The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 122

2003:08:13:22:18:16 CALIFORNIA SF B13 LOSANGELESTIMES Obituaries By Dennis McLellan Times Staff Writer Lady Diana Mosley, the widow of prewar fascist party leader who was imprisoned with her husband as a Nazi sympathizer and was regarded as the most beautiful and most controversial of the famous Mitford family sisters, has died. She was 93. Mosley, who knew Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, died Monday in her flat in Paris after suffering a slight stroke a week earlier. Her death, according to the notice posted by her sister, Deborah, the duchess of Devonshire, was Diana Mosley was an aristocrat who became known as most hated woman in during World War II. Her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, was founder of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and Diana gave him her full support.

She traveled to Germany frequently in the 1930s and often met with Hitler. In 1940, the Mosleys were imprisoned as national security risks. Despite continued criticism over the years, Diana Mosley never stopped championing her political views and defending his reputation. He died in 1980. And although she ultimately conceded that actions were wrong, she never expressed regret over her friendship with Hitler, a man she found fascinating and all know he was a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible she said in a 1994 interview.

that alter the fact that he was obviously an interesting figure. No torture on Earth would get me to say anything Born Diana Freeman-Mitford on June 17, 1910, she was the fourth of seven children of David Mitford, the second Baron his wife, the former Sydney Bowles. Novelist Nancy Mitford, one of sisters, captured their sheltered and privileged upbringing and their eccentric relatives in two of her early books: of and in a Cold In addition to Diana, Nancy and Deborah, the other Mitford sisters included Unity, who generated controversy in the 1930s with her own pro-Hitler views; Jessica, the author, journalist and onetime Communist Party member; and the less well- known Pamela, who married a physicist. Their brother, Tom, was killed in Burma in 1945. By all accounts, Diana was the most beautiful of an attractive group of sisters.

Author James Lees-Milne was moved to write in his diary in the late 1920s that the tall, blond and blue-eyed Diana was god- dess, more immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than Bot- Novelist Evelyn Waugh, another smitten admirer, proclaimed that her beauty through the room like a peal of In 1929, at age 18, Diana married the handsome and wealthy brewing heir Bryan Guinness. After her marriage, she became a leading London hostess whose circle of friends included society photographer Cecil Beaton, poet and author John Dora Carrington, biographer and critic Lytton Stracheyand Waugh, who dedicated his novel to her. She had two children during her marriage to Guinness, but the union was short-lived. In 1932, she met Mosley and left her husband to live openly with the married political maverick. wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon, died of peritonitis in 1933.

Diana was enthralled by the older Mosley, who had recently left the Labor Party to found the British Union of Fascists. She later said she him politically, absolutely Indeed, she is said to have sat quietly in the crowd at her fascist party rallies, even when things grew volatile. Diana visited Nazi Germany for the first time in 1933 with her sister Unity, and she first met Hitler two years later. She later affectionately recalled the Nazi brown hair, chivalry and elegant On October 1936, she and Os- wald Mosley were secretly married in Nazi propaganda minister Joseph room in Berlin. Hitler, one of only six guests, presented the newlyweds with a photograph of himself in a heavy eagle-topped silver frame.

Diana Mosley made numerous visits to Germany over the next few years, meeting several times privately with Hitler as she handled negotiations to set up an English-speaking commercial radio station in Germany to broadcast to Britain, with profits to go to Oswald British Union of Fascists. In May 1940, Oswald Mosley was interned in Holloway prison. A wartime British intelligence memo urging that Diana Mosley also be imprisoned, written in 1940 and released only last year, described her as being cleverer and more dangerous than her husband, and will stick at nothing to achieve her Diana, who was still nursing their 10-week-old second child, was imprisoned in a separate cell at Holloway a month after her husband. Even then, in an interview with a Home Office advisory committee, she admitted that she would like to replace the British political system with the German one we think it has done well for that Asked if she approved of the Nazi policies against Jews, she responded, to a point. I am not fond of Frequently mocked in the British press, she was a despised national figure.

When buses pulled up outside the prison, where she lived in a tiny cell, the conductors would call out, stop for Lady The Mitfords were cousins of Clementine Churchill, the prime wife. And through Tom intervention with Winston Churchill, she was allowed to join her husband in married quarters at the prison in December 1941. The Mosleys were released in November 1943 due to ill heath, but were under house arrest for the remainder of the war. After the war, the Mosleys moved to a farm in Wiltshire. In 1948, Oswald Mosley founded the Union Movement, which promoted the idea of as a and Diana edited the right-wing magazine The European.

They moved to France in 1951, where they became close to the duke and duchess of Windsor and where the British Embassy was forbidden to invite the Mos- leys to any functions. Known for her charm, wit and wide-ranging knowledge of literature, Mosley wrote a 1980 book about the duchess of Windsor and a 1985 memoir of her well-known friends. Her 1977 memoirs, Life of was republished last year. Among her survivors are her four sons, Jonathan, Desmond, Alexander and Max; and numerous grandchildren and great- grandchildren. Diana Mosley, 93; Nazi Sympathizer, Widow of British Fascist Party Leader DIANA MOSLEY The much-despised fascist, here at left in the early 1930s with sister Nancy Mitford, was imprisoned in Britain during part of World War II with her second husband, Sir Oswald Mosley.

Adolf Hitler was one of only six guests at their wedding. By Elaine Woo Times Staff Writer Kenji Ito, an attorney and civic leader who in 1942 successfully fought charges that he was aspy for Japan and who later became the first Japanese American admitted to the State Bar of California after World War II, died Sundayat his Alhambra home. He was 94 and had disease. Born in Seattle, Ito was admitted to the California bar in 1945 and practiced law in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. He served five terms as president of the Southern California Japanese Chamber of Commerce and helped found the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo.

Askillful debater who earned his law degree at the University of Washington in 1935, Ito was admitted to the Washington state bar in 1936. That year he earned a spot on a yearlong debate tour sponsored by the university that took him around the world, including stops in Australia, China, Japan, Egypt and England. After returning to Seattle in 1937, he was frequently invited by civic groups to debate the Sino-Japanese War, which had begun with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931. The United States had taken side in the hostilities. Ito agreed to take a rhetorical position in favor of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria Ifelt that both sides of the equation should be presented in a matter as important as this, and certainly there was nobody to defend or to even set forth position in those he told the Pacific Citizen, a publication of the Japanese American Citizens League, in1985.

was expressing myself as an American of Japanese ancestry, of course who knew something about Japan and Japanese he said. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, role in the debates became the foundation of a government case alleging that he was a subversive who had made 200 pro- Japanese speeches over a three- year period. He was arrested Dec.8 on charges that he was an unregistered agent for Japan and was held in lieu of $25,000 bond. He was one of hundreds of people of Japanese descent who were rounded up by the FBI in the weeks after Pearl Harbor and placed in custody on the theory of guilt by said University of Cincinnati emeritus professor Roger Daniels, who has written extensively about Japanese Americans during World War II.

Unlike Ito, most of those arrested were Japanese immigrants; none was ever found guilty of espionage or sabotage. Ito was acquitted by an all- white jury April 1, 1942. The jury acted after hearing matic appeal during closing arguments, in which he said his loyalty to America was so strong that he would live in this country behind prison than in a nation under dictatorship. Although he was found innocent, Ito could not escape the evacuation order targeting Japanese on the West Coast that had been signed a few months earlier by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Executive Order 9066 sent 110,000 Japanese Americans and nationals on the West Coast to 10 detention camps without proof of their disloyalty. Ito and his family spent the duration of the war at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California and the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. In the camps he provided legal assistance to other detainees. After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and opened a law office in Little Tokyo, where he helped former internees reclaim property that they had been forced to abandon. In later years Ito concentrated on corporate law, representing major Japanese firms.

Ito is survived by his wife of 63 years, Fumiye Betty; a daughter, AyleenIto Lee of Palo Alto; two sons, Ron of Alhambra and Bradford of Redwood City; a brother, Henry, of Gardena; four grandchildren; and five great- grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a daughter, Glenna Ito Angel. Amemorial program will be held at 11 a.m. Aug. 23at Little Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S.

San Pedro in the Doizaki Gallery. Ito will be buried in San Jose. Memorial donations may be sent to the Japanese American Treaty Centennial Scholarship Fund 244 S. San Pedro No. 504, Los Angeles, CA 90012, or Little Tokyo Service Center, 231 E.

3rd Los Angeles, CA 90012. KENJI ITO He was the first Japanese American attorney admitted to the state bar after World War II. Kenji Ito, 94; Attorney Was Found Not Guilty at Spy Trial in 1942.