‘You are always close to me’: Unity Mitford’s souvenirs of Hitler

The English aristocracy has had its fair share of misfits, and one of the most far-fetched was Unity Mitford. No novelist would dare invent the story of a young woman of 19 who settles in Germany in 1933, determines to captivate Hitler, and succeeds. Eva Braun, the long-term mistress whom Hitler married in the last days of his life, gives way in her diary to jealousy and spite. There is evidence provided either by Unity herself or Nazi officials that Hitler held her hand, stroked her hair and called her ‘Kind’ (child). During his preparation for world war in the summer of 1939, he found time to arrange for a Jewish couple to be dispossessed from their apartment in Munich in order for Unity to have it. He also paid various expenses.

My biography of Unity began when Jessica Mitford gave me some letters written by her sister, and described how Unity and Hitler had been in the habit of drawing up lists of English men and women to be summarily shot after the Germans had invaded and conquered the country. Was Unity a genuine Nazi, or merely fantasising a Vichy England in which she would come into her own? Could she have imagined herself as the Hon. Mrs Adolf Hitler? Jessica had also done her best to be a misfit. I went to Paris to interview the more astringent Nancy Mitford, for whom her family was a running comedy of manners. I should write the book, she said, adding that the sisters wouldn’t like it.

First came Lady Mosley (née Diana Mitford). She told me that I was too young to understand Unity or Nazism, but would live long enough to see statues of Hitler and Goebbels in the capital cities of Europe. Demonstrators today holding placards with the slogans ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘Jews to the gas’ may be proving her prophetic.