8
Unity and the Führer
(1934–5)

In the spring of 1934 the Rodds, back from their honeymoon, attended several BUF rallies, and even bought black shirts. ‘Prod looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ Nancy wrote years later to Evelyn Waugh, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’1 Prod had flirted briefly with Fascism at Oxford, before transferring his political allegiance to the Labour Party, and for a few months early in their marriage he and Nancy supported Mosley’s movement by paying a subscription. With hindsight, however, and bearing in mind Nancy’s lifelong support of socialism, it is more likely that they were actually supporting Diana, though they must have been interested in hearing what Mosley had to say. Equally importantly, Nancy was gathering material for another book. Later that year, from her small house at Chiswick, she began working on Wigs on the Green, probably the least known of her novels. This time the leading character was Unity. One cannot say it was ‘Unity to the life’ because Nancy’s characters were always larger than life, unmerciful caricatures, but it was clearly Unity to everyone who knew her, despite Nancy’s disclaimer that ‘all characters in this book are drawn from the author’s imagination’.2

‘BRITONS, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion!’ cried Eugenia Malmains in thrilling tones. She stood on an overturned wash-tub on Chalford village green and harangued about a dozen aged yokels. Her straight hair, cut in a fringe, large pale-blue eyes . . . well-proportioned limbs and classical features, combined with a certain fanaticism of gesture to give her the aspect of a modern Joan of Arc . . .3

This was guaranteed to make the sisters, at least, scream with laughter, for to their merriment, and to the astonishment of the postmistress, Unity had taken to appearing in Swinbrook’s only shop (Chalford was Swinbrook to the life) and throwing up her hand in a smart Nazi salute before ordering a twopenny chocolate bar.

‘The Union Jack Movement is a youth movement,’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old . . . We see nothing admirable in that debating society of aged and corrupt men called Parliament which muddies our great empire into wars or treaties . . . casting away its glorious colonies . . . And all according to each vacillating whim of some octogenarian statesman’s mistress—’

At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd . . . ‘Eugenia, my child,’ she said brokenly. ‘Do get off that tub . . . Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’

‘Go away, Nanny,’ said Eugenia . . . The old lady again plucked at Eugenia’s skirt. This time, however, Eugenia turned and roared at her, ‘Get out you filthy Pacifist, get out and take your yellow razor gang with you.’

It was all there, TPOM and TPOF, the insults that Decca and Unity hurled at each other in pseudo-earnestness, a brilliant parody of the BUF anthem sung to the tune of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’; and sly little digs at Fascism. ‘“I really don’t quite know what an Aryan is.” “Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes . . .”’4

When Decca came home from Paris for the Easter break she was fascinated to hear the grown-ups tut-tutting about the latest prank of one of the unacceptable Romilly cousins, Esmond. A year younger than Decca he had run away from Wellington College where he had been running a left-wing magazine called Out of Bounds and because of his relationship to Winston Churchill the newspapers were on to it. ‘Mr Churchill’s 15 year old Nephew Vanishes’ ran a typical headline; others referred to him more luridly as ‘Churchill’s Red Nephew’. It was said that he was under the influence of a group of London Communists, but his mother told reporters coolly, ‘We are not worried about his safety. We have a good idea where he is . . .’5 There was a great deal of family sympathy for his parents for having to put up with such appalling behaviour, but Sydney blamed Nellie for it.

Listening to the conversation of the grown-ups, Decca thrilled to the exploits of this swashbuckling cousin whom she’d never been allowed to meet, although once she had missed him by only days, when she had gone to stay at Chartwell and found the Churchill nannies agog with stories of his wickedness. In the previous autumn, while she was settling herself in Paris, Esmond had declared himself a pacifist and had wrecked the Armistice service in the school’s chapel by inserting pacifist leaflets in the prayer books. Diana has sometimes been held responsible for indirectly setting Decca on a left-wing path, by steering Unity towards her right-wing allegiance. But it was Nancy who was the biggest influence in Decca’s life. ‘Watching her,’ Decca wrote, ‘all through her engagement to Hamish, and [seeing] how she loathed Swinbrook and longed to be free of Muv etc, her fate – to be stuck in that life because she hadn’t any way of escape being without money even after she started writing – was a huge influence on me, then and ever [afterwards].’6 She was determined not to be stuck at home like Nancy, obliged to marry to escape.

There was one last sitting for the annual family photograph taken in front of the house, with everyone in their usual position, Unity with Ratular on her shoulder, Diana, Debo and Nancy clutching dogs, David looking handsomely serious with his thick hair now turning white, Sydney expressionless but revealing that the girls took their beauty from both sides of the family, and Tom in a bright lumber jacket. It was the last time they would all gather like this for a ritual photograph. Then Sydney departed, taking with her Decca, Idden and Unity. Decca and Idden were about to embark on their final term at the Sorbonne, but before leaving them Sydney spoke firmly with Madame Paulain, making it clear that her daughter and niece required their bedlinen to be changed more often than once every three weeks. Then she departed with Unity for Munich, to oversee the settling-in process at Baroness Laroche’s.

The Baroness, whom Diana remembers as a charming woman, took her girls en pension. They joined her for lunch and dinner at which the food was always delicious, and all conversation was conducted in German.7 They were given formal German lessons by a governess, Frau Baum, and when Unity made her first appearance in May she had already missed the first few. She wore her black shirt and BUF badge to classes but these emblems had no power to shock as they did in England as Nazi emblems were common everywhere. Her fellow students were a year or two younger than Unity, and were being ‘finished’ prior to coming out. Indeed, one or two were already discreetly dating young ‘storms’, as they called the storm-troopers. Because she was already out Unity did not have to attend the deportment classes, but she did not waste her free time; she worked hard at her German for she had a good incentive to do so. Within weeks of her arrival she had conceived a plan, and begun what was to be her daily programme for the next year or so. She discovered from Frau Baum, a keen Hitler supporter, that Hitler sometimes took lunch in a restaurant called Osteria Bavaria. Unity’s objective was to meet him, but she had discovered that to communicate with him she would need to speak German for he spoke no English. So she concentrated on her studies, and made a few exploratory sorties to the Osteria, and to the Carlton tearooms, which Hitler also patronized.

In June, she finally got to see him. Derek Hill, a young English painter who was visiting Munich, was an old friend of Unity and was in the Carlton tearooms one evening with his mother and aunt when the Führer arrived. There was no pomp when he attended a restaurant, except that he was always accompanied by several henchmen, or members of his inner circle, and the inevitable bodyguard. The party simply came in unannounced and sat down quietly, keeping themselves to themselves. Derek Hill immediately phoned Unity, who jumped into a taxi and sped to the tearoom. ‘I went and sat down with them [the Hill party] and there was the Führer opposite,’ she wrote to Diana. Hill noticed that Unity was trembling so violently with excitement that he had to steady her cup.

Three weeks after Unity’s first sighting of Hitler the Night of the Long Knives took place, when Ernst Roehm and over a hundred officers of the brown-shirted SA (Sturm Abteilungen, storm-troopers) were brutally assassinated on Hitler’s orders. Some were shot on their front doorsteps, others were formally executed or hacked to death in secret, some – thinking the attack was part of an anti-Hitler plot – died screaming, ‘Heil, Hitler.’ Like many of those killed, Roehm had been an old comrade of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and had helped him to power. But the SA had been a problem for some time, with Roehm refusing to accept Hitler’s right to give direct orders to SA troops. It seems unlikely that he was guilty of plotting against Hitler, as was claimed at the time, but was disposed of because he posed a threat to the more disciplined black-shirted SS (Schutz Staffeln, Protection Squad) troops, whose leader, Heinrich Himmler, made his rival’s death the price of future co-operation. Hitler called personally on his former friend to arrest him, saying that he alone could arrest a chief of staff. Unity wrote breathlessly to Diana about the massacre, which had shocked Munich burghers to the core.

I am terribly sorry for the Führer – you know Roehm was his oldest friend and comrade, the only one that called him ‘du’ in public . . . it must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Roehm himself and tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines8 and found him in bed with a boy. Did that get into the English papers? Poor Hitler.9

The words said to have been used by Hitler when he arrested his old friend became a catchphrase among the girls at Baroness Laroche’s, ‘Schuft, du bist verhaftet [Wretch, you are under lock and key],’ but Unity was unable to see the funny side of this, and was upset that her beloved Führer had been in danger.10

It was a subtly changed Unity who returned to Swinbrook for the summer. Photographs show that she had a poise and a singular beauty, where since the age of thirteen she had merely looked fair and awkward. She and Decca squabbled as usual about politics, but they were loving squabbles, and they sat down cheerfully afterwards to discuss what they would do should either of them be placed in a position where they had to give orders for the execution of the other. Only one thing marred Unity’s summer: she received a postcard from Tom, who, having grown up with six sisters, had learned a thing or two about teasing. He was in Bayreuth, he wrote, and he had been invited to supper with Hitler and Goering. She believed him and was miserably jealous for days, until she heard that it was untrue. But she was so enthusiastic about her life in Munich that Sydney decided to take Decca and Idden there for a short holiday in September after the beginning of Unity’s autumn term.

Unity went back early, in August, so that she could attend the 1934 Parteitag and Diana joined her there a few weeks later. Putzi Hanfstaengl refused to help them, saying that their excessive make-up embarrassed him and, besides, there was not a ticket to be had for the rally. If they went to Nuremberg, he warned, they would find every bed reserved and would end up spending their nights sitting in the railway station. The sisters decided to go anyway and found it, just as he had predicted, crammed. They sat in a café and Unity was thrilled simply to be there. ‘Do be glad we came,’ she kept repeating happily to Diana. But luck was with them: an old man with whom they shared a table in a beer garden was wearing an unusual emblem. Unity engaged him in conversation, curious about his badge, and it turned out that he was one of the first members of the Nazi Party and his card bore the number 100. It entitled him to various privileges and, impressed with the enthusiasm of the English girls, he arranged accommodation and passes to the stadium for them.

Diana’s motive for visiting Germany at this point was not simply to attend the Parteitag. She had already begun to do what Professor Lindemann had suggested and was learning to speak German. It was not possible for her to be away from Mosley or her two boys11 for extended periods, to learn as Unity was learning, so she took some Berlitz courses in London and was now looking to improve on this base. She enrolled in a short course at the university run for foreigners, due to begin in November, and returned home in the meantime. In November she moved into a flat that Unity had found just off the Ludwigstrasse. It was full of Biedermayer furniture, centrally heated and the rent included a good cook. Unity was no longer staying with the Baroness and had taken a room at a hostel, a Studentheim, for women university students, which she always referred to as ‘the heim’. She left it and moved in with Diana.12

With the help of Putzi Hanfstaengl Diana obtained a press card, which enabled the sisters to get into meetings at which Hitler was to speak. Whenever her classes allowed she joined Unity at the Osteria. Otherwise Unity went there alone. Initially she persuaded friends to accompany her, but after a while she was content to eat a light lunch on her own and read a book to pass the long hours of waiting. She was rewarded and saw Hitler on a number of occasions, which was always a terrific thrill for her. When she was not waiting for Hitler she and Diana were fond of visiting the Pinakothek (Munich’s Museum of Art, now the Alte Pinakothek, one of the leading art galleries in the world), the palaces, museums and parks such as the Englischer Garten, and they wandered around the old and new parts of the city, the ‘new’ parts designed by King Ludwig I over a century earlier in the neo-classic style. Ludwig bankrupted himself and the city to bring about his ideals, and eventually lost his throne because of his affair with the dancer Lola Montez. Diana had enjoyed the city in the summer, but found it just as attractive in the winter: its proximity to the mountains made it possible for many of its citizens to be on the ski slopes in under an hour, and at weekends there was almost a holiday atmosphere. ‘The icy air out of doors had a special smell so that had one been set down there blindfold one would have known at once it was Munich. Possibly the smell was of brewing, combined with the little cigars the men smoked.’13

But whatever they did their timetable was subject to any possibility of seeing or hearing Hitler. The two young women have been referred to in recent years, crudely, as ‘Hitler groupies’ and because of what Hitler subsequently became those who admired him were inevitably to be reviled. Then, however, he was not universally regarded as a monster, but as a statesman in whom everyone was interested, leading an administration with a new and radical form of government that appeared to be working well. Few intelligent English visitors to Germany in the thirties would have turned down an opportunity to see or speak to Hitler. Numerous visitors who would become pillars of the British establishment or distinguished in the fields of literature, art, entertainment and politics tried every possible method to meet him, including courting Unity and Diana when it was known that they had access to him. And Diana, because of her allegiance to Mosley and the British Fascist movement, had reason to be more interested than most.

In September Sydney, Decca and Idden joined Unity. It was Sydney’s first visit to Germany and she wanted to see things for herself, and also to try to moderate Unity’s passionate enthusiasm. She was agreeably surprised to find, instead of the heavy, dark, ugly buildings and furnishings that everyone had told her to expect, great beauty and charm. She thought that nothing could have been lovelier than the small baroque theatre in Bayreuth, and the gilded, pastel-coloured churches of Bavaria seemed to invite the worship of God. However, in her written account of that visit one of her chief memories was of an almost daily squabble with Unity. Outside the Feldherrnhalle a plaque commemorated the 1923 putsch when several of Hitler’s closest comrades had been killed. Two SS men stood guard beside it and everyone who passed this spot saluted as a sign of respect. It soon became obvious to Sydney that no matter where she and the girls went, they always seemed to pass it, whereupon Unity would throw up her hand in an almost theatrical Nazi salute. Sydney was slightly embarrassed by this, and as a foreigner she certainly did not feel obliged to salute. When she insisted that they avoid the building Unity simply went off on her own, leaving her to find her own way back to the hotel. If it proved unavoidable Sydney would take the opposite side of the street, leaving Unity to make her salute, but there was no animosity about this. ‘We met at the other side [of the building], with great laughter,’ Sydney wrote.14

We do not know Decca’s reaction to Munich for although photographs of the visit survive, she never mentioned it in her memoirs, or in any surviving letters and papers. She did say in Hons and Rebels that in 1935, the year after her visit to Germany, it occurred to her ‘over and over again’ to pretend to be a convert to Fascism, so that she could accompany Unity to Germany and meet Hitler face to face. ‘As we were being introduced,’ she fantasized, ‘I would whip out a pistol and shoot him dead.’15 But that was after she had read The Brown Book of Hitler Terror,16 one of the first testaments to the horrors lurking at the heart of the Nazi regime. Like Cry Havoc, Beverly Nichols’ indictment of the First World War, it had a major impact on Decca. It explained the new anti-Semitic laws in Germany, and how they were being implemented, while pictures showed the effects of treatment meted out to Jews by storm-troopers. At that stage it was beatings and brutal handling, but the book also prophesied what would happen if the regime continued unchecked. There was little demand for such works in England and they were largely distributed through left-wing bookshops and Communist channels.

Decca, now as strongly aligned to the Communist movement as Unity was to Fascism, read the book carefully, accepted it absolutely and was consumed with righteous anger. She brought it to the attention of David and Sydney, who told her what the majority of the population would have told her at that time: that they believed the book to be Communist-inspired propaganda and an exaggeration. That she could not make them see the dangers that to her were so evident made her sick at heart. Every day she read more about such horrors in the Daily Worker and in her left-wing pamphlets, and increasingly she spent a lot of time crying in her room from frustration that she could do nothing constructive, or even make the family see the dreadful problems. Much later she stated in an interview, ‘People say they didn’t know what was happening to the Jews until after the war, but they did know because it was all there.’ She referred to the books Cry Havoc and The Brown Book of Hitler Terror which had made such an impression on her. But, equally, those who supported Communism and Russia must have known about the millions of people being killed by Stalin in the thirties. Vague reports of these atrocities filtered into England but were regarded by the regime’s supporters as anti-Communist propaganda.

On days when she felt more cheerful, although she still experienced pangs of guilt because such activities were contrary to the class struggle, Decca looked forward to being a débutante. She imagined it would be a sort of extension of her experiences in Paris, and at the end she would be regarded – finally – as ‘grown-up’ and therefore free to run away. But the reality of being a débutante was less exciting than the anticipation: Decca found that Sydney still treated her as a child, and chaperoned her carefully from Rutland Gate to a seemingly endless series of lunches, tea parties, cocktail parties, dinners and dances. None of the ‘chinless wonders’ or ‘debs’ delights’, as the young men were known, interested Decca in the slightest. There is a picture of her in her presentation gown with extravagant train and court feathers; the dress is white satin with a row of pearl buttons down the front, which are twisted to one side and caught in the sash. She has made little effort with her appearance for the occasion and looks frumpily and balefully at the camera. There was an explanation for this disarray: recalling that Unity had grabbed some writing-paper when at the Palace, Decca felt she should do something. At the buffet following her presentation, she took some chocolates to eat later, and hid them in her bouquet. Sydney took her and Nancy, who was being presented again ‘on her marriage’, straight from the Palace to the photo studio. To Decca’s dismay when she picked up her bouquet to pose, the chocolates tumbled out all over the floor just as the photographer was about to shoot.

However, the event that most coloured Decca’s Season as a débutante – she had only one – concerned her wicked younger cousin, Esmond Romilly, who had been in the news again. Having been expelled from Wellington he was now ensconced in a left-wing bookshop in Bloomsbury from where he was editing and publishing his Out of Bounds magazine, distributing it to public schools. He had not always been a Communist: he had recently converted from ultra-Conservatism. This had come about when he was asked to attack the Russian government in a school debate. He wrote to his uncle Winston, who replied that he was too busy to give detailed information and advised that the point to stress was that the Russians had murdered millions of people during the revolution. After blundering around for a while, confusing pacifism with Communism, Esmond came across the Daily Worker on his way to Dieppe on holiday. That put him on track and he became a daily subscriber. From this source he learned ‘that there was another world as well as the one in which I lived’. His own magazine was bright, informative and cheeky. The fact that it was banned in many public schools gave it a considerable cachet and he triumphantly emblazoned the names of those establishments on the front page. But he was clever enough to realize that he would not gain new readers through political editorials alone, and to increase circulation he included articles on subjects that were of primary importance to public-school boys . . . bullying by masters and older boys, the fagging system, and obscure hints at masturbation and homosexuality. In an article on how a thirteen-year-old new boy might expect to be warned by masters of what lay in store, Esmond wrote from his own experience: his housemaster had lined up the ‘wet bobs’ and explained incomprehensibly, ‘Men! There are men here who will try to take advantage of a man because a man is a new man. That’s all I have to say to you.’ There was even an article on that most shocking of subjects, co-education.17 Needless to say, underground copies of the magazine were soon to be found in every public school in the land and, once again, the national newspapers got to hear of it.

Through gossip about his exploits, Esmond became a sort of hero to Decca. Although a year younger than her, he was an open rebel doing all the things that – had she the courage – she would have liked to do. She wished that somehow she could contrive to meet him. She might not have expected the apparition who greeted Philip Toynbee, though, who on 7 June 1934 ran away from Rugby School to join Esmond, fired with enthusiasm for the Communist cause by Out of Bounds. ‘At this point,’ Toynbee wrote of Esmond, ‘he was at the height of his intolerant fanaticism, a bristling rebel against home, school, society . . . the world.’ He had been living semi-rough in the basement of the shop on what he could earn from his magazine sales, sleeping on a camp bed, and smoking endless Craven A cigarettes. Nellie had washed her hands of him, unable to cope with an ideology that was opposed to everything in which she believed. ‘He was dirty and ill-dressed, immensely strong for his age and size; his flat face gave the impression of being deeply scarred, and his eyes flared and smouldered as we talked.’18

After the 1935 Season ended, Decca hung around at Swinbrook, thoroughly miserable, waiting for mealtimes. Now she was depressed and unhappy, and everyone could see it. Sydney put it down to a late attack of adolescent misery and was sorry for her daughter, but any attempt to offer sympathy resulted either in floods of tears or in loud recriminations from Decca that she had not been allowed to have a proper education and therefore could not go to university. Being ‘grown up’ seemed to have no particular advantage at Swinbrook, and having had her year in France, and made her début, without attracting an ‘eligible’, Decca had nothing to do, and nothing whatever to look forward to. She had almost fifty pounds in her running-away account but she could not see the best way of using this to give herself a future. It seems that her boredom and unhappiness at this point coloured all memories of her earlier life at Swinbrook. This is the only possible explanation for differences between extant papers and the testimony of her contemporaries, and what she wrote of her childhood in Hons and Rebels.

Sydney, though by no means won over to the Nazi regime by her visit, was enthusiastic about what she had seen in Germany, which prompted David to visit the country of his old foe, the Hun. In January 1935 he took Unity back after the Christmas break. She had stayed with Diana in the flat until the end of the previous term, but now she returned to ‘the heim’, and David stayed at a hotel. One day while they were lunching at the Osteria, Hitler put in an appearance. Unity was overjoyed. They did not speak, of course, but David was impressed. ‘Farve has been completely won over by him,’ she reported to Diana, after David left for home, ‘and admits himself to being in the wrong until now.’19

Meanwhile, Unity had made progress towards her dream scenario, and in February 1935 she met Hitler face to face at last. Her Führer-watching had become more scientific by then: she scanned the newspapers for his movements. If he was not in Munich, or if he had a specific appointment during the afternoon, then it was pointless wasting time at the Osteria. She made friends with some of the guards at the Brown House (the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich), where she was a regular caller, and there she received odd snippets of information about when Hitler was expected. When he appeared she made small attempts to be noticed, such as dropping her book. Eventually this paid off. Hitler became used to seeing the tall, Nordic-looking girl – often alone – sitting in the same seat every time he visited the Osteria, and saw that her attention was fixed constantly on him. To her huge delight he began to nod to her sometimes as he passed her table. Eventually he became curious enough, exactly as she had hoped, to enquire of the restaurant owner, Herr Deutelmoser, who she was.

The day of 9 February 1935 was, Unity wrote to David, though she claimed she was still almost too shaky to write properly, ‘the most wonderful and beautiful of my life.’ About ten minutes after she arrived at the Osteria, she wrote, Hitler spoke to Herr Deutelmoser and the two men glanced across at her. Deutelmoser walked to her table and said, ‘The Führer would like to speak to you.’ Unity continued, in an 800-word letter,

I got up and went over to him, and he stood up and saluted and shook hands and introduced me to all the others and asked me to sit down next to him. I sat and talked for about half an hour . . . I can’t tell you of all the things we talked about . . . I told him he ought to come to England and he said he would love to but he was afraid there would be a revolution if he did. He asked if I had ever been to [a Wagner festival at] Bayreuth and I said no but I should like to, and he said to the other men that they should remember that the next time.20

Then they spoke of London, which he felt he knew well, he said, from his architectural studies. They went on to discuss films (Hitler said he considered Cavalcade the best he had ever seen), the new road systems being constructed all over Germany, the Great War and the Parteitag. He signed a postcard to her, writing in German: ‘To Fraulein Unity Mitford as a friendly memento of Germany and Adolf Hitler’. Then he pocketed the slip of paper on which she had written her name for him to copy, and left after instructing the manager to put Unity’s meal on his bill. ‘After all that,’ Unity continued in her letter to her father, ‘you can imagine what I feel like. I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying. I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world . . . you may think this is hysterical. I’m sure Muv will, but when you remember that for me, he is the greatest man of all time, you must admit I am lucky even to have set eyes on him, let alone to have sat and talked to him.’

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.

Later in the month Unity went to visit friends at Hayling Island. They were out sailing when she arrived and Unity was greeted and welcomed by their father, an ‘old-style Times correspondent and a great Liberal’28 who, having left Unity to unpack and settle in, went off to do some work. Hearing the sound of gunfire in the garden he went to investigate. Unity was firing at targets with her pistol. When he asked her what she was doing she told him she was practising to kill Jews. Her friend reported, ‘Father almost left the house at once.’

Unity’s pistol was a pearl-handled 6.35 Walther, which she sometimes wore in a small holster. Her biographer was unable to verify whether Hitler had given it to her, as Paulette Helleu claimed Unity had once told her,29 or whether she had simply purchased it to wear for effect with her Nazi regalia. One friend thought she had bought it during a trip to Belgium and this seems more likely. Although Hitler was keen that women should be able to defend themselves and know how to handle guns and shoot properly, a few years earlier he had suffered a significant personal loss when his half-niece, Geli, generally believed to have been the love of his life, committed suicide by shooting herself with his gun.

To escape the censorious atmosphere at home Unity went to stay with Diana, but she made no attempt to keep a low profile while in London. There were several incidents during which she deliberately antagonized small crowds gathered around socialist speakers at Speaker’s Corner, calling out ‘Heil, Hitler’ and giving the Nazi salute.30 She was furious when Nancy teased her that she had done some research into the family history and had discovered a great-grandmother Fish, who made them one-sixteenth Jewish.

During a visit to Swinbrook with Diana, Unity produced an autographed photograph of Julius Streicher, which she proposed to display prominently in the DFD to offset a bust of Lenin that Decca had recently installed. This was too much for Decca, and she objected violently, referring to Streicher as a filthy butcher. In her autobiography she made much of the argument: ‘“But, darling,”’ Diana drawled, opening her enormous blue eyes, “Streicher is a kitten.”’31 Diana’s short response to this, when asked about it some sixty years later, was ‘A kitten? Rubbish!’32