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she loved. She could not bear to live with her loyalties so torn and a few hours after the war broke out she sat on a park bench in Munich’s Englischer Garten and put a bullet through her head. For days she lay unconscious in hospital in Munich, her life hanging in the balance. Eventually, Hitler arranged for her to be moved to a hospital in Switzerland, which remained a neutral country. The Führer was personally shocked and full of regret at her fate. ‘She lost her nerve just when for the first time I could really have used her,’ he was recorded as saying. In January 1940 her mother and one of her sisters, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, travelled to Switzerland to bring her home. She could not walk, and could only talk with difficulty. Above all, she appeared to her family as a stranger, a totally changed personality and in need of constant care. Unity never fully recovered and died in 1948.
    Her sister Diana, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, was interned with her husband for much of the duration of the war. MI5 believed there was evidence that Mosley thought he would be able to seize power if Hitler successfully carried through with Operation Sealion, the Nazi plan to invade Britain. Had this happened the British authorities feared the Germans would have put into action Operation Willi: replacing George VI with the Duke of Windsor as king, his wife Wallis as queen and Mosley as prime minister. Goebbels, writing in his diary in January 1940, expressed that hope: ‘The Mosley people keeping their heads down at the moment. Their only, but perhaps their big chance.’ 5 But that opportunity never came.
    Sir Oswald lived on after the war and formed yet another new party, the Union Movement, which failed to gain anywhere near the support he had achieved with the BUF in the 1930s. He and Lady Mosley took up residence in France, only a few miles from the Windsors’ home, and all four became close companions, dining together twice a week. Sir Oswald died in December 1980. His wife Diana survived for more than twenty years longer, dying in Paris in 2003 in her 90s, still sticking to her fascist views. In an interview in 1986 she was insistent that from the 1930s right up until their deaths, the Windsors shared her and her husband’s views on politics.
    Hitler’s adjutant and former senior officer, Fritz Wiedemann, having been captured by the Americans following the Japanese surrender, was interrogated and then held in detention. He was moved back to Germany under guard and required to give evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in October 1945. But the extensive FBI file on Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie was never considered at Nuremberg. It was never asked for by the trial authorities. Wiedemann was credited with being part of the plot in which the chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Franz Canaris, had hoped to remove Hitler, which enabled Wiedemann to escape much of the evidence that he might have been confronted with. The tribunal hearings over, he was kept in detention until May 1948, one of only 6,656 Nazis who faced conviction for crimes following the fall of the Third Reich. He died at the age of 78 in Fuchsgrub in January 1970.
    Wiedemann’s lover and co-conspirator, Princess Stephanie, outlived him by two years – but of all this cast of extraordinary characters she was the survivor. After her release from internment by the American authorities at the end of the war, she set about totally reinventing herself. As she had succeeded in doing all her life, she clawed her way back into high society in the States. She used a series of wealthy male friends, whom she either charmed or seduced, as her source of funding, and she exploited her title and her notoriety as her entry ticket to American society. First she had to contend with continuing newspaper criticism and attempts by the American immigration authorities to eject her. In March 1947 she was living in New York with her lover, Major Lemuel Schofield, who had