘I can’t give you an anaesthetic. It’s going to sting.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Can I telephone?’
‘Oh no,’ said the doctor, ‘you certainly can’t. You wouldn’t be able to stand for one thing.’
‘But I must telephone,’ I said. ‘You can carry me on the stretcher to the telephone.’
‘We’ll see,’ said the doctor. He dug his needle into the side of my nose. After two stitches he said: ‘I’m afraid this stings.’ Sting was a mild way of putting it.
‘Yes,’ I said, awake now, ‘and if I don’t scream will you let me telephone?’
‘Yes, all right,’ he said making another jab. He sewed up my nose and then my jaw, and then, unwillingly, they carried me to a telephone which was fixed to a wall in the passage. I dialled M.’s number; he must have been asleep, it was after two. ‘I’m in St. George’s Hospital and I’m quite all right.’
‘What? Where did you say?’
‘Quite all right,’ I repeated and rang off. It was as much as I could manage.
They put me in a huge ward full of poor old ladies who had had major operations. After about three hours of snores and groans and strange night noises the nurses came pattering along waking everybody up. I was only too pleased, since I was awake already. My face hurt. My neighbours in the beds either side were pleased to see me; they told me the accident ward was shut for the summer and they enjoyed having the accidents in their ward, it made a change. They were there f
or weeks and months and bored to death.
When an important nurse came by I asked if I could go home. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. I was carried away to be X-rayed, and after a bit: ‘You can go home if you hire an ambulance,’ I was told.
Tom came and fetched me in an ambulance. He looked worried. ‘Your face,’ he said. All one could see among the bandages was my eyes peering out.
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s much. They’ve sewed me up,’ I told him. I was carried into Eaton Square and put in my own bed. M. came, and Bryan came. It was Bryan’s father who thought of what to do; he telephoned: ‘You must see Sir Harold Gillies at once. Don’t wait. I’m going to get hold of him now.’
When Sir Harold Gillies undid the bandages he was angered by what he saw. He pulled the thick thread out, which hurt. ‘What on earth is this?’ he said.
‘Well, they couldn’t find the thin thread,’ I answered. Sir Harold said that if he had left the stitches in my nose and jaw I should have been marked for ever by them, as well as having a pugilist’s nose. He would operate after a week when the swelling and bruising had gone down, meanwhile he put two huge stitches from one part of my face to the other to hold the cuts together and he told me not to talk or laugh more than I was obliged. Lord Moyne sent a kind nurse and she came with me a week later to the London Clinic. I still did not know what I was in for.
As it was the silly season the papers had headlines about my crash and the house filled up with flowers and letters and telegrams. I sent masses of the flowers on to St. George’s to my friends in the operation ward. The Daily Express had a short leading article on the mutability of human fortune; doubtless Lord Beaverbrook, like Tom and everybody else but me, imagined my poor face was wrecked for ever.
A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley Page 15