In 1934, she returned to Germany with her husband and attempted to investigate the Nazi concentration camps, which resulted in their names being put on the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B..[8][7] After World War II was declared, Lady Listowel urged both Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, and her own brother's in-law, the Hungarian prime minister Pál Teleki, not to side with Adolf Hitler.
[10] She and her husband, then Under-Secretary of State for India, divorced in 1945, the year he was appointed Postmaster General of the United Kingdom in the Labour government of Clement Attlee.
[11] From October 1944 to September 1954, she published the weekly news bulletin East Europe as a joint effort with the two wartime commanders of the Second Department of Polish General Staff (military intelligence and counterintelligence) in exile, Jan Kowalewski and Jerzy Niezbrzycki.
She travelled to Austria and crossed the border illegally on 4 November 1956 to cover the events of the Hungarian uprising,[9][7] but returned after a few days and eventually produced her report by interviewing refugees.
[15] She also worked with the Foreign Office's secret anti-Communist propaganda arm, the Information Research Department, where her contact person in December 1951 was Mollie Hamilton.
The publication of her first book on the subject, The Making of Tanganyika (1965), written on request as a semi-official history of the country,[9] coincided with the shift to one-party state in Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere in 1965, and with the white government of Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence also in 1965.
[4] In 1973, she produced an Irish University Press-commissioned book on the rise of Idi Amin to power in Uganda and lost the resulting lawsuit for defamation to Milton Obote.