Tanya Gold has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I was touched but not surprised that, despite his illness, the King attended the 80th anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau this week. His paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a rescuer. She hid the Cohen family in her house in Athens and is honoured as a ‘righteous’ gentile at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, where she is buried on the Mount of Olives.
A less friendly aristocrat was Unity Mitford, whose views were probably a more accurate reflection of her class. Her newly published diary describes her friendship with Adolf Hitler. Here is a typical entry: ‘Lunch Osteria 2.30. THE FüHRER comes 3.15 after I have finished lunch. After about ten minutes he sends the Wirt [owner] TO ASK ME TO GO TO HIS TABLE.’ She sounds like Bridget Jones. ‘Met THE FüHRER139 times! (Vvg).’
Unity was the fourth of the Mitford sisters, a sort of six-headed manifestation of Tatler, Punch and the rise of murderous dictatorship. Nancy wrote novels. Diana married the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Jessica was a communist. Deborah was a duchess. Pamela wanted to be a horse. Amid such sisters, it’s hard to gain parental attention: invent a romance with the Führer and your mother might look up from her sewing.
Unity moved to Germany in 1934 and stalked Hitler, though she was pushing at an open door. Hitler suffered from acute class anxiety, and Unity, conceived in Swastika, Canada – was it fate, OMG?! – was very blonde. The results are hilarious. ‘I go and sit next to him while he eats his lunch, and we talk. THE MOST WONDERFUL DAY OF MY LIFE.’ She was an avid Nazi, writing to Der Stürmer: ‘Out with the Jews! Heil Hitler! P.S. Please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’ When war broke out, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the head. She died in 1948, and whenever I think of her I laugh.
Unity was a bad poster girl for Nazism – when she shot herself, she missed. But her racism was typical, even if her immediate family was divided on the matter. Jessica’s second husband, Robert Treuhaft, was a Jew, and Jessica refused to let Diana meet her children: ‘I didn’t want Benj turned into a lampshade.’ Deborah’s husband Andrew, the Duke of Devonshire, gave huge amounts to Jewish causes, possibly embarrassed by his appalling relations. Nancy, too, sheltered bombed-out Jewish refugees.
But much of the interwar aristocracy did not like Jews, and this dislike fomented in the Cliveden set and the Right Club, whose supporters included the Dukes of Wellington and Westminster, and Lord Redesdale, Unity’s father. Lady Redesdale owned a copy of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and scribbled in its margins ‘Too true!’ and ‘I always said so!’
It was Jessica they couldn’t forgive, because she was a class traitor who tried to bequeath her interest in Inch Kenneth, the family island, to the Communist party of Great Britain. They declined. Deborah visited Jessica in California in 1952 and wrote to Diana: ‘Oh dear it was frightening and, in a way, so terribly sad.’ Jessica’s ‘little suburban house’ (Deborah lived at Chatsworth) had ‘a very peculiar smell and they said they had a negro family in the basement so of course that was it’. Deborah was the ‘good’ sister. The prejudice was omnivorous.
The root of it is class. The aristocracy do not know where to place Jews, and in a class-driven society, that is everything. Does this endow us with magical or malevolent powers? Jews, despite our ancient lineage – more ancient than any Mitford – reflect our time and place. (Lord Rothschild was the poshest man I have ever met.) The bigot projects what it most fears: for the aristocracy, that is being thought common, and greedy.
When I worked at a gossip column with the idle posh, I caught at the edges of conversations a brief, oblique othering best summed up with the words: what are you doing here? When they mocked me for being a dentist’s child, I explained, patiently, that modern dentistry is a wonderful thing. They took my point – they aren’t stupid, that’s a feint – but I was an interloper, and they made sure I knew it. I’ll use a property analogy because it’s relevant here: it’s like being a leaseholder when everyone else has a freehold.
The rest is guilt. I read George Orwell’s essay on British anti-Semitism and this line struck me: ‘Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with anti-Semitism and German atrocities: “Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.”’ I wonder what Unity, our Nazi Bridget Jones, would say to this woman. ‘Analysis of JEWISH QUESTION vvg! HEIL HOTLER!!!!!’
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