The three youngest Mitford sisters — Unity, Jessica and Deborah — used to fantasize in their schoolroom about what they would do “when they grew up”.
Jessica, known as Decca, planned to run away and be a communist; Deborah, known as Debo, dreamed of marrying a duke; and Unity longed to go to Germany to meet Hitler. As Jessica wrote in her memoir, Hons and Rebels: “Seldom have childhood predictions materialized with greater accuracy.”
Decca became the family’s “red sheep”, Debo the Duchess of Devonshire and Unity the British person who spent more time with the Führer than any other. Unity’s long-lost diaries covering 1935 to 1939 — which have just been uncovered by the Daily Mail — reveal a blind adoration for Hitler, alongside vile antisemitic rants.
Her encounters with Hitler are written up in red, in contrast with the black and blue ink used elsewhere, to emphasize their importance. The impression is of a groupie in love with a member of a boy band. Unity: the adoring acolyte of a genocidal tyrant.
The 450-page journal describes how Unity stalked Hitler, documents 139 separate meetings between the pair including eight solo encounters, and lists the presents he gave her, from lottery tickets and flowers to a decorated tree at Christmas. Unity describes February 9, 1935 — when she first speaks to Hitler — as “the most wonderful day of my life”.
In January 1939, eight months before the outbreak of the Second World War, she wrote: “Had tea alone with the Führer. He is perfectly heavenly, in his sweetest mood.” She also visits Dachau — a brutal detention center which would later become a death camp — three times.
The story of the Mitfords, who still captivate decades after their heyday, is usually summarized thus: there’s the writer (Nancy), the lesbian (Pam), the fascist (Diana), the Nazi (Unity), the communist (Jessica), and the Duchess (Deborah). The sisters’ story is arguably mythologized through Nancy’s books, although Laura Thompson, who wrote Take Six Girls about the Mitfords, noted: “While there’s the mitigating charm and intelligence with [communist] Jessica, there’s nothing to mitigate Unity. Nobody’s ever really been able to explain Unity — the best I could come up with was that she was mentally ill and found the worst possible outlet for that.”
Unity, who was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika, was born in 1914, four days after the start of the First World War. She was the fifth of seven children born to David Freeman-Mitford, Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney, known as “Muv” (they also had a son, Tom, who was killed in the Second World War). The girls, who were related to Winston Churchill through marriage, were educated at home in three large country houses — Batsford Park, Asthall Manor and Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire — and given what Thompson described as “a freedom that today would seem almost feral”.
The impression is of a groupie in love with a member of a boy band.
Biographers suggest that Unity was desperate for a cause and a leader, and may have turned to Nazism to distinguish herself among her many siblings. Family dynamics may also have played a part: Unity was in competition with Jessica and in thrall to Diana. While Jessica carved hammer and sickles into the glass windows of the family home using a diamond ring, Unity carved swastikas. Thompson added: “The dynamic within that family is so competitive — there was the element of: ‘Diana has met Mosley, I will go one better.’”
As a young woman, Unity, known as Bobo to her family, was nearly six foot tall, handsome but with bad teeth. Deborah said her sister was always the “odd one out”, and when she appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1989, Diana told a researcher: “Of course Birdie [Unity] really was original to the last degree but the rest of us weren’t a bit.”
At first Unity kept her interest in fascism a secret from her parents, but it leaked out and aged 20, she begged to be allowed to go to Germany when Hitler came to power. “My parents put up much less opposition than might have been expected,” Jessica recalled.
Unity tracked Hitler down by reserving a nightly table in his favorite restaurant, Osteria Bavaria, and staring at him until a flunkey was sent over to find out who she was. In January 1935, she wrote in her diary: “The Führer nods and smiles at me on the way out.” By February, Hitler had invited her to join him at his table, and Unity documents how the waitress afterwards told her Hitler had never invited anyone over before. She became one of his circle, going to meetings, rallies and to the Olympic Games, and making a speech at a midsummer festival at Hesselberg. She remained in awe, however, trembling at the sight of him.
Unity briefly returned to England after six months where she bought a pistol and took up target shooting, saying that she was practicing “killing Jews”. She also translated Mein Kampf and started listening to Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, even though he was not to her taste. “It will be the first thing I have ever really suffered for the sake of the Führer,” she confided in a letter to her mother. Unity gave Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, access to the highest levels of the Third Reich and also introduced Hitler to her mother in 1935, though she was disappointed with Lady Redesdale’s reaction, writing that she “doesn’t feel his goodness and wonderfulness radiating out”.
The historian Guy Walters, author of Hunting Evil, said: “The diaries show that Unity was more infatuated than many thought. She was emotionally fixated on him. She is the Nazi Baby Reindeer — that is the effect that Hitler could have on young women.”
According to his aide Julius Schaub, Hitler, meanwhile, enjoyed the “light relief” of her company. Her diaries show that he held and kissed Unity’s hand, stroked her hair, and frequently complimented her. In January 1936, he told her: “Every time I talk to you, I get wiser.” He got her a flat in Munich which he had seized from its Jewish owners.
Unity, who was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika.
“Hitler liked having a tall, blond Aryan worshipping him and she talked about British politics, which would have been useful to him,” said the historian Lord Roberts of Belgravia.
“German security services were worried about having a Brit so close to the Führer, but quickly worked out she was a fanatical Nazi.”
The final entry in the diary is on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. In response, Unity shot herself in the head in Munich’s English Garden park. She was left brain damaged, with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old. Hitler visited her in hospital and is said to have offered to give her German nationality, but Unity returned to Britain and died in 1948 aged 33. Her story will again be explored in Outrageous, a UKTV and Britbox series about the Mitfords, which will be broadcast in April.
While the Daily Mail did not reveal how the diaries had come into its possession — saying only that they had been held by the same family for the past 40 years — historians have their theories. After Unity shot herself, her Hungarian pre-war lover Count Almasy retrieved some of her possessions, and it is thought that the diaries may have spent most of the past 85 years behind the Iron Curtain. As the diaries are unpublished, they remain in copyright until 2039.
Although there was initially some skepticism about their veracity, the biographer Mary S Lovell, who wrote The Mitford Girls, said that she had been shown pages of a similar, likely earlier diary of Unity’s by Debo, who died in 2014. “This is very typical of Unity’s writing — she was never going to set the world on fire,” Lovell said. “I suspect Muv bought many of these diaries for the girls, covered in very similar leather.”
The Mitford Estate said: “Unity’s youthful infatuation with Hitler has already been extensively documented in biographies, and her fervent support of Nazism is well-detailed in her own letters. Among the six Mitford sisters, Unity is arguably the least compelling figure. Her life, for all intents and purposes, came to a halt at the age of 25 when a suicide attempt left her permanently brain damaged. Her sisters, whose views spanned the political spectrum, outlived her by decades and left behind a more significant legacy of writings and achievements.”
Rosamund Urwin is the media editor at The Sunday Times
