Hitler's Valkyrie

by David R L Litchfield

  There was certainly still no shortage of English support for Hitler and the Nazi Party, particularly by conservative anti-Communists. Such a man was Colonel (later Sir Thomas) Moore MP, whose attitudes were shared by more people than those who cared to admit it. In the Daily Mail on 25 April 1934, he had tentatively tested the public’s fascist sympathies: ‘Surely there cannot be any fundamental differences of outlook between Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives.’

  By 15 August, in The Times, he was gaining confidence:

  Rarely do we read … anything of the social, educational or even moral achievements of the Hitler administration. Housing, maternity clinics, the purging of dens of vice, were a generation ahead of the rest of the world. Hitler may have been guilty, either personally or through his followers, of what may seem to us, without lack of knowledge, crimes against his own people, but they are his own people, and he is responsible to them, not to us.

  The only member of the Mitford family to vehemently disagree was Jessica. By now she would have been under no illusions concerning the political and social developments in Germany, particularly regarding Hitler’s banning of the Communist party.

  By the late summer of 1933 she would certainly have known a great deal more about the past, present and future of the Nazis in general, after a group of exiled communist writers escaped to Paris where they published The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, which was almost immediately translated into English and published by Knopf.

  The Brown Book had a major impact on the 18-year-old Jessica. ‘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 beating and brutal handling, but the book also prophesied what would happen if the regime continued unchecked.’ Conservatives claimed, ‘There was little demand for such works in England and they were largely distributed through left-wing bookshops and Communist channels.’8 The less politically bigoted accepted the fact that it became a bestseller and was translated into twenty-four languages.

  Jessica optimistically introduced her mother and father to the book but they reacted in the same way as most of the English middle and upper classes by insisting that the book was nothing more than communist-inspired propaganda and a gross exaggeration. This was at the same time that they would subsequently claim to have been so appalled by Unity’s decision to stay in Germany.

  Much later, Jessica 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.’

  Unity and Diana certainly knew. According to Graham Stevenson, in 1935 Diana, Unity and her journalist friend Mick Burn were taken on a tour of Dachau concentration camp, which was quite close to Munich. Many of those who had known, but were loath to admit it, were only too pleased to accept the ever popular defence: ‘But by this yardstick, those who supported Communism should have known about the millions of people being murdered by Stalin in the thirties. Vague reports of those atrocities also filtered into England only to be regarded by supporters of the regime as anti-Communist propaganda.’9 But as Kathleen Atkins was so fond of saying, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right,’ and no amount of Communist guilt acquitted the Mitfords’ support of Hitler and the Nazis.

  An English translation of Mein Kampf had also been available since October 1933, the same year that Dachau concentration camp was opened, with the camps at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen in place by 1938. Although the book was dramatically unsuccessful initially, by the end of the war it had sold 10 million copies. But what is perhaps far more interesting is that it has continued to sell an average of 3,000 copies a year in the UK and 15,000 in the US, ever since.

  * * *

  ‘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 13 she had merely looked fair and awkward.’10 Of course this was hardly surprising as not only was she seven years older, but she had also just spent three months fulfilling her sexual fantasies, and no doubt those of a number of Storms.

  Unity’s stay in Swinbrook could, in fact, hardly be described as ‘the summer’ as by August 1934 she had returned to Munich. There, ‘she was content to eat a light lunch, alone at the Osteria and read a book to pass the long hours of waiting for her Führer’11. It was to be a long wait, and one had to admire her determination, if not the object of her ambition.

  That same year Mosley adopted anti-Semitism as part of the BUF agenda, though many, including the Mitfords, would hasten to reassure critics that his British version was more concerned with the Jews’ financial power than their undermining of the country’s racial purity.

  Meanwhile, in a vain effort to moderate the committed anti-Semitism of the Mitfords and Unity in particular, Pryce-Jones suggested, ‘Unity was a German-inspired anti-Semite of this Mosley stamp.’ However, he then contradicted himself, continuing, ‘When anti-Semitism, among other Nazi flies, was cast over her, she swallowed it hook, line and sinker.’ But, however it was couched, explained or excused, Unity and the Mitfords never voiced any concern for Hitler’s policy of extermination; in fact, quite the opposite. They and many of their ilk believed racial hygiene to be a reassuring basis for politics. Predictably, most Jews were more concerned with the effects of violent anti-Semitism, than the cause. The Torah True Jews (a division of Orthodox Judaism) would even blame Zionism and go as far as claiming the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jewish return to Israel, prior to redemption, with a new messiah and before the predestined time.

  To the Torah True Jews, Adolf Hitler was an envoy of God sent to punish Jews for their sins, claiming, ‘It is common knowledge that all the sages and saints in Europe at the time of Hitler’s rise declared that he was a messenger of devine wrath, sent to chasten the Jews because of the bitter apostacy of Zionism against the belief in the eventual messianic redemption.’

  Hitler’s appalling racial policies and the fact that his political, social and militaristic ideals were almost entirely male orientated also did nothing to reduce his quite astonishing attraction to millions of other adoring women.

  In his book Pathology of Evil, George Victor maintained:

  Women by the thousand abased themselves at Hitler’s feet, they tried to kiss his boots, and some of them succeeded, even to the point of swallowing the gravel on which he had trod … As a figurehead, as a male in absolute power, Hitler’s aphrodisiac effect was scarcely even sublimated in the more impressionable women who constituted his beloved mass audience. They moaned, they were hysterical, they fainted, for an introspective bachelor deficient in sexuality.

  But of course it was not Hitler who they found sexy; it was the power that he represented.

  John Heygate noted:

  People in Germany are throwing off the Christian religion and openly worshipping Hitler. Hitler’s portrait hangs above their bed. The day for a German boy and girl begins with the praise of Hitler. Hitler is a German’s prayer and a German’s answer. He is the Messiah who has come down from his mountain to earth, and has not contented himself with preaching and publishing a gospel; he has brought it to pass!’

  Every one of the words he has preached and written, almost every word, he has accomplished. Is it a wonder the man has become a God in Germany?

  But it was not only the men and women of Germany who worshipped Hitler as God, or simply Unity who believed him to be her messiah. So, indeed, did Hitler himself!

  He first started to believe that he enjoyed some form of divine protection during his military service in the First World War. He spoke of a mysterious voice that had advised him to move away from a crowded dugout moments before an incoming shell scored a direct hit. There was also a confirmed story of a British soldier, who, given a clear shot, had lowered his gun and chosen to allow him to escape. Hitler spoke of being chosen by the gods to lead his people.
Even Pope Pius seemed to be of the opinion that God might have been keeping a special eye on him.

  * * *

  Unity had returned to Munich early with the idea of going to the Parteitag again. A week or two later, Diana joined her there, but to their annoyance, Putzi Hanfstaengl was said to have declined their request for VIP tickets, offering them press-passes instead. He later admitted to have been criticised the year before for being accompanied by women in such heavy make-up.

  It was not the first time that the Mitford girls had come under attack for wearing too much make-up. At this time only theatricals and prostitutes wore make-up in Germany, while in England the middle and upper classes plastered themselves in mascara, rouge, lipstick, ‘foundation’ and powder, which they constantly reapplied. It gave rise to the whole culture of the powder compact. Not only would such women carry them at all times, but they would use the excuse of powdering their noses to leave the table, either to give the men freedom to discuss male things or to swap girls’ gossip. The thickness and brittleness of such make-up also resulted in women speaking without moving their lips and avoiding any facial expressions likely to cause cracks in their ‘war-paint’.

  Confident that they could talk their way into the VIP enclosure, Unity and Diana went to Nuremberg anyway. There they were said to have ‘got talking with an elderly man in a beer garden who was wearing the gold party badge, which testified that he was one of the first hundred thousand members. He turned out in fact to have party card number 100: “Parteigenosse Nummer Hundert”, they called him.’12 Diana rose to the challenge (in other words, she turned on her most seductive charm) and in next to no time they had persuaded him to fix them up with tickets for everything and beds in a small inn.

  Once again they were seduced by the theatrical extravagance of the Parteitag and the sight and sound of Europe’s most powerful and, doubtless, charismatic man, whipping the crowd up into a state of mass hysteria with the promise of a thousand years of power and glory.

  The flash of his steel-blue eyes … and now the screams of ‘Heil!’ erupt, becoming overwhelming, like some all-fulfilling wave that rips everything along with it. Fifty thousand voices merge into a single cry of ‘Heil Hitler!’ Fifty thousand arms shoot out in salutes. Fifty thousand hearts beat for this man who is now striding, bareheaded, through the narrow passage formed by all those thousands.13

  Klaus Theweleit, author of Male Fantasies, a study of fascist consciousness, continued to describe and explain ‘the enormous attraction of fascist celebrations and their overwhelming impact on participants’, and the importance of the Führer and the Reich’s celebrations, in a manner that quite galvanised academic historians. ‘Hitler enabled fascists to have an erection,’ he wrote. It was a particularly interesting analogy, as Hitler had already admitted that for him the act of public speaking was like sex, the crowd playing the part of a woman who he stimulated and excited to the point of simultaneous, orgasmic climax.

  Needless to say, the rally intensified the Girls’ enthusiasm and afterwards Diana, on the advice of Professor Lindemann, decided to remain in Munich with Unity and learn to speak German. This was the same Professor Lindemann, known to the Mitford girls (and later Churchill) as ‘the Prof’, who, armed with some rather fanciful statistics, would encourage the British to become involved in a terrifying and ill-advised campaign of bombing German civilian targets during the war.

  Unity, having left Madame Laroche’s restrictive ‘finishing school’, moved into a flat with Diana and the pair enrolled on a special foreign-language course at the university. Apparently Diana loved Munich, which, as Jonathan Guinness described, had ‘its faint smell of brewing and cheap cigars, its heavily subsidized opera which cost nearly nothing to attend and its cheerful population made healthy by the proximity of the mountains for cheap Sunday skiing’. What Guinness avoided mentioning was that for those who failed to qualify as racially, sexually, politically, mentally or physically compatible with the Nazis’ requirements, life in Munich was far from cheerful or healthy. But the Mitford girls were far more interested in the seemingly limitless supply of sexually available, physically attractive young SS officers who had recently taken a sacred oath of unconditional obedience, not to Germany but to their Führer; something that Unity found particularly appealing. One has to assume that Diana was also finding Germany and its ‘diversions’ more compelling than caring for her children or sharing Mosley with his numerous mistresses. Meanwhile, Unity’s obsessive stalking of the Führer continued.

  According to Diana, when Unity thought Hitler would be at the Osteria Bavaria, she used to insist on going to lunch there. She ‘seemed to know by instinct’ when Hitler was likely to be there. Her family and friends concluded that she must have had some contact in his entourage. What they seemed quite unprepared to consider was that her contacts were of course her appreciative Storms.

  Diana’s explanation would be particularly protective. ‘She followed his doings in the newspapers, chatted to the doorman at the Brown House, looked to see if there was a policeman in the Prinzregentenplatz where he had his flat.’ Diana’s son Jonathan added:

  When they did see him in the Osteria it was (as far as Diana was concerned) liable to mean a lost afternoon, because of what Diana called his Spanish hours. He never arrived before two o’clock at the very earliest, and often not before three, driving up with an adjutant and a few friends or assistants in two black Mercedes cars. Unity then insisted on staying in the restaurant until he left, perhaps an hour and a half later, so as to see him go by her table. Needless to say, eventually Hitler noticed her and one of the waitresses told her that he had asked who she was.

  Unity was beside herself with excitement. ‘Did he really? … I hope you told him I was an English Fascist and not just an English student.’

  He would certainly not have been surprised to discover that she was English; as a result of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis’ presence, Munich’s popularity as a Grand Tour destination for the privileged classes of England increased. The exchange rate also continued to attract, as did the presence of the ci-devant aristocracy, especially in Bavaria and nearby Austria.

  Even Pryce-Jones was minded to impart the time and the city with an atmosphere more redolent of Waugh’s Oxford than the location for the dawn of an unimaginable horror:

  Many of them were independently rich, on allowances, owners of cars, carefree and heart-free, which obliged the countesses to rein in their charges, and the tennis parties, the expeditions, the picnics with the girls in local costume and the men in lederhosen were innocently decorous. The Nazis welcomed them all with open arms in appreciation of the value of such influential potential converts to their fascist values.

  If first impressions of Germany were favourable, and stuck, then their return home was likely to filter youthful Nazism through the English upper classes. Suitably formal occasions, such as the laying of the foundation stone of the Haus der deutschen Kunst in 1937 by Hitler (who broke the silver hammer as he did so, his superstitions erupting at once) were attended by massed rows of chic English girls. Unity was even present when the silver hammer snapped; she cast herself into whatever Nazi reception or ceremony there was, the captive slave perpetually bound to the wheel.

  This last phrase gives what appears to be a clear indication that Pryce-Jones may have even begun to realise that Unity’s relationship with Adolf Hitler and the Storms was not as naively romantic as the surviving Mitford girls would later have had their public believe.

  * * *

  While Diana was settling into Munich life, the BUF was holding a Blackshirt rally in Hyde Park in an attempt to inject fresh impetus into the campaign. For the next large meeting on 28 October 1934 at the Royal Albert Hall, tickets had been sold promising that visitors might witness ‘yet another stage in the advance of fascism. ‘This would turn out to be Mosley’s declaration that anti-Semitism was henceforth to be one of the main planks of the movement.’ It was not long before the Blackshirts were marchin
g through the East End, chanting ‘The Yids! The Yids! We’ve got to get rid of the Yids!’ But despite Unity’s enthusiasm for the mantra, compared with Germany there just were not enough ‘Yids’ in England to generate the level of racist hysteria needed to revitalise the failing BUF. Fortunately, many potential BUF members were also discouraged by extreme anti-Semitism.

  As Susan McPherson, the granddaughter of Norah Dacre Fox, one of Mosley’s most ardent and committed disciples, recently stated, ‘In the twenties fascism was viewed as a great new idea and a creative and positive movement; before it was taken to extremes by the Nazis.’

  However, Jessica Mitford was more concerned by the ‘extremes’ than the ‘great new idea’:

  The Brown Book [of the Hitler Terror, written by exiled journalist, Otto Dix and published in 1933] had detailed and documented as much as was then known of the revolting cruelties to which the Jews were being subjected in Germany. It contained actual photographs of the bruised and bleeding victims of Nazi sadism, and related in horrifying detail how the new anti-Semitic laws were working out in practice. My parents maintained that the book was Communist-inspired, and that anyway the Jews had brought all this trouble on themselves, apparently by the mere fact of their existence. Unity and Diana, on their rare visits to Swinbrook, justified the atrocities as necessary for the survival of the Nazi regime.

  For many of the English, all too aware that their country’s fortune had been based on slavery and the subjugation of a large percentage of the world’s population, this would probably not have been considered a particularly unreasonable policy. But things were undoubtedly changing; the subjugated were beginning to rise up against their foreign oppressors, slavery had been abolished for some time and while the English, particularly the middle and upper classes, were generally anti-Semitic, it was not manifest in physical violence and wouldn’t become so without the persuasion of a considerably more charismatic and committed political leader than Oswald Mosley. There were also an increasing number of educated people who were devoting their energies to improving the lot of the oppressed rather than subjugating them. Unfortunately, they possessed insufficient sympathy with the plight of such people in Germany.