The Daily Mail has got a world exclusive on its hands. In great excitement it is publishing the secret diary of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the star-struck young aristo who made a splash in the 1930s tabloids with her pursuit of her famous love interest. The thing was that the star she was struck with was Adolf Hitler.
Unity was the scion of a posho family famous for its literary accomplishments and political extremism: she was one of the six daughters of David Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, a dim peer immortalised in the novels of the eldest daughter, Nancy, as ‘Uncle Matthew’. Known to his offspring as ‘Farve’, Redesdale was a reactionary imbecile best remembered for his withering judgements of practically everything and everybody: foreigners were ‘fiends’, abroad was ‘bloody’ and his own family were beneath contempt.
In the 1980s I had a very brief encounter with Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford
The Mitfords owe their niche in English social history to their eccentricity, their twee pet names for each other, and the fact that the six sisters (there was also one fascist-sympathising brother, Tom, who ironically was killed in the war fighting fascism) were good-looking in a flat-faced, china-blue-eyed kind of way. Jessica (‘Decca’) became a communist and married an American Jew; Deborah (‘Debo’), the youngest, became Duchess of Devonshire and chatelaine of Chatsworth; and Nancy satirised the family in her novels. The Mitford sisters were notorious for their fascist sympathies – and in Unity’s case for her outright obsession with Hitler and the Nazi cause.
Diana was generally judged the most beautiful of the sisters. She deserted her Guinness husband to become the mistress of Britain’s fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, and after the death of his first wife Cynthia Curzon, in 1936 she married Mosley in Berlin in a ceremony ‘honoured’ by the presence of Hitler and Goebbels. Later, she pestered the Nazi leaders in a bid to win subsidies for Mosley’s financially-strapped fascist movement. Hitler had a taste for blondes and would summon Diana to his chancellery in the middle of the night where he would perform comic impressions of his fellow dictator Mussolini which she pronounced ‘a hoot’.
If Diana was a frequent visitor to Berlin, Unity’s beat was Munich where she became an assiduous stalker of the Fuhrer. She regularly ate at Hitler’s favourite Italian restaurant in the city, the Osteria Bavaria, in a bid to attract her hero’s attention. Despite discouragement from his SS guards, her stalking paid off when she was eventually summoned to the dictator’s table for a chat. Hitler was evidently impressed by her looks – despite disapproving of her make up – and aristocratic antecedents, and she soon became a regular member of his social circle, to the extent that he fatally assumed that the Mitfords were the movers and shakers in Britain who ran the country’s foreign policy.
Clad in her uniform of black blouse and leather gauntlets, Unity attended the giant Nuremberg Nazi party rally where she flirted with her beloved ‘Storms’ – as she called the SS thugs – and became ever more besotted with Nazi chic. Fundamentally stupid, her foul anti- Semitic comments regularly featured in the press, which freely speculated on whether she and the Fuhrer were lovers in the physical sense.
Disappointingly, the answer is ‘no’. Though Hitler’s sexuality is still wreathed in mystery, the general historical consensus is that – like Churchill – he had a weak libido, and was probably asexual with a sidebar of extreme sado-masochism.
Inevitably, the relationship between this very odd couple ended in tears. When war broke out in 1939, a horrified Unity’s reaction was typically extreme. She went into a Munich park significantly called the ‘Englischer Garten’ and shot herself in the head with a pistol. The wound, however, was not immediately fatal ( not for nothing was she known as ‘heart of stone and head of bone’) and she lay in a Munich clinic (paid for by Hitler) in a comatose twilight state.
Two months later, the Fuhrer came to Munich to take part in the annual commemoration of his November 1923 beerhall putsch. Before doing so he visited Unity and initiated arrangements to have her shipped home via neutral Switzerland. That same day, the Burgerbrau beerhall where Hitler spoke was blown apart by a time bomb planted by a lone wolf communist called Georg Elser. Unfortunately with his usual devil’s luck, Hitler had concluded his speech unexpectedly early and left for Berlin, thus escaping the blast by minutes.
After Unity arrived back in Britain she was scooped up by her mother (‘Muv’) and hidden in seclusion at a remote Scottish house owned by the Redesdales. She died as a result of her injuries in 1948. Her leather bound diary, though much trumpeted by the Mail, will hardly have the same impact as the faked Hitler diaries published by the Sunday Times in the 1980s. Couched in a schoolgirlish Pony Club prose, though the genuine article, they don’t tell us more than we knew already: that Unity was a foolish halfwit naively consumed by her pash for a very evil man.
Diana Mitford was more fortunate. Though interned in Holloway jail for her fascism by her relative Winston Churchill during the war, she got off lightly. Her marriage to Mosley endured, producing two sons, and until the end of her long life, she never renounced her own affection for the Fuhrer, nor her allegiance to the Nazi creed.
In the 1980s I had a very brief encounter with Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford – the sole sister who had gone to the far left in her political enthusiasm. She came into the LBC studios where I worked for an interview, and a producer asked me to escort her to a bank a few yards away in nearby Fleet Street as she was apparently unable to find her own way there.
I too wanted to visit the bank next door to her branch, and when I emerged she was standing in the street, having completed her bank business, blinking like a bewildered owl in the sunlight, clearly waiting to be collected again by an obliging servant and brought back to the studio. It struck me that Miss Mitford, despite her professed sympathies for the toiling masses, had never so much as pulled a curtain for herself in her entire privileged existence. Unity, I think, was cut from the same precious cloth.
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