Unity Mitford’s five-year secret diary comes to an abrupt end on September 1, 1939. At that point, she’s forced to accept the unthinkable – war between Britain and her beloved Nazi Germany is now inevitable.
She spends the following day writing letters to her family and to at least one friend.
Here, we piece together from numerous sources the extraordinary events that follow…
1939-1940
Sunday, September 3, 1939
At 11.15am, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces Britain is now at war with Germany.
Soon afterwards, Unity visits the British consul, leaving him a letter to her parents, in which she says: ‘Perhaps when the war is over everyone will be friends again . . . I hope you will see the Fuhrer often when it is over.’
Towards midday, she drives to the Ministry of the Interior in Munich, where she hands Hitler’s second adjutant, Julius Schaub, a mysteriously heavy envelope, and immediately departs.
Hitler sympathiser Unity Mitford shot herself in an attempted suicide when war was declared. On January 3, 1940, she arrived in Folkestone on a steamer from Germany and was brought ashore on a stretcher to be met by her father, Lord Redesdale
She then drives to the Englischer Garten, the Munich park where she’s spent many happy hours walking her dog, soaking in the sun or cavorting with a lover.
Schaub busies himself with more important correspondence before finally opening the sealed envelope. It’s a letter of farewell.
As Schaub records later in a memo: Unity has written that as ‘she could not bear a war between England and Germany, she had to put an end to herself’.
Any doubts about her intentions are dispelled when he realises the envelope also contains Unity’s most treasured possessions: her signed portrait of Hitler and her gold swastika badge, with the Fuhrer’s signature on the back.
‘Everything was set in motion to prevent misfortune,’ Schaub writes. ‘But Unity had vanished. She must have driven off very fast in her car.
‘A few hours later the police discovered a young girl on a bench in the Englischer Garten who had shot herself in the temple. At first the casualty could not be identified as she was not carrying any papers. Only some hours later was she recognised as Unity Mitford.’
Her limp body is initially found by a friend of Erna Hanfstaengl, Professor Honigschmid – an atomic scientist – who slightly contradicts Schaub’s account.
Erna, once a close friend of Unity, recalls: ‘My friend had gone into the Englischer Garten not long after midday. He was 100 yards in or so, when he heard a small report and saw a figure slump down on a bench.
The ambulance taking Ms Mitford to her father’s home broke down outside Folkestone. She had to return to the hotel in the town where Lord Redesdale had been staying with her mother and sister, Deborah, while waiting for her to arrive from Germany
‘He ran up and recognised Unity. He called for help. The police picked her up – they pushed her at once into a car. They thought she was dead already, and brought her immediately to the anatomie [for a post-mortem]. There she showed signs of life, so they rushed her on to the clinic.’
After studying an X-ray, doctors decide it’s too dangerous to extract the bullet and bone fragments in Unity’s head.
Hitler, now focused on the Nazi invasion of Poland, hears the news in a phone call from Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich and interior minister of Bavaria.
The Fuhrer immediately orders a news blackout on Unity’s suicide attempt. He also issues orders for her to have the best treatment at a Munich clinic from the best doctors – which he’ll pay for himself.
Army officer Gerhard Engel (later Hitler’s adjutant) recalls: ‘His whole entourage formed up in front of him to ask forgiveness for having been so suspicious of her, and his eyes watered, and he said, “You see, she was nothing but an idealist. She couldn’t have put off the war.” ’
Henny Schirach, wife of the Hitler Youth leader, recalls: ‘Hitler was very upset, and he also worried about her dog (a Great Dane Unity called Rebell or Boy) asking everyone what should be done with it. He gave orders that someone be with Unity all day and every day.
‘Frau Schaub [Wilma, wife of Hitler’s second adjutant] visited her the most. I went two or three times but I saw her only when she was completely unconscious. Quite without a scar. No blood.’
Rest of September 1939
Unity’s married lover, Count Janos Almasy, is at Bernstein, his castle in Austria, when her friend Rudi Simolin phones him with the news. She tells him not to come – there’s no point, as Unity is unconscious.
On Monday, September 4, he phones the clinic in Munich for further news. On the same day, Rudi finds a letter from Unity, enclosing the keys to her flat.
‘In it she had written that she had to kill herself and what I ought to do with her money and possessions. It was her will. I went to the flat, and it had already been sealed.’
Rudi then goes to see Gauleiter Adolf Wagner, who tells her that Unity’s parents have been informed and her sister Diana is expected at any minute.
‘I learnt only after the war that this was not true,’ says Rudi.
Unity’s furniture will be stored until 1949, when her mother comes to collect it. Hitler pays for the storage until his suicide in 1945.
Wagner provides petrol for Rudi to visit Unity every day in the clinic, part of the university medical faculty. It takes a week before she recognises Rudi, but her words are muddled. Rudi also phones Janos or sends him a telegram every day.
‘Unity never spoke about whether she was upset or regretted what she had done,’ Rudi recalls. ‘ “That was a terrible fall I had,” she would say. “That’s why I’m ill.”
‘Unity made another attempt at suicide, trying to swallow her swastika brooch [a gift from Hitler] – one of the Ordensschwestern [nuns] told me that.’
Julius Schaub, Hitler’s adjutant, corroborates this: after Unity’s gold swastika is returned to her, he reports, she waits until she’s alone in her room to swallow it. A doctor has to use a probe to remove it.
Princess Tima Auersperg, a friend of Janos, also visits Unity at the clinic. ‘She said over and over again, “Now please tell me who I am”. I tried to talk about the old days [at Bernstein with Janos] but couldn’t. It was awful.’
Some time after the shooting, Magda Goebbels (wife of Hitler’s propaganda chief) tells Kukuli von Arent (wife of Hitler’s favourite stage designer) that Unity left a note for Hitler in which she wrote: ‘Be merciful to my people.’
There is no other evidence that Unity wrote this – but Kukuli is quite confident she did. ‘Magda usually knew what went on in the Reichskanzlei [Reich chancellery],’ she says.
There is no other evidence that Unity wrote this – but Kukuli is quite confident she did. ‘Magda usually knew what went on in the Reichskanzlei [Reich chancellery],’ she says.
October 1939
Janos – wary of the long arm of the Gestapo – writes a guarded letter to Unity’s parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, merely informing them that she’s been ill in Munich and may need an operation. This is Muv and Farve’s first news about their daughter, trapped behind the curtain of war.
He writes a second letter two weeks later, saying an operation may not be necessary after all. (In her own journal, Muv seems to attribute these letters to Janos’s brother Lazlo.)
Around this time, Janos – who dabbles in astrology – casts Hitler’s horoscope. He warns friends that the Fuhrer’s horoscope predicts catastrophes, collapse and death by Hitler’s own hand.
Lady Redesdale, still a committed Nazi supporter, writes to her local MP, complaining about attacks on Hitler.
November 1939
Hitler visits Unity in hospital on the 8th. His adjutant Schaub, who accompanies him, writes in a memo: ‘He was deeply shaken by the fearful alteration to the beautiful, lively girl.
‘Unity lay thoroughly apathetic and lamed in bed, and took no notice of the visitors – whom she barely recognised, nor of the flowers they had brought. Hitler remained only a few minutes.’
This account is contradicted by Dr Reiser, one of Unity’s doctors. Hitler had been warned that Unity couldn’t speak, he says, ‘but she found her tongue with him all right.
‘Of course we asked what she said, and he answered, “She would like to go back to England.” And then Hitler said he would set things in motion so that somehow she was able to travel home.’
On the 9th, a British foreign office official writes to Lord and Lady Redesdale to tell them Unity is in hospital in Munich and well on the road to recovery.
He adds: ‘According to information received by the [United States] embassy, your daughter had attempted to do away with herself on 3 September.’
This is how the Redesdales learn at last of Unity’s botched suicide attempt. They’ve been kept in the dark until the day after Hitler’s visit – timing that’s unlikely to be coincidental.
Unity’s sister Decca later reflects: ‘It always seemed to me that this last really conscious act of her life, the attempt at self-destruction, was a sort of recognition of the extraordinary contradictions in which she found herself, that the declaration of war merely served as the occasion for her action, which would in any case have been inevitable sooner or later.’
December 1939
On December 1, the Daily Mirror reports that Unity has been shot by the Gestapo. According to their story, she’d apparently ‘demanded to return to England after stormy scenes with
Hitler, and the German secret police feared she might “talk”.’ Since then, Unity has ‘simply disappeared.’
She’s actually still in the clinic, suffering from severe vertigo and partial paralysis.
Janos pays his first visit to her there on December 20.
On Hitler’s orders, an ‘ambulance’ railway carriage is prepared, and Unity is transported on December 23 – with a doctor and nurse in attendance – to Bern in neutral Switzerland.
Janos accompanies them, having been promised that all his expenses will be paid by the Ministry of the Interior.
Some of Unity’s clothes and personal possessions have been loaded on to the train – ‘but nothing Nazi,’ says Rudi. Unity’s large collection of photos, including many Hitler gave her of them together, will be lost or destroyed during the war.
The Redesdales, meanwhile, have been asked to send a British doctor to accompany Unity back to England.
At the railway station in Bern, an ambulance is waiting to take her to the city’s Salem hospital. But there’s no sign of an English doctor. Janos phones Lord Redesdale, who says there have been problems obtaining the doctor’s visa.
In Salem hospital, Unity is surrounded by flowers sent by Hitler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and several Gauleiters. ‘She has been singing Hitler’s praises,’ the professor in charge tells the doctor who accompanied Unity from Munich.
On December 24, she speaks on the phone to her family in London. ‘When are you coming to fetch me?’ she asks. To Lady Redesdale, she sounds like her old self.
All four episodes of the Daily Mail’s new podcast, Hitler’s English Girlfriend: The Secret Diary of Unity Mitford, are available now
Muv and Unity’s youngest sister Debo travel together through France and Switzerland, arriving on December 29 to collect Unity. Janos leaves Bern on the same day. He will never see his English lover again.
Debo remembers: ‘Our first sight of her was a shock: her face was the same greyish-brown as her hair, which was matted and almost solid with dried blood. Even her eyes looked different: one glance showed that the lights had gone out.’
January 1940
Accompanied by Muv, Debo and a nurse, Unity travels home to England via train and cross-Channel ferry. The Secretary of State for War has given Lord Redesdale a guarantee that she won’t be arrested on arrival.
At Folkestone, on January 3, she is carried out on a stretcher in full view of hordes of reporters and photographers. She’s then loaded into a private ambulance hired by her father. ‘I am not ashamed of Unity,’ he tells the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail later invites readers to list their wartime grouches. ‘Women in uniform’ comes top of the list. Unity Mitford is in 14th place, below ‘patriotic songs’ but above ‘the civil service’, ‘the evacuation of businesses’ and ‘sympathy for German prisoners’.
As the war progresses, Janos burns Unity’s copy of Mein Kampf – a gift from the Fuhrer – which has notes Hitler wrote for Unity in the margins.
Rudi has given Unity’s diaries, which will be hidden in various places during the war, to Janos for safekeeping.
The British socialite died in 1948, aged only 33, as a result of meningitis caused by a bullet which remained in her brain after a self-inflicted gunshot. Unity, along with three of her six sisters, is buried in St Mary’s church in the Cotswolds village of Swinbrook
Her final years
Early 1940
Unity was taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where doctors agreed they could do nothing more for her. A professor visited to help her learn how to read and write again.
Afterwards, Lady Redesdale looked after her daughter devotedly at the family cottage near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
In the media Unity was vilified as an enemy of the state, but MI5 judged her to be ‘mentally unsound’ and ‘harmless.’ Had Unity not been brain-damaged, she would almost certainly have been interned.
She certainly required constant attention. The bullet had left her with roughly the mental age of 12, a limp and weakness in her right hand. She was incontinent at night and had unpredictable bouts of fury.
‘Am I mad?’ she kept repeating. Unable to concentrate, she’d use the wrong words and get angry when no one understood her.
‘She sometimes spoke of the Führer, but as from a great distance; her grasp on reality was that of a child,’ wrote Debo in a memoir.
Unity’s unbridled passion for the Nazis appeared to have been quickly supplanted by religious fervour. According to Debo, whenever Unity met a clergyman, she’d ask him if he wished he’d been made a bishop and if he enjoyed sleeping with his wife.
Did Hitler ever try to contact Unity again?
Gerhard Engel, part of Hitler’s entourage and later his adjutant, insisted: ‘He did get messages through to her, via Switzerland and Portugal. He also had flowers sent to her after her departure. He suffered for her. At first a lot.’
Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, agreed – up to a point. ‘[Hitler] felt responsible for her committing suicide.’
‘I remember that was his reaction,’ he told Unity’s biographer David Pryce-Jones. ‘About a year or so later, she had been forgotten.’
Lord Redesdale retreated that February to Inch Kenneth, a small island he owned in the Hebrides, along with one of the family’s parlour maids (who almost certainly became his mistress). This marked the end of Farve’s life with Muv – partly because he couldn’t come to terms with Unity’s condition, and partly because Lady Redesdale remained an unrepentant fascist.
‘I am not, never have been, and am not likely to become a fascist,’ Lord Redesdale told the press – conveniently forgetting his earlier fervour for the Nazis.
The large Mitford family home in Rutland Gate, which had a ballroom and overlooked Hyde Park, was requisitioned to provide temporary accommodation for Polish Jews. Predictably, this enraged Lady Redesdale.
That same year, Diana and her husband, the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, were sent to prison (then released, under house arrest, in November 1943.) Diana never knew that her own sister Nancy had denounced her to Gladwyn Jebb, a peer working in the foreign office, as ‘an extremely dangerous person.’
It’s possible she really did think this. But Mitfords biographer Laura Thompson points out that Nancy had long been jealous of her most beautiful sister.
1941
In April, Unity was deemed well enough to attend the wedding of her sister Debo to the future Duke of Devonshire. The press were outraged, pointing out that if she was well enough to be there, she was well enough to be interned.
The question of internment was raised in parliament, but the home secretary said Unity’s health precluded her being a national security risk.
Unity was now capable of taking the bus to Oxford for singing lessons. A friend remembered her talking the whole way home about how marvellous Hitler was – ‘and nobody (on the bus) batted an eyelid.’
Unity’s sister Nancy recalled: ‘All she wanted out of life was a husband, which of course by then was out of the question. “When I get married, I should like to have 10 children,” she would say.’
Unity also confided to a friend that she was going to have six sons, with the eldest called Adolf.
To another friend, she remarked that she loathed the Blitz, adding: ‘It’s so odd for me because I want to die.’
In November, Unity wrote to Diana: ‘You see, when I first came back [from Germany], I thought all this was a play, and I was looking on. Now I know I have a part to play, & I can’t bear acting in it.’
On November 30, her sister Decca’s husband Esmond Romilly, a British Communist who’d joined the Canadian air force, was killed at the age of 23 when his plane came down in the North Sea.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill – whose wife was Lord Redesdale’s first cousin – tried to comfort Decca. She retorted angrily that her sister Diana and Diana’s fascist husband Oswald Mosley should be put up against a wall and shot.
Decca’s second husband, Bob Treuhaft, was a Jew.
Unity never stopped loving Decca, with whom she’d invented a private language in childhood they’d called Boudledidge. One day, Unity’s nephew Jonathan asked her, on a whim, what the word ‘force’ was in Boudledidge. Unity replied: ‘Vudz!’ Despite her brain injury, she hadn’t forgotten.
In December, the Oxfordshire constabulary discovered she’d become friendly with a married RAF test pilot. He was relocated to Scotland within a month.
1943
Exhausted from looking after Unity, Muv turned to her chiropodist, Bettyne. They came to an arrangement: Unity would be installed as a house-guest at the vicarage in Hillmorton, Warwickshire, where Bettyne lived with her husband, the Rev Frederick Sewell-Corby.
According to their daughter Margaret Laidlaw, now aged 90, the vicar was banished to a bed in his dressing-room and Bettyne slept in the main bedroom with Unity, often having to change her sheets during the night.
‘Unity was incontinent – I knew this from the sheets galore that were hung out on the line each morning,’ said Margaret. ‘And she had a leg that was paralysed and swung like a log when she walked.’
Locks and bars were installed on all the vicarage windows and doors. ‘I think Unity was under what you and I would call house arrest. She was never, ever alone,’ Margaret told the BBC.
‘Unity had no money, she had no passport, she had no writing paper. She was allowed absolutely nothing at all. For a while, she wasn’t even allowed a library ticket.’
Margaret, who knew her as ‘Auntie Unity’, believes this arrangement continued – on and off, for long periods – until 1948.
‘She was always very cheerful, very jolly. My memory is that Unity liked Bavarian marching songs and would stride around singing. She was a very good singer – a bit loud and very spontaneous.’
1944
After spending time with Unity, the author James Lees-Milne, a friend of the family, wrote in his diary that she ‘talked about the Führer, as though she still admired him.’
In July, Lord Redesdale decided to move from Inch Kenneth to a family property in Northumberland. Subsequently, Lady Redesdale spent about six months of each year with Unity on the Scottish island. Bettyne Sewell-Corby sometimes came with them to help out.
Incredibly, Muv allowed Unity to fly a swastika flag on their Inch Kenneth flagpole, to decorate her room with photographs of Hitler and to play German marching songs on their gramophone.
On the island, Unity would fish, go for long walks, read, and do embroidery and crochet. She’d sometimes wind a sheet around herself – as a makeshift cassock – and improvise religious services in the ruins of an ancient chapel, with Muv as the sole member of the congregation. She’d also draft plans for her own funeral service, scrap them, then start all over again.
‘Muv has been too wonderful & absolutely given up her whole life,’ Nancy wrote to Decca. ‘Farve simply beastly, hardly goes near her.’
1945
On January 1, Nancy published The Pursuit of Love, a heavily autobiographical novel. It was an immediate best-seller. Thanks to this literary classic and its sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, she remains the best-known of the Mitford sisters.
Their brother Tom was now in the Far East, where he’d asked to be sent so he could avoid fighting Germans. On March 30, he died, aged 36, from wounds sustained in Burma. Thereafter, Unity wore his Sam Browne belt under her clothes.
At Bernstein castle in Austria, Russians hauled Count Janos Almasy’s disabled wife Marie from her wheelchair and beat her severely. Her injuries hastened her death and Janos later married again.
In April, the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby was the first reporter to enter the liberated Belsen concentration camp.
Unity’s former debutante friend Mary Ormsby-Gore, who visited her regularly, remembered: ‘We saw those awful films of camps after the war, and (Unity) said, “That’s all propaganda – there was a typhoid epidemic and it’s the way of getting rid of the bodies.”’
Margaret Laidlaw, the daughter of Unity’s carer Bettyne, clearly remembers Unity’s reaction after news reached Britain of Hitler’s suicide.
‘My sister said, “Morning, Auntie Unity. I’m so sorry your boyfriend’s died” and she said, “Oh, you are such a sweet child”.
‘And I said, “Oh – that man”. And she went for me – she went to kick me and I fled under the dining-room table to get out of her reach.’
1947
While staying at the family cottage near High Wycombe, Unity started a part-time job in a nearby hospital as a tea-lady. She also did the washing-up.
1948
Unity was on Inch Kenneth with Muv when the bullet lodged in her brain since 1939 suddenly caused an infection to flare. By the time she was shipped off the island, she was critically ill with meningitis.
Unity Mitford died on May 28 at the West Highland Cottage Hospital in Oban. She was just 33.
Lady Redesdale had a line from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough engraved on her tombstone: ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth.’ She saw no irony in this grossly inaccurate epitaph.
Unity’s wholehearted adoption of the vile Nazi creed had ruined her life, blighted her family and quite possibly led to the deaths of a few people she’d denounced.
Thirty years later, Decca wrote to Debo: ‘To this day sometimes I dream about her, arriving fresh from Germany in full gaiety.’
- Sources for notes include: Unity Mitford – A Quest, by David Pryce-Jones; The Mitfords – Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley; Valkyrie: Gender, Class, European Relations, and Unity Mitford’s Passion For Fascism, unpublished thesis by Kathryn Steinhaus; Take Six Girls, by Laura Thompson; Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister, by Deborah Devonshire; Hons and Rebels, by Jessica Mitford.
- All four episodes of the Daily Mail’s new podcast, Hitler’s English Girlfriend: The Secret Diary of Unity Mitford, are available now
