Shiela Grant Duff

Among the friends she made at Oxford were Berlin, Goronwy Rees, Christopher Cox, Herbert Hart and Ian Bowen; although her closest friendship was with Rees, she remains associated in historical literature with the later German Widerstand figure Adam von Trott zu Solz, then a Rhodes Scholar attending Balliol College who was romantically involved with her friend Diana Hubback.

Mowrer had reported from Europe since 1917 before living inside Germany from 1924 and, having a long personal knowledge of the Nazi leadership, was forced out of Berlin in June 1933 shortly after Adolf Hitler assumed power.

This leading American newspaper-man was of central importance to Grant Duff for disabusing her of the anti-Versailles Treaty assumptions she had learned at Oxford and from von Trott.

Mowrer, who predicted World War II from 1933 and was labelled "a sworn and proven enemy" by the Nazi Press[2] gave further urgency and impetus to Grant Duff, and can be credited for the increasing antagonism she developed against the complacency displayed by von Trott in his relationships to the leading "appeasers" of the 1930s.

Afterwards, she assisted Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit to England in 1936 and briefly considered following his example into the field of anti-colonialism, before deciding to concentrate on the necessities for the survival of "small-nations" in Europe.

After meeting Basil Newton, the British minister in Prague, she wrote she was feeling "terribly depressed by the cynical and uncaring attitude of my fellow countrymen" towards Czechoslovakia.

[6] Shiela Grant Duff's testimony regarding her friend's proposition and von Trott's using this same offer in attempt to sway Neville Chamberlain, bears upon analysis of the appeasement era and of Widerstand positioning in mid-1939.

Grant Duff herself was ever-after unsure as to whether von Trott genuinely sought this transfer of territory or, saw it as a means to achieve another end, and by preventing an out-break of war, give time to some un-specific Widerstand counter-Hitler push.

Shiela Grant Duff's final break with von Trott of June 1939, caused by the "Danzig for Prague" proposition, continued to influence a division of attitude concerning largely herself and, on the other side, those who leaned to the view that not only was the Widerstand misunderstood even prior to the Second World War, but that Churchill particularly erred in holding to the wartime policy of unconditional surrender.