Six, page 18
VII
Unity, for instance, had been wary of introducing Tom to Adolf Hitler. She had thought her brother insufficiently pro-Nazi, and in the sense that she meant this was true. But all was well: ‘He adored the Fuhrer.’ They lunched with Hitler twice. ‘So really I think no harm is done...’
This was from a letter to Diana, written in June 1935. By then Unity had known Hitler for four months. By the time that war broke out, just over four years later, every member of the Mitford family – except Nancy and Jessica – would have met him.
Back in September 1933, the decision to go to Germany with Diana came about almost accidentally. Unity had wanted to visit France. Diana wanted to go somewhere – anywhere – while Mosley was on his motoring tour with his sister-in-law Baba Metcalfe. Earlier that year she had met Putzi Hanfstaengl, a long-standing friend of Hitler’s who dealt with the British press on his behalf (and who claimed to have invented the chant ‘Sieg Heil’). Now Hanfstaengl – smooth, supremely connected – suggested that Diana attend the forthcoming Parteitag at Nuremberg: the first major rally of Hitler’s chancellorship. There she and her sister, those fabulous specimens of Aryan womanhood, could meet the new German leader himself. Presumably Hanfstaengl thought they might be of some use, somewhere down the line.
Even at this early stage, Unity was extremely excited; nevertheless she did not manage to meet Hitler in 1933, and her obsession with Fascism might therefore still have been a teenage phase, like her love of cinema, with the Führer in the guise of Errol Flynn. Jessica, of all people, wrote to Diana after the visit to Nuremberg, in a manner that makes a fond joke of the whole thing, and refers jauntily to Unity’s ‘semi romance’ with Hanfstaengl. It was the Redesdales who saw danger. David, who was anyway in a prolonged rage with Diana, wrote to her: ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a murderous gang of pests... What we can do, and intend to do, is to try to keep Bobo out of it all.’ Thus David revealed an awareness of the susceptibility in his daughter – and of his own essential powerlessness.
In 1937, Unity would be a part-agent in Putzi Hanfstaengl’s fall from grace, when she informed Hitler, in her apparently inconsequential way, that Hanfstaengl had criticized him. Four years earlier, when he first met her in London, the power was his. He recalled that she was ‘very much second string to her sister, tagging along’.31 He was also frustrated by the attitude of the British press towards the Nazi regime. ‘Hitler will build a great and prosperous Germany for the Germans,’ explained the urbane and exasperated Hanfstaengl. ‘If the Jews don’t like it they can get out.’ The first camp was established that year at Dachau, holding Socialists and writers as well as Jews, but not yet a death camp. As Clive James later wrote, in reference to Mosley’s claim that the Jews were not under dire threat at this time: ‘Before the war, apparently, Dachau had been like Butlin’s.’32 The great question of how much was known, or feared, about the regime is answered to an extent by The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror, a prophetic piece of writing, listing 250 murders committed by the Nazis after the burning of the Reichstag (which led to the declaration of a state of emergency, then to dictatorship). This was published in Britain by John Lane around the time of the Mitford girls’ visit to Nuremberg, and in 1935 seized upon by Jessica. Later Diana would say that she ‘did not pay much attention to it’. The book was quite easily dismissed as a Communist production. With politics, after all, people generally hear only what they want to hear; Jessica was equally willing not to know about Stalin’s murderous propensities.
The Nuremberg rally was not exactly an epiphany for Diana. She had already had hers in the ballroom at Cheyne Walk. But to see a crowd of some 400,000 sieg heiling and marching was to see the Fascist dream realized: ‘a demonstration of hope in a nation that had known collective despair’. Which it had, after the First World War. The exigent demands of the Treaty of Versailles were still gaping wounds; unemployment was at 7 million; civil war raged on the streets: it is not hard to see why a figure like Hitler could unite and dominate as he did. Nor, given the Communist threat, is it impossible to grasp why he was welcomed by some members of the British Establishment; or why, given the prolonged depression, ‘what we need is an ’Itler’33 became a refrain within certain parts of British society. What is almost incomprehensible – even without hindsight – is that a non-German could be a witness to that quasi-religious spectacle of mass hypnosis, could listen to Hitler’s screaming voice with its razor rasp, its death rattle, and find it something magnificent: even beautiful. Diana claimed to Unity that this was her own experience, although her interest in Hitler actually developed when they talked privately and he behaved very differently. But Unity really did respond like a disciple. Although she too was at conversational ease with Hitler, Deborah wrote that in his presence ‘she was shaking all over’. The image of her at the Parteitag, removing her lipstick – as Hanfstaengl instructed – then putting it stealthily back on again, has something of a schoolgirl’s juddering excitement as she waits at the stage door. At the same time it was as if the semi-dormant madness in Hitler had found the same thing in her, and let it loose.
Back home, Unity became ever more possessed with her cause. Her social behaviour grew more extreme. There was a fashion at the time for recording one’s voice on to a disc, and Unity’s friend Mary Ormsby-Gore recalled them doing this together at Selfridges: Unity’s recording allegedly consisted of a Blackshirt chant, ‘The Yids, The Yids, We’ve got to get rid of the Yids.’ This from a girl who in her first debutante season had attended a ball for her friend Nica Rothschild, and who had happily accompanied the producer John Sutro to watch a day’s filming at Elstree (Sutro seems to have fallen into the category of ‘I don’t like Jews, but you’re different’). Unity continued to appear at the aristocratic houses of London, for instance a ball at the Howard de Waldens on Belgrave Square, which ended in a dawn walk through Covent Garden with none other than Hamish St Clair-Erskine. But a fellow deb recalled – presumably accurately – that Unity would also spend her days in the East End (where the Blackshirts marched through Jewish areas) to play ping-pong with ‘the boys’, meaning Mosley’s muscly young followers. One can imagine it, the comfortable sense of de haut en bas shot through with dark intimations of lust. Just as Diana had responded to Oswald Mosley’s rather more manicured seduction techniques, so Unity was getting a serious kick from the straightforward hard-edged maleness of the Fascist movement. ‘All those men,’ as Nanny Blor had said; how right she had been! The nature of Unity’s sexual curiosity was hinted at when she planned what she called ‘an orgy’ at Diana’s Eaton Square house. Of course it was nothing of the kind. ‘Everybody had been sick, and there had been a lot of necking,’ recalled an art-school friend, who was told about it after the event. That too was probably an exaggeration. But the mere fact that Unity talked in this way – half sincere, half seeking to shock – hints at how fascinated she would have been by her sister’s affair with Mosley, and what pleasure she might have got from being the centre of attention among all those uniformed young men.
Blackshirts, for the time being; not yet Stormtroopers. Later there would be lurid tales of her ritualized sexual antics with ‘the darling storms’, but this is just the kind of thing that would be said, as it were translating Unity’s mysterious passions into the recognizable. Even the alleged affair with Tom’s friend Janos von Almasy is unproven, as is the rumoured liaison with the SS officer Erich Widemann. In 1970 Nancy spoke to Unity’s future biographer, David Pryce-Jones, and was rumoured to have told him that Hitler had wanted to marry Unity but was put off by her promiscuity with SS men. This ‘information’ was never printed. If Nancy said such things, she did so at a time when she was ill and made excessively spiteful by pain. In fact the only evidence of Unity’s sexual activity, such as it is, is that she saw a gynaecologist for contraception advice.34 She expressed a passionate desire for children – the life that she might have had – yet there was always something of the Joan of Arc about her, something virginal and untried, as perceived by her childhood governess.
In early 1934 Unity achieved her desire of living in Munich when she arrived at the home of the Baroness Laroche, who took girls en pension. It is unbelievable, really, that the Redesdales let her go. She was already a debutante; she did not need to be ‘finished’, as her older sisters had been, and Jessica would be, in Paris. Her parents had expressed horror at the recent visit to the Parteitag. So who knows what their idea was; other than that the baroness was a woman of the utmost respectability, and that Unity’s nagging may have been such that it was simply easier to let her get this energetic obsession out of her system. Unity was on a girlish high. Might she still have come down from it, had the Redesdales refused to let her return to Germany? Diana thought not – ‘Unity was a revolutionary’ – and she knew her sister very well. Nevertheless Unity’s cousin Clementine, who stayed with her in 1937 and who, to a lesser degree, succumbed to the Nazi spell, later said: ‘In no way was she a person who wished to escape her background. I think she would always have come home.’35
Unity’s intention in 1934 was to meet Hitler. And again, there was something in this of the schoolgirl, dreaming that she will catch the eye of the man on her bedroom wall. However hard it is to see Hitler in that light, there is no doubt that Unity did: up to a point. Then there was another factor, the desire to compete with the sublime Diana. All right, so Diana had Britain’s Fascist-in-Chief in tow, smouldering at her across the dinner table and chatting in baby talk down the telephone. But Hitler: do admit. That was something more. The man with the real power, the one who had putsched his way to the top and had the whole of Germany swaying to his oratory, whom even hard-headed British people sought to encounter on their visits to Munich. If Unity were able to write to her sister and say oh, by the way Nard, you’ll never guess who I’ve met... Well. In that sense, therefore, Hitler represented something comprehensible in the context of a young girl’s imagination, a bizarre crush plus an ace of trumps in the lifelong Mitford game of sister whist. Yet there was also the unknown factor, the dark and terrible tide in whose shallows Hitler already swam, to which Unity responded in the same way as Diana did to the Mosley rallies. The times in which this pair lived were terrifying: most people crossed their fingers, shut their eyes and prayed for it all to be over. For reasons that can never quite be explained, these aristocratic young women embraced it instead.
So Unity, frantically learning German, began visiting the same restaurants as Hitler (as Deborah later put it, today she would have been arrested as a stalker). This is where that extraordinary blithe Mitford confidence played its part. She seems to have had no doubt that she could command the attention of this player on the world’s political stage: if she sat there, in all her Anglo-Aryan splendour, the Führer would recognize her for what she was. Most people (assuming that they actually wanted to meet Hitler) would have worried about what to say, how to hold his interest and seem like something more than just a power groupie. Unity had no such fears. She would chat away, as Mitfords did, and she would amuse him. As indeed she did. In June 1934 a friend summoned her to the Carlton tearooms where the small Hitler party had just arrived. She wrote to inform Diana of the sighting. The following month she wrote to Nancy, warning her that she could not possibly publish Wigs on the Green. By this time her tone, although buoyant and brisk, held a faintly manic quality; ‘No I didn’t fumble with Röhm at the Brown House’ was her PS to Nancy. The reference was to Ernst Röhm, who a couple of weeks previously had been dragged from his bed and shot on Hitler’s orders (the Brown House was the Nazi HQ in Munich). Around a hundred brown-shirted officers were executed in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, an efficient purge leaving the way clear for the ultra-loyal black-shirted SS led by Himmler. To read of this in the Mitford idiom is to come up, about as hard as is possible, against the sisters’ adamantine mystery. ‘I am so terribly sorry for the Fuhrer – you know Röhm was his oldest comrade & friend,’ wrote Unity to Diana.
Around this time Sydney and, surprisingly, Jessica visited Munich. So again Unity was receiving encouragement, rather than disapprobation; it was beginning to seem that the ‘murderous gang of pests’ had been forgiven. Either that, or the Redesdales wanted to keep an eye on their daughter (David would go to see Unity in early 1935). Sydney, who had visited Tom in Austria back in 1927, now discovered that she rather liked Germany. Nevertheless her attitude to her daughter’s hysterical saluting and so on is ambivalent; in her letter to Nancy, Unity wrote that Sydney ‘isn’t in a very good temper. I am though.’
The two Fascist girls again attended the Parteitag in 1934, after which Diana took a flat for them both in Munich. Possibly Diana was staying away from home deliberately, with the aim of bringing Mosley to heel; he was still pursuing his affair with Baba Metcalfe, cheered on from the sidelines by Irene Ravensdale. He was also charged with an allegation of ‘riotous assembly’ – in Worthing, of all places – along with the BUF member William Joyce, later known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’.36 They were acquitted in December. That same month a dance was held for Jessica, then seventeen, at Rutland Gate. The court pages calmly reported that dinner parties were hosted before the ball by Mrs Winston Churchill and Mrs Somerset Maugham, Lady Cunard and Lady Rennell; the known world still spun on its axis. In March 1935, Jessica was presented at Buckingham Palace wearing a white satin dress by Worth of Paris, which was later dyed purple and sold to help fund her life as a Communist fugitive. In tribute to her beloved Boud, who had stolen writing paper from the palace, Jessica snaffled some chocolates and hid them in her bouquet. Hons and rebels, eh. By that time beloved Boud had met her Führer: they spoke for the first time at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant in Munich on 9 February.
VIII
Hitler’s sexuality has been much speculated over, but there is no doubt that he responded favourably to women of Unity’s type. Although she still wore the red lipstick that had so distressed Putzi Hanfstaengl, in every other way her strong, fair, healthy youth was perfectly designed to please. He said, she later recalled, that she had beautiful legs. Diana almost certainly attracted Hitler in the conventional way; like most men whom she met, he found her beautiful and desirable. She in turn found him immensely good company. It should be emphasized that she was not alone in this. Hitler was courteous to women, he had old-fashioned manners of the kind to which the Mitfords were accustomed, albeit with Teutonic embellishments; and he was capable of commanding love, particularly that of unstable girls. Eva Braun, his mistress since 1932, attempted suicide twice; Hitler’s adored half-niece Geli Raubal killed herself. Years later, in a television documentary, Winifred Wagner – daughter-in-law of the composer, and the director of the Bayreuth Festival during the war – would attempt to explain the nature of her friendship with Hitler (‘Wolf’), his kindness to her children, his ‘Austrian tact and warmth’. It was quite clear that, to those inclined to see him in that way, he had the ability to step away from the Nazi backdrop – ‘I except Hitler quite generally from that whole crowd,’ said Winifred Wagner, meaning creatures like Himmler – and produce a direct stream of high-octane charm. The truth, of course, was that the Nazi backdrop was always there, a dark shimmer behind the eyes, and this was the root of the attraction. The idea of talking to the Führer as a man was thrilling because he was the Führer; he had a dual identity that could never be divided: there is nothing more exciting, to the susceptible, than a man who is more than a man. The whole time that he and Unity were sharing jokes, they remained the devil and his disciple.
Why he wanted to share jokes with her is another story. ‘Bobo said whatever came into her head, and spoke to him as she might have done to anyone, and he loved it,’ was the recollection of Clementine Mitford, and this seems to have been at least part of the truth. If Hitler could turn on charm, the Mitfords embodied it. And Hitler, it would seem, fell for Unity’s particular version. At their first meeting in February, he sent the restaurant owner to invite her to his table. Then they talked for half an hour – about Wagner, London, films (his favourite being Cavalcade)37 and so on. And one can imagine the appeal of such a girl, talking in what Nancy called the family’s ‘loud sing-song voice’, fearless in the face of somebody who operated on terror. She was like a great blonde lion cub in a pit full of black mambas: not incapable of violence herself, but without the smiling glint of malice aforethought. In the next four and a half years she and Hitler would meet some 140 times. She was treated like an honoured guest at rallies, at events such as the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and the Bayreuth Festival; she was twice invited to his retreat at Berchtesgaden. (Eva Braun was not happy about this. ‘She is known as the Walküre and looks the part,’ wrote Braun, ‘especially her legs.’) Effectively Unity was admitted to Hitler’s inner circle. They were almost certainly not lovers, although naturally this has been claimed. Diana thought that Unity would have slept with Hitler had he asked, but he never did. She later dismissed a book claiming that the pair were seen, by a maid, on a sofa at the Wagner house in Bayreuth, ‘in a compromising position’ (as Winifred Wagner made clear, Unity never actually stayed at the house38).
Recently a story emerged that Unity had given birth to Hitler’s child:39 a fascinating notion, but there was no real evidence. Anyway one has the sense that Unity was in a preferable position to a mistress, more protected because not dependent upon that mutable physical tie. She could sit and babble away as a mistress would never have dared. Her intimacy with Hitler was odder than that. She was light relief, a combination of younger sister, court jester and talisman; he may also have enjoyed the fact that his henchmen did not really want her there, but could not say so. He was impressed by Britain, fascinated by its ability to command an empire, and like so many people he was compelled by the British aristocracy. In his way he was probably impressed by Unity herself. Quite simply he felt happier with her around, calling him blissful Führer and laughing at his impersonations of Mussolini. Whereas with Diana he engaged in the cautious dance of semi-courtship, and she herself was always careful to display decorous respect, the relationship with Unity was more relaxed. In photographs she has an air of compliance, but she also looks as though she belongs next to Hitler. On one occasion he showed his temper, in what must have been a terrifying scene, and ‘thundered – you know how he can – like a machine gun’, wrote Unity to Diana. ‘It was wonderful.’
