The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (27 page)

Several days later she wrote to her mother of Hitler’s pleasing simplicity: he had been ‘so ordinary that one couldn’t be nervous . . . I still can’t quite believe [it] but I have my signed postcard as proof’.
²¹
Nothing Hitler could say or do would subsequently destroy Unity’s admiration of him. She had swallowed the Nazi bait whole: waving banners, emotional anthems, torchlight processions, and anti-Semitism.

There must have been some extraordinary quality in Unity that not only attracted Hitler’s attention but caused him to establish a deeper relationship by continued invitations to her to join his table. Other people regularly visited Hitler’s known haunts in the hope of catching a glimpse of him, but he never noticed them. Unity wrote of how some congratulated her after that first meeting, and she was amazed that they were not jealous of her, a foreigner, for having been singled out for notice.

Two weeks later she was having tea at the Carlton tearooms with a fellow student when Hitler spotted her and invited both girls to join him. In the following week she was there with Michael Burn, who became well known as a journalist, writer and poet. Burn had known Unity since he attended a Rutland Gate party during Unity’s year as a débutante and, like Derek Hill, he was struck by Unity’s extreme reaction when Hitler appeared. As Hill had witnessed, she trembled. ‘Hitler passed our table and spoke to her,’ Michael Burn recalled, ‘and then he went on to his table in the garden. One of his adjutants came back and said Hitler had invited her to join them. She rushed off after him. I might not have existed . . .’
²²
A week after that a similar invitation was extended to her at the Osteria; this time Unity was introduced to Goebbels. Her diary reveals that between their first meeting in June 1935 and her penultimate meeting with him in September 1939, on the eve of war, she and Hitler met and talked on 140 occasions – an average of about once every ten days, remarkable when one considers what Hitler’s schedule must have been like in those four years leading up to the war. Can one even imagine Churchill or Roosevelt behaving like this with a foreign student? But so quickly did Unity find a place as a friend of Hitler that, within months, when Diana, Tom, Pam and Sydney visited her, she introduced them to him without any difficulty.

Was this purely because of Unity’s ‘presence’, the unique quality that Decca wrote about in her memoir yet which she could not quantify? Or might it have been that Nazi intelligence sources had connected her with Diana Guinness, mistress of British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, which led in turn to the even more surprising information that the twenty-one-year-old English student was a close relative of Winston Churchill? However, it is doubtful that any connection would have been made initially with the divorced Mrs Guinness, and it is reasonably certain that, whatever happened subsequently, those first meetings occurred as the result of Unity’s own personality.

That April, when she had met him three times, Hitler invited Unity to a luncheon party. To her surprise, Unity discovered when she arrived that it was in honour of Mosley, who was paying a private visit to Hitler. It was the first meeting between the two men, and they met only once more. Neither spoke the other’s language, and neither was especially impressed with the other. Besides an obvious interest in meeting the man whose name was on everyone’s lips, Mosley possibly hoped to obtain financial support from Hitler: funding for the BUF from Mussolini (which Mosley always denied receiving) was drying up, the organization was rapidly eating up the donations of major supporters in England, and was in danger of draining Mosley’s own fortune. In the event it is doubtful that Mosley even broached the subject of finance in the short time allowed for discussion, after which they joined the ladies in the dining room of Hitler’s comfortable apartment. As well as Unity, two other women had been invited: Winifred Wagner, the brilliant English-born widow of Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, and the Duchess of Brunswick, only daughter of the Kaiser and a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. These English connections were intended as a graceful compliment to the guest of honour. Hitler, apparently, was not aware of the relationship between Unity and Mosley,
²³
for he appeared taken aback to find that his young English student friend knew Mosley so intimately. Later, he asked her who her father was. Hitler was unfamiliar with the customs of the English peerage, and when Unity said he was Lord Redesdale, not Mitford as Hitler had expected, he assumed she was illegitimate, patting her hand and murmuring sympathetically, ‘Ah, poor child!’

The meeting between Hitler and Sydney, which occurred soon afterwards, was something of an embarrassment to Unity. They joined him for tea at the Carlton tearooms, and Unity had to translate her mother’s lecture about the value of wholemeal bread. ‘Whenever I translated anything for either of them,’ she complained to Diana, ‘it sounded stupid translated . . . I fear the whole thing was wasted on Muv, she is just the same as before. Having so little feeling, she does not feel his goodness and wonderfulness radiating out like we do . . .’ In fact, Hitler was something of a health-food fanatic and probably agreed with Sydney about the bread.

Unity found Pam little better than Sydney as a potential fellow worshipper of the Führer. Pam had given up managing the farm at Biddesden in the previous autumn and spent the rest of the pre-war years travelling extensively, visiting parts of Europe by car that after the war were behind the Iron Curtain. In June 1935 she called on Unity with Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Cresswell [later Lady Harrod]. Billa was an old friend of all the girls and lives on in literature as Fanny, the narrator of Nancy’s most famous novels
The Pursuit of Love
and
Love in a Cold Climate
, and the major character in a subsequent book,
Don’t Tell Alfred
. It was during Pam’s second visit that autumn that she met Hitler. She and Unity were lunching at the Osteria and had just finished eating when there was a flurry of activity, which Unity knew meant that Hitler’s black Mercedes, with a similar car containing members of his party, had been spotted arriving outside the restaurant. She told Pam to go and stand by the door if she wanted a good view of him. As Hitler passed her, he looked straight into Pam’s eyes, the most strikingly blue of any of the sisters’. A short time later Schaub, one of Hitler’s adjutants, came over and asked Pam if she was Unity’s sister. On receiving a positive answer he said that the Führer had invited both of them to move to his table. The sisters cheerfully ate a second lunch with Hitler. When she returned to England and was asked about him, Pam described Hitler vaguely as ‘very ordinary, like an old farmer in a brown suit’. But she recalled every detail of the food they ate and was rhapsodic over some of it, ‘Oh, the new potatoes . . . they were absolutely delicious,’ she said.

Tom’s reaction was more to Unity’s satisfaction. He paid several visits to her while staying with his friend Janos von Almassy. That summer he and Unity argued hotly about the Nazi regime for although Tom had conceded the transformation in Germany that the Party had brought about since coming to power, he was opposed to the racial creed it espoused. Nevertheless, he was interested in seeing Hitler for himself, which caused Unity to worry that if she introduced him he might say what he felt to Hitler, which would rebound on
her
. She therefore took Tom to the Osteria very early, knowing that Hitler never arrived before two o’clock and often later than that. On this particular day, however, Hitler arrived early and Tom was duly introduced. To Unity’s relief, ‘Tom
adored
the Führer,’ she wrote to Diana. ‘He almost got into a frenzy like us. But I expect he will have cooled down by the time he gets home.’

But if Unity felt irritated by the casual demeanour of Sydney and Pam in the presence of her earthly god, then she soon gave her entire family every reason to feel aggrieved by her own behaviour. In June that year she wrote a letter to a publication owned and edited by the notorious Julius Streicher. Copies of
Stürmer
were displayed in bright red boxes all over the Reich. It was less of a newspaper than a propaganda organ, but it carried stories of a popular nature and had a circulation of 100,000 copies. Streicher was an old acquaintance of Hitler – indeed, Hitler made few new friends after 1930; most of those with whom he surrounded himself were from the
Kampfzeit
, the years of struggle, or
die Altkampfer
, the old fighters. Streicher’s membership card in the Nazi Party was number two and Hitler’s was number seven. Soon after Hitler came to power Streicher was made Gauleiter of Franconia, a region he purged not only of Jews, but of all non-Aryans without mercy. It was Streicher, for example who made a party of Jews clear a meadow by tearing out the grass with their teeth, an incident that evidently caused much amusement in the higher echelons of the Nazi Party.

It was Streicher who initiated the Nuremberg rallies and promoted the Nuremberg decrees against the Jews. We now know from surviving correspondence that he became a great liability to the Nazi regime and was detested by Goebbels and hardly ever saw Hitler except at Nuremberg. Unity would not have known this: when she wrote to Streicher’s newspaper her motive was almost certainly to make Hitler and his immediate circle aware of her unqualified support, in a tone that she could hardly adopt in conversation. She was now playing with very big fish indeed, and the letter haunted her for the rest of her life.

Dear
Stürmer
, [she wrote in German]

As a British woman Fascist, I should like to express my admiration for you. I have lived in Munich for a year and read
Der Stürmer
every week. If only we had such a newspaper in England! The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. English Jews are always described as ‘decent’. Perhaps the Jews in England are more clever with their propaganda than in other countries. I cannot tell, but it is a certain fact that our struggle is extremely hard. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. They never come into the open, and therefore we cannot show them to the British public in their true dreadfulness. We hope, however, that you will see that we will soon win against the world enemy, in spite of all his cunning. We think with joy of the day when we shall be able to say with might and authority: England for the English! Out with the Jews! With German greeting, Heil Hitler!

Unity Mitford.

PS: If you find room in your newspaper for this letter, please publish my name in full . . . I want everyone to know that I am a Jew hater.

The hysterical tone of this letter sounds remarkably like Nancy’s character Eugenia in
Wigs on the Green
, and if it was a deliberate ploy by Unity to ingratiate herself with top Nazis, then it worked. Streicher was intrigued enough to ask her to do an interview for the
Münchener Zeitung
, in which she spoke just as freely about the BUF and her hopes for Germany and Britain to be united in Fascism. He prefaced Unity’s remarks with the information that her father was a
Graf
and that she was related to Winston Churchill, so that there could be no doubt in the minds of potential readers that this was a young woman of status whose views should be regarded with respect.
²⁴
Next he invited her to the midsummer festival at Hesselberg, near Nuremberg, where, dressed in a military-style black shirt, and her favourite gauntlet gloves, she was treated as an honoured guest and asked to give an impromptu speech. It was widely covered in the British press under headlines such as ‘The Girl Who Adores Hitler’ and ‘Peer’s Daughter is Jew Hater,’ illustrated with photographs of Unity giving a Nazi salute. The Redesdales were appalled to be contacted by reporters from the national daily papers, and asked to comment on their daughter’s pronouncements. In the aftermath one reader from Kingston-on-Thames wrote, via the correspondence columns of a daily paper, to ask what Unity Mitford would do if she were put into a kindergarten ‘with a score of beautiful Jewish four-year-olds, and then given a gun and told to wipe out that much Jewry’.

David and Sydney had been about to join her in Munich but now they cancelled their trip and ordered her home for the summer instead. Realizing how angry they were, and since they had yet to find out about the
Stürmer
letter, Unity thought she had better comply. She told them the Hesselberg incident had been ‘unavoidable’. She couldn’t have refused to go, for the sake of politeness, she wrote to Sydney, and once there she couldn’t wave away the bouquet presented to her, or refuse to take the microphone.
²⁵
But friends of Unity in Munich saw no signs of regret over any of the notoriety she subsequently attracted.
²⁶
In a sense she had achieved the ultimate success. All her life she had obtained pleasure from shocking people, now she had shocked so absolutely that people
had
to sit up and notice her. She was, at last, notable as someone in her own right. She had even begun to create her own legendary persona, building on the coincidence of her conception in Swastika and always calling herself Unity Walkyrie.

At home, she was soon brought down to earth. From Mill Cottage in High Wycombe on the evening of 26 July, she wrote to Diana that David was in a vile temper with her, ‘mainly because of the letter in the
Der Stürmer
’. Its contents were reported in the
Evening Standard
that afternoon, and on the following day it was carried in the daily national press. She received a huge postbag of letters, some from people who were opposed to her views and some from people who supported them. Nancy wrote teasingly, ‘We were all very interested to see that you were Queen of the May this year at Hesselberg. “Call me early, Goering dear/For I’m to be Queen of the May.” Good gracious, that interview you sent us; fantasia! Fantasia!’
²⁷
But by then Unity and Nancy were scarcely on speaking terms. It was far more important to her that Decca wrote from a holiday in Brittany to say that she hated what her Boud had written but that she loved her nevertheless.