Hitler's Valkyrie

by David R L Litchfield

  Peter Rodd was claimed to have been the prototype for Evelyn Waugh’s fictional character, the brilliant but disreputable ‘freebooter-in-chief’, Basil Seal, though others claimed the ‘unsavoury’ Basil Murray to have been equally well qualified. His sister-in-law, Lady Rennell, described him as being both ‘wild’ and ‘beautiful’.

  The fact that she spent three years engaged to a homosexual seems to signify that all may not have been well in Nancy’s emotional life; or her sex life, for that matter. Perhaps it had been little more than a convenient social arrangement for both of them and a means by which she could avoid her parents’ constant pressure to marry.

  Peter Rodd was also a fascist sympathiser. Apparently he had been influenced by the BUF’s declared intentions of helping both the poor and the unemployed. Though quite what experience, let alone concern, either Peter or Nancy might have had for either poverty or unemployment is somewhat of a mystery. But they bought black shirts, ‘fervently embraced fascist dogma and attended meetings, clapping enthusiastically’.44 There was little evidence that the BUF had any long-term effect on either Peter or Nancy’s concern for the less privileged and she remained a ‘screaming snob’ from birth to death.

  They married in November 1933 and went to live at Strand-on-the-Green where they gained some limited personal experience of being poor. For while Lord Redesdale gave Nancy a small allowance, Peter’s inability to earn as much money from his freelance journalism as he could spend on drink put a severe strain on Nancy’s finances, even when bolstered by royalties, causing them considerable difficulty to live in anything like the manner that they had both come to expect.

  By 1934 Nancy had nearly completed her third novel, Wigs on the Green. Once again it was based on the family, but with their enthusiasm for fascism hidden behind a thin veil of satire. Aware that the book would infuriate Unity and Diana, Nancy allowed them to see a pre-publication proof, which is said to have resulted in her being forced to remove three chapters concerning her comical portrayal of Mosley, thinly disguised as Captain Jack. Not only was publication delayed but it remained the source of a life-long ‘pique’ between Nancy and Diana.

  With the eventual publication of Wigs on the Green in 1935, Nancy would have three novels in print, all based on the family. With the continuing support of Evelyn Waugh and his ‘press pals’, Nancy had succeeded in establishing the Mitford girls as a ‘brand’. The irony of this achievement was that the more Nancy had satirised her family’s most unattractive social traits, the more engaging the brand became.

  By the time Nancy’s book was published, the development of anti-Semitism as part of the BUF’s policy had lost any element of humour, particularly now that people like the Mitfords were no longer under any illusion as to what the Nazis were already doing to the Jews and anyone else that Hitler and his cohorts considered a threat to their creation of a Nordic race of ‘supermen’.

  Diana justified her growing anti-Semitism by claiming, ‘One felt the City was feathering its nest while three million unemployed were starved’, later adding, ‘You can have no conception of how totally divided the “two nations” were then.’ But there was still no evidence that either she or Unity had any concept of what life was like for the ‘other nation’, of what being ‘unemployed’ felt like, or even that they knew anyone who did. Presumably it was Mosley who had instilled in her this justificatory theory.

  Most of the Mitford family also still shared a strong predilection for Germany which, combined with their fascist beliefs, encouraged them to overlook or justify the Nazis’ use of political violence, racial cleansing and eugenics in re-establishing the economy and defeating communism. In an attempt to justify their behaviour, years later Nancy wrote a letter to Evelyn Waugh, in which she claimed, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald’. But they were certainly aware of Dachau and they knew what Hitler’s intentions were, and they displayed considerable enthusiasm. He did not put his policies into practice overnight. After eight years of warning what he intended to do, he spent a further eleven years doing it. Kristallnacht alone should have been enough to halt the family’s relationship with Adolf Hitler.

  In the spring of 1934, perhaps in response to Diana’s encouragement of the continuation of their ‘open relationship’ and concern that he may have lost control of the situation, Mosley rented a house north of Grasse, in southern France, where they stayed for ‘a month or so’, once again epitomising his lack of political commitment.

  At the end of 1934, with Mosley’s encouragement, Diana returned to Munich to learn to speak German and socialise with leading Nazis. Unity had been in Germany since the spring of that year, attending Madame Laroche’s finishing school. She had yet to be introduced to Hitler, but her determination to meet ‘the greatest man of all time45’ had in no way diminished her resolve. Meanwhile, she continued her language studies.

  It has been said that ‘No one could have foreseen the tragedy that resulted from the Redesdales’ decision to allow Unity to go to Germany’46; though even when she started to tell all and sundry of her determination to shoot herself if there was a war between Britain and Germany, the Redesdales continued to finance her stay.

  5

  BAVARIAN RHAPSODY

  * * *

  1934–36

  * * *

  Somewhere between fear and sex is passion.

  Somewhere between God and the Devil.

  Jeanette Winterson

  On 30 June 1934 the Nazi Party exploded in an orgy of brutal political cleansing that became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler had decided that mass assassinations were the only way to solve what he was persuaded to believe was a planned coup against him by the SA, its leader Ernst Röhm and other political opponents who were dragged from their beds and without any form of trial were either immediately or subsequently executed.

  The SA was the Nazi Party’s original, largely working-class paramilitary organisation which, after Hitler had gained dictatorial power over Germany, became redundant. But with 3 million armed members, dangerously sympathetic to the party’s socialist roots, with ambitions to take over the existing army, they could indeed have been considered a threat, even while there was no evidence of any planned coup. They were superseded by the more middle-class SS, which had no political agenda and owed its allegiance to the Führer alone.

  Unity, who was quite obviously determined to immerse herself in a mystical celebration of ritualised violence, could not have arrived in Germany at a better time. The mood was perfectly reflected in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Ernst Jünger’s Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Combat as an internal experience): ‘Death, where is thy sting / Hell, where is thy victory?’ It sounded like a quote from William Blake, but is in fact from Corinthians.

  * * *

  Of all the Mitford girls, only Jessica would rebel against fascism. But to adopt socialist and even communist ideals she would need considerable support and encouragement to stand up against the political and social steamroller that was her family. Even Mrs Hammersley was ridiculing her as a ‘ballroom communist, a cut below a parlour pink’. Her saviour arrived in the form of Esmond Romilly who, far from being a shop-floor socialist from a working-class background, was in fact her so-called ‘social equal’. They were even related and between them would manage to gain almost as many column inches as Unity.

  Decca had admired her second cousin Esmond from an early age. He was Aunt Natty’s grandchild, son of Clementine Churchill’s sister, Nellie. He possessed all the steadfast determination that young sons of the upper classes were supposed to have in order to run the Empire. He was, however, in rebellion against the whole status quo. They were made for each other.

  Jonathan Guinness obviously found it frightfully difficult to tell his story, for while politically he was quite obviously a ‘pinko’ radical, Romilly was Winston Churchill’s nephew and as such was, at least socially, an expression in common usage at the time, ‘stra
ight out of the top drawer’. So, he referred to him with patronising endearment as ‘perverse, zany’ and ‘rather splendid’1.

  Jessica liked to give the impression that she was shipped off to Paris with cousin Idden for her ‘finishing year’ as much to keep her away from such goings-on as to brush up her French at the Sorbonne. Though one would have to admit that while, some time later, her mother may have come to appreciate Esmond’s ability to publicise her daughter, such a ‘young radical’, particularly of a communist persuasion, would not have been the type of person she had in mind as a potential husband for Jessica, regardless of whether he was related to Winston Churchill.

  * * *

  It was Jessica who had insisted that ‘Unity went to live in Germany with full parental approval’, despite other members of the family’s insistence that their parents had reacted with ‘fury and distress’ to the news of Unity’s visit to Germany with Diana the previous year. Jessica had also pointed out that their mother had not only accompanied her to Paris where she was returning to complete her ‘finishing year’, but had then continued on to Munich with Unity, to ‘settle her in’ to Madame Laroche’s.

  The Baroness Laroche, whom Diana, if not Unity, rather diplomatically remembered as being, ‘a charming woman’, instilled in her girls some limited veneer of sophistication and cultural knowledge, while providing them with comfortable accommodation, or pension complète. She also joined them for lunch and dinner, at which the food was said to have been delightful and all conversation was conducted in German.

  1 Unity reading to Decca (Jessica), 1923. (Topfoto)

  2 Mary Ormsby-Gore and Unity Mitford. Photo by Bassano, 1932. (Author’s collection)

  3 The Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford. (Getty Images)

  4 Unity and Diana amongst their ‘storms’. (Author’s collection)

  5 Hitler relaxing with friends. (Topfoto)

  6 Hitler addressing 100,000 Nazis at Nuremberg in 1935. (Topfoto)

  7 Painting by Adolf Ziegler in Hitler’s apartment. (Author’s collection)

  8 Unity with Lady Redesdale and Doctor Fritz-Randolph of the German Embassy at a Christmas Party given by the Anglo-German Fellowship at Victoria Hall in Bloomsbury, London. (Getty Images)

  9 Unity with Diana and her two sons. (Getty Images)

  10 Unity at Nuremberg rally in 1935. (Topfoto)

  11 Janos Almasy. (Alexander Almásy)

  12 ‘Creation of Eve’ by William Blake. (Author’s collection)

  13 Hitler and Unity. (Author’s collection)

  14 Unity returning to England from Germany in January 1940 following her suicide attempt. (Getty Images)

  15 Nancy, Unity and Diana laid to rest in the Swinbrook churchyard. (Wikimedia Commons)

  Most of her fellow students, who were a year or two younger than Unity, were being given a degree of European finish prior to ‘coming out’. But due to the somewhat relaxed supervision, a number of them celebrated their lack of parental control by indulging in relationships with virile young SS officers, despite Madame Laroche’s known dislike of Nazis. However, it was unlikely that Madame Laroche would have ever discussed such things, politics not being considered ‘quite the thing’ as a subject for polite conversation amongst her girls. Fortunately for Unity, Fräulein Baum, who taught the girls to speak German and supervised their evening entertainment, was very pro-Nazi.

  Unity was doubtless in heaven and quite convinced that her fantasies were about to become reality, even though it would be some time before she would actually meet the Führer; which was just as well as she had first to learn to speak his language. This she achieved remarkably quickly, once again demonstrating that she was a great deal more intelligent than the rest of her family cared to admit.

  Unity soon made useful friends in Munich. One in particular was Erna Hanfstaengl, who was a year or so older than her brother Putzi and who frequently referred to herself in the third person as Miss Hanfstaengl. She introduced Unity to the upper echelons of Munich society; mainly professional people but also those in business and the arts. The closest of these friends were said to have included her cousin Eberhard Hanfstaengl, the director general of the Pinakothek art gallery; Arno Rechberg, a chemical manufacturer; an eminent surgeon called Sauerbruch; Baroness Redwitz; the writer Bobby Shrenk; and the Bruckmanns, a publishing family from which Frau Bruckmann, the Princess Cantacuzeno, became a fanatical devotee of Hitler. Unity was also particularly attached to Pinky Obermeyer, the ‘sharp tongued’ German equivalent of Brian Howard.

  Pryce-Jones wrote of Erna’s obvious pride in her relationship with Unity:

  On and off Unity lived with me practically the whole Nazi time. Her clothes were left in her room at Solln a well-to-do area in the South of Munich, with her books and photographs. In the winter she would come to Uffing (a fashionable town on the shores of Lake Staffelsee in the Bavarian Alps). Every summer, at least until 1939, she was my guest … Before the war, Randolph Churchill came there 3 or 4 times. He introduced Selfton Delmer (the Sunday Express correspondent) to me and he was on the best of terms with Unity. I told her that she looked like his sister, and she answered, ‘You know my grandmother was a very naughty woman.’

  It was Sefton who would describe Unity as, ‘probably the only foreign woman in Germany to enjoy Hitler’s acquaintance. Twenty years old, pretty with shining blue eyes and flaxen hair, she seemed … to embody the Hitler ideal of a Nordic woman’.

  Erna claimed that such remarks did nothing to increase Unity’s popularity amongst the Nazi elite. ‘I know how deeply hated she was by the party. Jealousy of course. She was more prominent than some German leaders and they could not forgive that. Frau Himmler came into my shop and in the course of conversation she remarked on “that good-for-nothing Unity”.’

  This questionable opinion was largely the result of somewhat understandable sour grapes and spite on the part of Erna, whose brother Putzi would eventually pay dearly for his friendship with Unity.

  Unity took up anti-Semitism as breezily as everything else, talking about Jews with her usual exaggeration; she wanted to have them all burnt. “Burn the Jews, that’s the thing for them”, she would say, it was the fashion to chatter on like that … her education [background] forced these attitudes on her.

  But Erna Hanfstaengl’s revelations only served to illustrate how little she really knew of Unity’s relationship with Hitler: ‘Only her education as a lady was perfect and that appealed to Hitler, she didn’t make love to him or fall on her knees and make an exhibition of herself as other women did.’

  * * *

  While developing various friendships in Munich, Unity also soon started to make regular visits to her brother Tom’s bisexual friend and lover, Janos Almasy, in his castle on the Austro-Hungarian border at Bernstein, over which the swastika flag was already flying. According to John Heygate, ‘By the end of 1933, there was a large and vigorous Nazi Party in Austria, demanding to be free of Vienna, the Catholic Church and Mussolini.’

  Janos was also a friend of Gaby Bentinck, née Thyssen, whose father Heinrich owned the infamous neighbouring Castle Rechnitz and, with his brother Fritz Thyssen, contributed considerable funds towards Hitler’s rise to power. Gaby, who, like her sister, Margit Batthyany (who was later involved in a major Jewish atrocity), also gained notoriety for her sexual exploits, described Janos as, ‘An astrologer and necromancer in the Wallenstein tradition, rather sinister-looking but invited everywhere, dashingly Nazi and Unity’s bosom friend.’ She would later form a friendship with Unity and also enjoy encouraging her to go into intimate details of her adventures; particularly those involving Janos.

  Apparently, he shared Hitler’s obsession with the occult; an obsession that would soon also be shared by Unity. Her passion for Blake and Milton both reflected and influenced her preoccupation with mystical, spiritual fantasy. In Janos she found both a kindred spirit and a sexual alchemist, who succeeded in fusing together her fantasies and her erotic realities, thereby awakening in Uni
ty a passion akin to religious ecstasy.

  She later told Gaby that one morning, after a rich, late-night supper and more champagne and sweet wine than she was used to, Unity followed Janos into his dark satanic library where they indulged in ‘savage fornication’. Between explosive bouts of physical passion, they lay by the fire while Janos expounded the principles of necromancy, the summoning of spirits and manipulation of mortals. ‘To drive them mad. To enflame to love or hatred. To gain their favour or to constrain them to do or not to do some deed.’ He also spoke of the manipulation of death and Unity’s role as a Valkyrie or ‘chooser of the slain’ and how obvious it was that their coming together had been preordained by the Norse gods, for whom pain and death was the ultimate sacrificial rebirth.

  As Unity once again rose to ecstasy in the firelight, Janos revealed these to be the same gods that had chosen Hitler to lead the reborn Germanic master race and Unity to be the Führer’s personal Valkyrie, while in a trance-like state she whispered Blake’s immortal words, ‘Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d. Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.’ And dreamt of Hitler.

  The following day, Unity awoke determined to gain more knowledge of Norse mythology. With Janos’ guidance and the contents of his library she soon learnt that it comprised ‘the myths of North Germanic pre-Christian religion or German paganism, rooted in mediaeval Iceland, Iron Age Scandinavian and Romanticist Viking revival.’ She also discovered the importance of Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century epic Prose Edda and the gods Odin and Thor, and that Norse mythology was perfectly suited to her fantasies, being full of death and war, human sacrifice and slaves. Janos also explained to her the importance of Norse mythology and necromancy to both Wagner and her beloved Führer.