Hitler's Valkyrie
Page 1
To Robert Kearns and Caroline Schmitz
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1 Dawn of the Daughters of Albion 1264–1906
2 The ‘Golden’ Years 1904–18
3 Fascism and Fantasy 1918–30
4 Dancing on the Edge 1930–34
5 Bavarian Rhapsody 1934–36
6 The Great Affair 1936–38
7 Ride of the Valkyrie 1938–39
8 The Next Great Adventure 1939–48
Epilogue
Bibliography
Sources
Notes
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Hitler’s Valkyrie is the first independent, unexpurgated biography of the Honourable Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford. It is also the first biography of Unity Mitford to give a full explanation of her astonishing social, political, sexual and transcendental relationship with Adolf Hitler.
The remarkable and much-loved Mitford family has remained largely unrepentant concerning their enthusiastic support of Hitler, the Nazis, Oswald Mosley and British fascism. But having initially encouraged Unity’s affair with Hitler, after the war they distanced themselves by insisting that she had in fact been a rather unintelligent, clumsy lump of a girl, whose unrequited relationship with one of the most terrifying dictators of all time was a mere romantic obsession.
Following further research and the reinterpretation of existing, often contradictory evidence, plus new information supplied by the author’s own family and friends, Hitler’s Valkyrie will reveal that while she was, like Hitler, an extreme fantasist, there was little of the previously claimed juvenile romantic about Unity. She (and her sister Diana) could in fact have more accurately been compared with the wonderfully promiscuous Jane Digby (Lady Ellenborough, a nineteenth-century English aristocrat, famed for her extravagant and exotic sexual adventures) than with any sentimentally romantic Jane Austen inspired character.
This is also the first book to explain how and why a maniacally ambitious Austrian, who was already subject to the demands of a physically attractive mistress and had only recently achieved dictatorial power over Germany and was equally determined to gain world domination and achieve the creation of a Jew-free, Nordic master race, could find the time, let alone the motivation, to devote to a young, upper-class English girl.
Hitler’s Valkyrie answers the questions of how and why an unmarried, 21-year-old girl with a conspicuously liberal attitude towards her own sexuality could spend so much time, often alone and unchaperoned, in the company of a man twenty-five years her senior without causing a major scandal; and why her parents displayed such obvious pride in her having been conceived in a town called Swastika, had seen fit to christen her Valkyrie (a female figure of Norse mythology and ‘chooser of the slain’ who accompany their slaughtered warrior heroes to the afterlife hall of Valhalla where they attend to their various needs) and generously financed her life in Munich, while subsequently claiming that they had wanted nothing more than for her to return home.
There is also the question of the motivation for her extremely active sex life, much of it with SS officers, Sturmführers or ‘Storms’ as Unity referred to them, and what it may have contributed to her spiritual and physical relationship with ‘my Führer’.
For the privileged few, the period following the First World War, when, despite financial pressures, Britain was at her imperial zenith, was a golden era. It was an endless summer of white floppy sun hats, cucumber sandwiches, goat carts and racquet presses, but also an era in which the ruling classes’ fear of communism encouraged a surprising amount of enthusiasm for fascism and Adolf Hitler. It was enough for many to be quite accepting of the Mitfords’ role as the first family of fascism, though somewhat reassuringly, not enough for Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists to win one single seat in Parliament.
Meanwhile, Unity and her sisters were developing a reputation as a one-off icon of eccentricity, much loved by the new, socially ambitious English middle class. Hitler’s Valkyrie also reminds us of the Mitford girls’ obsessive fascination with themselves, their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and only brother, combined with a quite remarkable conviction that all other ‘PLU’ (People Like Us) shared this fascination. Of course, many did, and still do.
But our fascination with the Mitford girls did not develop by chance. Nor did it do so merely because they were, as described by various acolytes, ‘glamorous’, ‘romantic’, ‘scaldingly witty’, ‘born storytellers’, ‘mad’, ‘eccentric’, ‘remarkable’ and ‘brilliant’, were related to Winston Churchill and married into both Ireland’s fabulously wealthy ‘beerage’ and the upper echelons of English aristocracy, many of whom shared their enthusiasm for fascism. It was in fact, as this book will explain, skilful promotion that so successfully established the girls as celebrities and the name Mitford as a brand leader in the world of middle-class social, political and literary culture. Many still consider the Mitfords to be a deeply wonderful, aristocratic family, typical of everything that is – or was – best about England’s green and pleasant land.
They were such a perfect reflection of the times that it was often difficult to believe that the Mitford family had not been invented by Evelyn Waugh, though in part, of course, they had. For it was Waugh who, while embracing many of the Mitford girls’ expressions and anecdotes in his own writing, assisted and encouraged Unity’s elder sister Nancy to write a series of best-selling, popular novels based on a satirical view of the Mitford family, their competitive snobbery and extreme political convictions. It was Nancy’s ‘brilliance’ in injecting sufficient, often quite vicious humour into the recounting of their often appalling views and actions that made them not just socially acceptable but positively magnetic to their increasingly adoring public.
The Mitford girls were also fortunate in having a splendidly handsome, grumpy old father in Lord Redesdale, who could be and would be endlessly caricatured. But of even greater value to the development of their fame and fortune was their ambitious mother, Sydney, who in her initial determination to marry off her six daughters, developed an astonishing ability to obtain coverage of their ‘goings on’ in the social columns of national newspapers; despite the fact that, in truth, the upper echelons of the aristocracy, including the Duke of Devonshire, considered such self-promotion to be extremely vulgar and not at all the thing. This form of promotion also involved her in the quite shameless exploitation of Unity’s relationship with Hitler, including her leaking the story of their possible marriage. All of which resulted in her daughters’ ever-increasing celebrity status and Nancy’s burgeoning book sales.
Then there is the question of how and why Adolf Hitler, who to this day the Mitfords and their friends and acquaintances still describe as ‘charming’ and ‘delightful’, saw fit to persuade ‘my Valkyrie’ and the four other women in his life to commit – or attempt to commit – suicide and the part this necromantic element in his make-up would play in his responsibility for causing the death of 70 million people.
It should be noted that Hitler’s necromancy took the form of an obsession with death and his God-like control over who lived and died, rather than the more classical form of necromancy, which involves attempting to raise or communicate with the dead by means of occult practices.
It is perhaps understandable why, following Unity’s death in 1948, when even the Mitfords had begun to appreciate that Hitler had become somewhat less socially acceptable, Unity’s mother and, more recently, her sister, ‘Debo’ Devonshire, worked towards ‘putting the record straight’ concerning Unity. In so doing, Debo described her sister’s worship of the Führer as a mere ‘friendship’. But Hitler’s Valk
yrie will also examine why when Unity died, her mother, rather than quietly grieve, chose to take issue with the Daily Mail concerning her daughter’s obituary, entitled ‘The Secret Life of Unity Mitford’, by their man in Germany, George Ward Price; the same pro-Nazi George Ward Price who, prior to the outbreak of war had admiringly described Unity as ‘a spirited young English girl’ while encouraging her relationship with Hitler.
But after the war, when such attitudes were a great deal less acceptable, George had used Unity’s obituary to absolve her, by giving the impression that her relationship was little more than a pose and her suicide as tragic exhibitionism. While one had to admire Sydney’s apparent loyalty, predictably her protest only helped to remind the public of her commitment to fascism. However, her defensive reaction may have resulted from the pressure she had been under in hiding Unity’s true secrets; secrets that would go with her to the grave and beyond but which can now, finally, be made known.
1
DAWN OF THE
DAUGHTERS OF ALBION
* * *
1264–1904
* * *
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
William Blake
Late one night in pre-war Munich, a young woman dressed in a black jacket, long black skirt, boots and gauntlets, accompanied by six SS officers in full uniform, climbed the dark stairs to her apartment. Once inside she removed her gloves and lit two large ecclesiastical candles either side of her bed, the head of which was draped with enormous swastika banners. The candlelight also revealed silver framed portraits of Adolf Hitler on the side tables.
As she stepped out of her skirt, she was seen to be wearing no underwear apart from black stockings. She then took a Nazi armband and pulled it down over her eyes before lying down, spread-eagled. One of the men bound her hands and feet to the four corners of the bed while another, in what was obviously a familiar ritual, wound up the gramophone and dropped the needle on a record of Horst-Wessel-Lied, the iconic Nazi anthem. The other officers removed their boots, belts and uniforms. Then, as the pounding marching song broke the silence, they took it in turns to swiftly and aggressively mount her.
Could this young girl have been the same Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale, that her family and friends insisted was a virginal, innocent romantic? Her Austro-Hungarian society friends, the Baroness ‘Gaby’ Bentinck and ‘Milly’ Howard-Brown, were certainly quite convinced it was. But then much about Unity and the Mitford family was – and is – not quite what it seemed.
According to Jonathan Guinness, author of The House of Mitford, Bertie Mitford, Unity’s paternal grandfather, used to claim that Sir Bernard Burke of Burke’s Peerage fame had once informed him that the Mitfords were descended from ‘perhaps’ the two oldest Saxon families in England, a statement designed to suggest that they pre-dated the Norman Conquest: ‘Whether or not the Mitfords were Saxon, they were certainly medieval. Belonging to the landed gentry of Northumberland, they remained for centuries locally prominent, without ever becoming nationally distinguished.’ But in reality Lord and Lady Redesdale and their children’s connection to those of their forefathers who had qualified as landed gentry was tenuous to say the least and the conditions of their inheritance highly fortuitous. It should also be said that without a degree of propitious genealogy, and the Mitford girls’ flair for self-publicity, combined with a small quantity of indulgent, but highly successful literary endeavour and Adolf Hitler’s astonishing relationship with Unity, they would probably have remained profoundly ‘un’ distinguished.
There is evidence to suggest that during the reign of Charles II one Robert Mitford, born in 1612, managed to recover the family castle, or what was left of it, and the small town of Mitford near Morpeth, confiscated by Henry III as punishment for some treacherous act of skulduggery some 400 years earlier.
For the next hundred years or so, while the Civil War came and went, the new Mitford line was sufficiently successful in trade for a great-grandson, yet another John Mitford, to gain adequate education to qualify as a barrister; being called to the bar in 1777. Three years later, rather precociously, he published a book known as ‘Mitford on Pleadings’, which was said to have been much read, ‘even making him a fair amount of money; it continued to be read for a century afterwards’.1
However, it seems more likely that the considerable quantity of money he made which enabled him to return to Northumberland and invest in a much more comfortable and less draughty country seat in Redesdale would likely have resulted from some far less socially acceptable and ‘busier’ activity than writing a law book.
By the law of averages, barristers are quite likely to spend at least half their working life being paid to lie on other peoples’ behalf, a skill which of course also qualifies them for a career in politics. So it was that John Mitford entered Parliament where he soon established his natural affinity with politics by rapidly and successively achieving the roles of Solicitor General, Attorney General and Speaker of the House of Commons. It was hardly surprising that after this seemingly mercurial rise to political eminence he should soon be ‘raised to the peerage as Lord Redesdale and appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland’.2
The first Lord Redesdale’s most enduring achievement during his term of office was the coining of the phrase, ‘I find that there is in Ireland one law for the rich and another for the poor.’ But while he may have voiced concern for the human rights of individual Catholics, like many other Protestants he opposed the political power of the Roman Catholic Church, manifested by his preventing Catholics from being granted positions of political power.
Predictably, the situation ended in tears when, in 1806, he made a serious error of judgement by refusing to grant the Catholic Lord Cloncurry (the Irish republican, politician and landowner) the post of magistrate. Cloncurry’s successful legal challenge of his decision resulted in the first Lord Redesdale being obliged to resign.
However, his fall from grace was compensated, at least in a material and financial sense, in 1808, by the totally unexpected inheritance of the Batsford House and estate, which included many thousands of acres of Cotswold countryside. This seemingly miraculous windfall resulted from the death of Thomas Freeman, his uncle only by marriage, with whom he shared no blood relatives and whose only other surviving relative, a childless granddaughter, had also died shortly afterwards.
In memory (and presumably in appreciation) of Thomas Freeman, the family name was legally changed to Freeman-Mitford. One supposes it was the least Redesdale could have done to give the inheritance a modicum of credibility. Without this legacy, for which the Mitfords didn’t have to raise a finger, their lives would have been considerably less privileged.
Having inherited Batsford in 1830, the second Lord Redesdale, John Thomas, had settled comfortably into his position as an upstanding member of the squirearchy, an amateur theologian and master of the Heythrop Hunt, while remaining ‘active in managing the House of Lords in the interests of the Conservative Party’.3 As a result, the Mitford history included yet another stroke of ironic social advancement when Benjamin Disraeli, Great Britain’s only Jewish prime minister (albeit converted to Anglicism), rewarded him with an additional step up the peerage ladder as the Earl of Redesdale.
In his position as the Second Lord Redesdale, ‘The Great Dictator’, as John Thomas was known, refused to make any attempt to create a son and heir to inherit the position of the Third Lord Redesdale. Instead, he chose to live with his sister in what Jonathan Guinness insisted was ‘perfect and celibate amity’. Though how he could have known why such an arrangement should qualify as either ‘perfect’ or ‘celibate’ remains a mystery.
As a result of the shortage of suitable breeding stock that would (hopefully) result from such a relationship, the earl chose to leave his substantial estates to his first cousin twice removed in the form of Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, or ‘Bertie’ (pronounced B
arty in the old English habit of pronouncing ‘e’ as ‘a’), whose brother, Henry his Lordship, had disinherited as a result of having married a German girl and moved back to the country of her birth. Unfortunately, as Bertie lacked the required inheritance qualifications, the old man took both his titles to the grave with him in 1886, obliging Bertie to start again at the bottom of the peerage ladder. But in 1902, as a result of services to queen and country and his formidable social ambition, he would also be ennobled, taking the title of Baron Redesdale.
* * *
Bertie’s grandfather, Henry Mitford of Exbury, was a captain in the Royal Navy until Christmas Eve 1803 when his first command, the York, ‘went down with all hands in a fog in the North Sea’4. It was an ignominious end to an unremarkable naval career.
He left two daughters by his first marriage and an unfortunately pregnant second wife called Mary, who gave birth to a fatherless son, Henry-Reveley Mitford. Mary soon married again and together with his older half-sisters, Henry-Reveley was abandoned by his mother and stepfather and brought up by his grandfather, the noted historian William Mitford; apparently a deeply unpleasant but financially privileged man.
As a result of this arrangement, instead of a happy childhood Bertie’s father was blessed with a good education and private means, without which it would have been quite impossible to have even thought of going to Oxford, let alone taken up a post as attaché to the British Legation in Florence. Then, as now, the city contained ‘a colony of cultivated English people, drawn to the place by a love of the arts or of the climate; some of them, perhaps being attracted by the somewhat looser conventions which in all generations prevail among people who live abroad’.5 According to Jonathan and Catherine Guinness, it was among this ‘agreeable society’ that Henry Reveley met Lady Georgina Ashburnham, whose father, the Earl of Ashburnham, owned a Florentine villa.