The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  Unity chatted to Hitler as she would to any member of her family, unselfconsciously bright, always seeking to amuse, entertain or impress. No one else in his life dared to treat him in the casual manner that Unity adopted. His adjutants and lieutenants were always aware that a chance remark made in fun might cause him to take fast, bitter retribution, and were guarded. Eva Braun, according to contemporary observation, was apparently cowed for much of the time and few people outside of the inner circle knew about her. Even during the time that Diana spent alone with Hitler, which was far more than most people realize, she was always aware of his position, and her radio-station agenda, and she addressed him accordingly.

  It has never been proved that Unity’s intimacy with Hitler damaged anyone, though there are accusations that - wittingly or otherwise - she denounced various people to their serious disadvantage. Whether it is true or not, it is clear that her apparent naïvety in such a situation made her potentially dangerous. Her letters show that she discussed Mosley’s activities with Hitler, for she wrote to advise Diana that Hitler thought Mosley had made a mistake in calling his movement Fascists or Blackshirts instead of something more acceptable to the British. When she asked him what he would have done in Mosley’s place, he told her he would have emulated Cromwell and called his followers ‘Ironsides’.16

  Albert Speer, another inner-circle member, recalled that ‘even in the later years of international tension,’ Unity - or Lady Mitford as he called her - ‘persistently spoke up for her country and often actually pleaded with Hitler to make a deal with England’.17 Increasingly, Unity regarded some form of alliance between the two countries as a personal mission: this was her destiny, to prevent war between the two countries she loved. And it was just this sort of conversation that worried and irritated Hitler’s chiefs. Nor did it go unnoticed by the British ambassador. On a number of occasions he reported back to London conversations he had had with Unity in which, he wrote, she was as open in telling him what Hitler had said to her as she undoubtedly was in telling Hitler what the British ambassador thought. The ambassador met Unity at the railway station when he went to greet the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor in September 1937. While they waited, she told him that Hitler disliked Mussolini but thought the Italian dictator’s forthcoming visit was useful in demonstrating to other countries the strength of the Berlin-Rome Axis. ‘Miss Mitford . . . said that she had heard it stated that HM’s Government had asked Herr Hitler not to receive the Duke of Windsor. Hitler had replied that he knew nothing of this and would gladly receive the Duke of Windsor.’18 He pointed out that he could not guarantee the accuracy of Unity’s statements, and he thought that she was so obsessed with Hitler that it was possible she sometimes put words into his mouth, ‘but I know that Herr Hitler is on familiar terms with her and talks freely to her . . . [and] subject to certain reservations I have little reason to doubt the accuracy of what she occasionally tells me of her conversations with the Chancellor’. As the situation deteriorated towards war, there were further conversations with Unity that the ambassador reported back to London.

  These vignettes underline Unity’s unique position among Hitler’s suite but there has always been speculation about her private, i.e. sexual, relationship with Hitler, and this was discussed at the time even in the Mitford family, judging from Esmond’s letter to his mother at the time of his elopement. Further research indicates that if there was ever any sexual element to this relationship, it was never fulfilled by physical intercourse. Diana also believes this is the case. She spent many evenings alone with Hitler, but she was an acknowledged beauty who had been courted and flirted with all her life; unlike Unity, she was experienced in assessing the motivations of men. She told me she thought Hitler was not very interested in sex, and she was convinced that Unity had never slept with him. ‘He enjoyed her company and it ended there, I think,’ she said. Had he asked Unity to sleep with him, would she have agreed? ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied unhesitatingly.19 That Unity was in love with Hitler is borne out by the testimony of many people who saw her over a period of years in his presence. One of these was another remarkable woman who had the ear of Hitler, Leni Riefenstahl.

  On one occasion she asked him about Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, the half-niece he had loved, who had committed suicide. Geli had not been his only lover he told her frankly, but, he said, ‘my romances were mostly unhappy. The women were either married or wanted to get married.’ He did not mention Eva Braun in this conversation, although Leni knew about his secret mistress hidden away in the mountains.

  He was bothered, he told me, when women threatened suicide in order to tie him down, and he repeated that he could have married no one but Geli. I asked him what he thought of Unity Mitford, the pretty Englishwoman who, as the whole world knew, was so in love with him. His reply surprised me. ‘She’s a very attractive girl, but I could never have an intimate relationship with a foreigner, no matter how beautiful she might be.’ I thought he was joking, but he assured me, ‘My feelings are so bound up with my patriotism that I could only love a German girl.’ Amused, he said, ‘I can see you don’t understand. Incidentally . . . I would be completely unsuitable for marriage for I could not be faithful. I understand great men who have mistresses.’ The tone of this was lightly ironic.20

  That Unity wielded influence with Hitler is evident from her part in a matter involving Putzi Hanfstaengl, who suffered directly when Unity repeated a private conversation they had had while sailing his yacht on the Starnberg Lake. He told her that he had hated being stuck in New York during the 1914-18 war, and said it was a pity there was no fighting anywhere now except in Spain. He said he envied those fighting for Franco. He went on to criticize Goebbels, whom he thought was ‘schizophrenic and schizopedic’,21 and even criticized some things Hitler had done. ‘I may have gone too far,’ he said, in his autobiography. 22 Clearly he had, for Unity turned on him and told him, ‘If you think this way you have no right to be his foreign press chief.’ He countered, saying it was bad for the Führer to be surrounded always by yes-men, and thought that that was the end of the matter. Shortly afterwards, however, Unity wrote to Diana that Hitler planned to play a ‘wonderfully funny joke on Putzi’ to repay him for some remarks that she had passed on.23

  Unity regarded what followed as a practical joke, a Nancy-style tease. History does not relate what Hitler intended, though it seems a curious way to treat a man who appeared to have been consistently loyal to him through bad and good times.24 Hanfstaengl certainly did not find it amusing. He was ordered, quite normally, to report to an airport to carry out a project for Hitler. Once in the light aircraft he opened sealed orders, which advised that he was to be dropped behind the lines in Spain on a secret mission. He had no trouble making the connection with his conversation with Unity, and guessed that she had probably repeated his wild criticisms of Goebbels and Hitler. Knowing a good deal of how Hitler’s machine worked he immediately suspected that he was to be assassinated and his death written up as an accident. He begged the pilot, a fellow Bavarian, to put down somewhere. The pilot, who was puzzled by the whole affair, pretended that the aircraft had developed technical problems and made an unscheduled landing, whereupon Hanfstaengl made his escape and fled to Switzerland. Many years later he met the pilot, who told him that his orders had been to fly him round Potsdam for a few hours then await further instructions. He had been given to understand that Goering was entertaining high officials from overseas, and that the highlight of the military display was a demonstration of how they would shoot down a dummy on a parachute. ‘It still does not sound like a joke to me,’ Hanfstaengl wrote in his autobiography.25

  Unity subsequently contacted Hanfstaengl in London on several occasions, dismissing the affair as a joke as she tried to persuade him to return to Munich. Even Diana got involved, and tried to win from Hitler a pension for his old friend, and a personal guarantee that it was safe for him to return to Germany. Subsequently, Hanfstaengl received a letter from Goering, whic
h told him: ‘I assure you that the whole affair was intended as a harmless joke. We wanted to give you an opportunity to think over some rather over-audacious utterances you made. Nothing more than that was intended . . . I consider it vitally necessary that you come back to Germany straight away . . . forget your suspicions and act reasonably. Heil Hitler! Herman Goering.’26 But Hanfstaengl dug into his intimate knowledge of Hitler and, having got his son out of Germany to the USA (though his sister Erna remained in Munich), he decided that he was safer where he was. The irony of this episode is that Hanfstaengl was incarcerated as an enemy alien in England during the Second World War. So, indirectly, Unity probably saved not only his life but also his way of life. After the war he and his family returned to Munich and lived out their lives in his old family home, which would scarcely have been possible had he remained an active member of the Nazi hierarchy.

  That September the Redesdales joined Unity for the annual Parteitag. It was the year of Speer’s famous ‘Cathedral of Light’, which received a great deal of attention in the British and US press. The party included David’s sister-in-law, Aunt Helen, mother of Clementine and Rosemary Mitford. Randolph Churchill was also present, but it was the Redesdales the British papers noticed, and they began to ask just why Lord Redesdale’s family were so interested in the Nazi regime.

  Diana made a number of visits to Germany that year, almost all for the purpose of furthering the Air Time Ltd project. She timed her visits to match periods when she knew Hitler would be in Berlin, and she would check into the Kaiserhof Hotel and send a note to let him know she was there. Quite often he would reply through an adjutant, inviting her to the Chancellery after he had finished his day’s work. When he had had a full day, and especially after an important speech, he found it difficult to sleep, so he welcomed the opportunity of a long chatty conversation to wind down before retiring. They used to sit together by an open fire in his private rooms in the Reichskanlei, and talk. ‘I got to know him fairly well,’ Diana states in her autobiography. ‘Sometimes we saw a film, sometimes we talked . . . in conversation he was quick and clever, and, of course, very well informed, and he had that surprising frankness often found in men at the top, in contrast with mystery-making nonentities.’27 Diana is good company, as were all the Mitfords: it can have been no hardship for Hitler to spend time with a sophisticated and beautiful woman who happened to share his taste in art and music. She told Mosley’s son, Nicholas, that they spoke of what was happening in England, what was happening in Germany, of Mosley and the BUF, and the state of the world.28

  Although it took a long time, her calm persistence in the matter of the radio station paid off. Back in October 1937 she had been advised formally that ‘the greatest objection was raised from the side of the appropriate military authorities’ to the idea. ‘The Führer regrets that under these circumstances he is not able to agree to your proposal.’29 Most people would have given up at that point, but Diana continued with her patient strategy. It was no hardship for her, either, to maintain her friendship with Hitler as she enjoyed their tête-a-têtes. In the spring of 1938 she was told by a German contact that Hitler had asked for the radio-station files and had taken them away to read. In June she was advised that he had approved a form of joint venture based in Heligoland, in which Air Time Ltd would share the profits with a German radio station.30 By any standards the obtaining of this concession at such a time was a remarkable achievement by Diana.

  It was at about this time that William Acton drew all six Mitford sisters in works that have since become well known. He had made a pencil sketch of Diana earlier in the year, at the same time as he had made a huge Wagnerian-type oil painting of her, part of a series he did of many of his friends. Sydney liked the sketch so much that she commissioned him to draw the other girls, too. It seemed unlikely that she would see them all together again for a long time (they were never all together again). He worked from photographs, though it is possible that Nancy and Debo also sat for him. Sydney had them mounted in red brocade frames and hung them in her sitting room. Nancy told her that it looked like Bluebeard’s chamber. 31

  From early October Decca and Esmond were ensconced at the rented house at 41 Rotherhithe Street. It was tall and thin, linking two of the great warehouses that lined that stretch of the southern bank of the Thames. With its dark wharves and teeming slums Rotherhithe was one of the most deprived areas of London, and when Philip Toynbee first visited he got hopelessly lost. ‘When I asked a muffled stranger the way, he said, “What ship do you want, mate?” and I knew I was in authentic Esmond territory.’32 It was the first time Toynbee had met Decca, and he was impressed not only with her beauty and her cheerful whole-hearted support of Esmond, but her upper-class voice, ‘a curiously cadenced sing-song which would have been grotesquely affected if it had not been even more grotesquely natural’.33 Esmond could be all things to all men and his voice though cultured was not obviously so, whereas the Mitford girls are renowned for the manner of their speech. Decca did not try to change this for some years, and Toynbee recalled her once asking a burly working man, ‘Could you be absolutely sweet and tell us where we can get some delicious tea?’34

  Esmond was keen to save so that they could travel to Mexico, so he got a job at five pounds a week, at J. Walter Thompson’s advertising agency on the Strand, writing copy for Radio Luxembourg commercials. Even Decca got a job for a few weeks, while she could still work, as part of a market-research team employed by the same agency. She travelled, ate and shared rooms with a group of women who conducted the surveys and it was the first time she had met anyone who was truly working class. Formerly her socialist and Communist contacts had all come from the upper classes, which was Esmond’s chief objection to the Communist Party in England: he felt that it was overloaded with young intellectuals and was therefore unrealistic. The local branch of the Labour Party was closer to his ideology. The coarse attitude towards their menfolk, and to life in general, of the other women in Decca’s group was a great shock to her and depressed her. Surely these were not the working classes for whom she had battled with Unity in the DFD? Occasionally she and Esmond would row about her ‘upper-classishness’, but they were so much in love with each other that all disagreements were quickly made up. And she was young and resilient enough to accept the hardships of the life they shared. The freedom from all restrictions and restraint, so utterly different from life with her parents, made it acceptable and enjoyable - a fulfilment of rebellion.

  Occasionally the couple made plundering sorties to the homes of the rich, in response to any casual invitations that came their way, teased right-wingers and filled pockets and handbags with cigars, cigarettes, and any small knick-knacks that took their fancy. Esmond claimed he once had to restrain Decca who had her nail scissors poised above a set of bedroom curtains she fancied for the sitting room at Rotherhithe.35 The young Romillys regarded this behaviour as amusing and acceptable, for in their persistent war against the upper classes no holds were barred. However, when the stories got out their behaviour was regarded with shocked disgust.

  Esmond had some other novel ideas about making a profit from well-heeled friends. The Romillys held parties to which guests were invited to ‘bring a bottle’, but any wine or spirit that appeared was carefully stashed away in the grandfather clock and only beer was served.36 Then there were the gambling parties. Esmond seems to have been an eternal optimist when it came to gambling and most weeks spent the best part of his earnings from the agency at the greyhound track, always certain that he was going to make their fortune. When he found he could not win as a punter, he had the brilliant thought of becoming ‘the bank’ so he acquired a roulette wheel and set up a casino in the sitting room. Any idea he had of fleecing their connections to recoup losses was bound to failure if the single experience of Bryan Guinness is anything to go by.

  Bryan had remarried, very happily, and he and his wife had a child a few months old. Relations between him and Diana were friendly again and
remained so for the rest of their lives. He also maintained contact with other members of the Mitford family but he was surprised when he and his wife were invited to lunch at Rotherhithe with Decca and Esmond. He soon realized why for ‘They told us in all frankness,’ he wrote, ‘of their intention to make a little money by organizing some gambling for their friends.’ Subsequently the Guinnesses played roulette in the homespun casino. Bryan was well aware that he was expected to lose and he was perfectly willing to do so - indeed, he looked on it as a form of charitable giving to help Decca, of whom he was fond. But the evening did not go as planned: ‘The stakes were low, but we determined to lose a little to our kind hosts,’ Bryan recalled. He staked recklessly, and to his growing despair found that he had won large sums of money. Much more, he realized, than Esmond and Decca could possibly afford. In desperation he continued to play for long hours after he and his wife wanted to go home to bed, and it was almost dawn before he had managed to make a small loss and felt he could retire with honour. ‘It was fortunate I think’, he wrote, ‘that the Romillys did not adopt the profession of croupiers.’37