The Sisters_The Saga of the Mitford Family

by Mary S. Lovell

  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 stree
t, 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 h
ad 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,