(19 14-1948)
British admirer of Germany and Hitler. Unity Mitford—the fifth child of David Mitford, Second Baron Redesdale, and his wife, Sydney Bowles—was born in London on August 8, 1914. She was named Unity after popular actress Unity Moore but given the unusual middle name Valkyrie. Conceived at her father’s Canadian gold mine in Swastika, Ontario, Mitford later incorporated her names and birthplace into her Aryan beliefs. Like her sisters Nancy, Diana, Pamela, Jessica, and Deborah, Unity was educated at home by governesses and took part in the eccentric life of her family. In 1930 Unity was the first of the sisters allowed to go to school, St. Margaret’s in Bushy, from which she was promptly expelled.
Unity was presented as a debutante in 1932, but instead of dancing, preferred shocking party guests with her pet snakes. She was drawn to the politics of Sir Oswald Mosley, with whom she had contact through her sister Diana, who had recently left her first husband to live with Mosley. In 1933 Unity joined Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. That year Unity accompanied Diana to Germany, where she attended the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg. Unity returned to Germany the following year after convincing her parents to allow her a year abroad to polish her German language skills. While in Munich, Unity began to follow Adolf Hitler’s movements, hoping to arrange a meeting, which finally took place in February 1935.
Hitler, to the amazement of his inner circle, met Unity more than 140 times over the next 4 years. Hitler allowed her to tease him, and they shared a number of pet names and inside jokes that, when mentioned, reduced both of them to hysterical giggles. Unity was often escorted, for the sake of propriety, by SS Officer Erich Wide-mann when she attended subsequent party rallies, the 1936 Olympics, and Nazi social events. In order to prove her loyalty, Unity wrote virulent anti-Semitic letters to the Nazi magazine Sturmer and took great pride in having been attacked by Spanish Republicans in 1936 for wearing her special gold party badge in Grenada and in being arrested as a "known Nazi" in Prague in 1938. She usually traveled in an MG sports car flying a Nazi pennant. The Mitfords in England were deeply embarrassed by the wide press coverage given to Unity’s activities, especially as she was a cousin of Winston Churchill. Her sister Nancy parodied Unity’s attachment to Hitler in her novel, Wigs on the Green.
In June 1938 Unity, who had already witnessed and approved of several instances of Nazi humiliation and oppression of Jews, accepted from Hitler an apartment vacated by a forcibly evicted Jewish family. Convinced that war between Britain and Germany could not happen, she wrote a full-page editorial in the London Daily Mirror and threatened to friends and family to kill herself if war were to break out between Britain and Germany. On September 3, 1939, Unity carried out her threat and shot herself in the head in a Munich park. She survived and was visited by Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering before being transferred to Switzerland where her mother was able to join her and arrange her return to England. Doctors were unable to remove the bullet from Unity’s head and she suffered brain damage that left her incontinent, prone to rages, and with the intellectual ability of an eleven- to twelve-year-old. The family, however, so discreetly managed her rare public appearances that a parliamentary committee demanded to know why she was not interned like Diana and Mosley as enemies during the war. On discovering the extent of her disability, the matter was dropped.
Unity Mitford remained in her mother’s care until May 27, 1948, when she died after developing meningitis at the family’s remote Scottish property, Inch Kenneth.
