Hitler's Valkyrie

by David R L Litchfield

  Until Unity chose to die, Janos fulfilled his role as her high priest and lover. But he was also married, though his wife Marie, who was confined to a wheelchair, was said to have accepted his other relationships. She got on well with Unity, who stayed for long periods of time at Bernstein, while Janos frequently went with her to Munich. They also spent time together in Venice.

  His reputation as an astrologer was greatly enhanced by the fact that in 1939 he cast Hitler’s horoscope, in which he warned of ‘portended catastrophes, collapse and death by his own hand.’ Hitler took his own life on Walpurgisnacht, 30 April/1 May, the night when witches meet on the Brocken mountain, or Blocksberg, in central Germany, and party with the gods.

  * * *

  While Madame Laroche’s other girls studied the piano, singing, painting and other subjects considered suitable for well-bred young women, Unity rarely attended formal lessons apart from German language. She had her own agenda and adopted a considerably more ‘à la carte’ approach to Laroche’s ‘academy’ than the rest of the girls, especially after dark.

  Unity also developed a particularly close friendship with her language teacher, Fräulein Baum, known to everyone as ‘Bäumchen’, principally because she was extremely pro-Hitler and the Nazis. ‘One was told by the Baroness that if one saw anything like a scrimmage, one was to hurry by and not stand and stare.’2 Unity’s anti-Semitism was even more extreme than Baum’s; on being told of Jews being beaten she used to say, ‘Jolly good, serves them right, we should go and cheer’, having no regard that the victims often included women and children.

  Armida Macindoe, a contemporary of Unity’s and a pupil at the school, remembered:

  During the autumn term Diana came out and took a flat off the Ludwigstrasse, she came again early in November. I also met Putzi Hanfstaengl with Unity, he was more of a means than an end, he introduced her to Nazis. I think I got on well with her. She used to go to the Osteria Bavaria restaurant and sit waiting for Hitler. She’d sit there all day long with her book and read. She’d say, I don’t want to make a fool of myself being alone there, and so she’d ask me to go along to keep her company, to have lunch or a coffee.

  Often Hitler was there. People came and went. She would place herself so that he invariably had to walk by her, she was drawing attention to herself, not obnoxiously but enough to make one slightly embarrassed. But the whole point was to attract his attention. She’d talk more loudly or drop a book. And it eventually paid off.

  That summer and autumn term, we sat there in the Osteria Bavaria. At last one of the henchmen was sent over. It was what she had been waiting and praying for. It was after lunch, we’d had a cup of coffee. I must go, I said, and hurried off. She was thrilled when she came home that the object of the exercise had been achieved, and she’d been noticed.

  Rosemary Macindoe, Armida’s younger sister, said:

  In October 1934 I went to Baroness Laroche’s … Unity had not yet met Hitler; every Friday he lunched at the Osteria Bavaria, and she used to go in blind adoration. He came in with a raincoat, an Alsatian, and a whip in his hand, and Unity said, ‘Don’t you think his eyes are marvellous?’ She had a phobia about Jews, she used to make us write on letters ‘Juden sind hier nicht erwünscht’. This was a Stürmer slogan which translated as ‘Jews are not welcome here’, and was often to be found posted up by Nazi mayors of villages and by shopkeepers.

  Diana used to have dinner parties in her flat and I went there quite a lot … there were three SS men in particular, Max was the first name of another of them, a curly-blond SS man whom we saw in the Brown House. As well as Max, Unity regularly recruited the services of two other ‘Storms’, Erich Widmann and Julius Stadelmann.

  They had records of the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, Unity was always singing that, as well as the ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘Unsere Fahne’. She was always on about the Hanfstaengls too. The only other thing we did, Diana, Unity and I, was when we went out to Schleissheim [where the famous Schloss was at Hitler’s disposal] to see army manoeuvres, or perhaps a flying show, and found we were somewhere near Dachau. There were endless jokes about it.

  So, even as early as 1934 they were under no illusion as to the purpose of the camp as an incarceration and extermination centre for members of the human race, that for racial, physical, mental, political or religious reasons, the Nazis considered unacceptable as members of German society; and if they knew what was going on there, then so did everyone else.

  Mary Gerard Leigh, who was later to become Countess Kapnist, was only 15 when she arrived at Laroche’s in September 1932, staying until the autumn of 1934 when the Mitfords started to descend on Munich. She had few illusions of what was going on, even though her memories remained somewhat coy:

  When Lady Redesdale came round with Diana, and with Jessica who was out there in September, they could hardly cram into the Baroness’s little salon. I have a firm memory of the Oktoberfest, with the daughters all losing their mothers in the public gardens on purpose … Unity used to bring SA or SS men back and ask them to spend the night, but probably there was no sex in it.

  But as Klaus Theweleit, quoting Hans Blüher, pointed out, ‘What was most immediately striking about Hitler’s bodyguards was their handsomeness. Hitler surrounded himself with young men of extraordinary beauty. Men worthy to become the pride of our line, with the delicate features we know as “Nordic”.’ Many of them were from upper-class families, raised from birth to adopt a military bearing and attitude; as such they would have been extremely attractive to Unity and Diana, both physically and socially.

  Of course there was sex in it. That was certainly Nancy’s opinion. According to Gaby Bentinck and Milly Howard-Brown, it was Diana’s opinion too, but it was only when the latter returned unexpectedly one evening that she realised the full extent of her sister’s bizarre sexual ritual. On entering her apartment, lit only by the reflections from the street lights, she was immediately aware of the sound of carnal activity and through Unity’s partly open door, in the candlelight, could just make out three or four partly clothed, uniformed SS officers, one of whom was aggressively ‘taking’ her sister, who was splayed across the bed. Blindfolded and dressed in her black and grey BUF uniform, complete with leather gauntlets, her skirt removed, Unity appeared to be tied to the bed. A record of Horst-Wessel-Lied played quite loudly, while the waiting men looked on in silence.

  Later, with considerable pride and no hint of shame, Unity apparently admitted that sex with the SS officers was her Eucharist. Her bed, draped with swastika flags, surrounded by candles and surmounted by iconic images of the Führer, was an altar devoted to her messiah on which she gave her body to those closest to him; his personal warriors or disciples. She explained that remaining blindfolded minimised her personal involvement.

  Diana confessed to finding her role as a voyeur exciting and by mutual consent would often repeat the process. From time to time she apparently also took SS lovers, but only one at a time.

  Sex with the Storms (as they were known) from the Brown House was also one of the ways in which Unity managed to get inside information concerning Hitler’s whereabouts. Julius Stadelmann was particularly valued, as despite the fact that he wore spectacles, he was one of Hitler’s junior adjutants and would have been a mine of information.

  * * *

  If one reads between the lines, some of Unity’s young English friends were obviously quite appalled by her behaviour and the openness with which she spoke about it, though such views were rarely expressed in print and never in intimate detail. The rather ‘fey’ Tim Martin’s comments concerning Diana and Unity were typical of the humorous anecdotes that have been encouraged by subsequent accounts:

  Late in 1934, my mother came out to visit me, and shared a sleeper with Diana. Early in 1935 we were invited to lunch with her, on a hideous day of pouring rain. At the top of the lift stood these two great blondes, obviously stunning, who took our mackintoshes. One of them [Unity] said, ‘I’ve met the most marve
lous storm’. ‘Really, what was that?’ ‘My dear, a storm trooper’.

  Another contemporary, Derek Hill, who was to become one of Ireland’s greatest society portrait and landscape painters but at the time was studying theatre design in Munich, insisted:

  Unity wasn’t sexy [or not to Derek who knew very little about girls’ sexuality and had little desire to find out] and I should be surprised if she got up to anything. References to Max or others in her letters are probably a tease. Although she talked a lot about it.

  One often gets the impression that witnesses had been heavily censored, not least, perhaps, by their own sense of loyalty to people they considered to be of a similar class or out of respect for those higher up the social scale. Particularly ‘Hons’. This would have been especially relevant after the war, when a number of reputations, but those of the Mosleys and Mitfords in particular, were in desperate need of censorial cleansing.

  * * *

  Back in London, the BUF was reaching what was considered the peak of its success when on 7 June 1934, ‘the biggest and most important meeting to date took place in the huge Exhibition Hall at Olympia’3. But just as Mosley rose to speak, a heckler shouted, ‘Hitler and Mosley, what are they for? Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war.’ It was also around this time that Lord Rothermere, under pressure from his newspapers’ advertisers, withdrew his support. His apparent change of heart, regardless of its hypocrisy, was a devastating blow to the party. If not the coup de grâce, it was certainly the turning point in the fortunes of the BUF.

  Despite the fact that Unity still awarded The Leader’ a considerable degree of hero worship, in Germany she was in the presence of the real thing and could hardly contain her excitement’. Particularly when, only three weeks after she had first laid eyes on Hitler, he would be personally involved in the first major act of violence since he had assumed absolute power.

  Unity was excited by the ruthless brutality of the Night of the Long Knives, but publicly disguised her excitement with a face of girlish sympathy:

  The excitement here over the Röhm affair is terrific, everyone is horrified … I am so terribly sorry for the Führer – you know Röhm was his oldest comrade and friend, the only one that called him ‘Du’ in public … it must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Röhm himself and tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines and found him in bed with a boy.

  It was somewhat paradoxical that this reputedly psychopathic leader, who would be responsible for the death of millions and whose ritualised violence Unity found so exciting, never actually killed anyone with his own hands. In the purest form of necromantic tradition, Hitler persuaded or inspired others to commit acts of atrocity on his behalf. He was a man who had an obsession with death rather than killing.

  Of course there were those, and still are those, who firmly believe that despite his indisputable brilliance as an orator and socio-political strategist, Adolf Hitler was in fact suffering from schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, or some other form of psychotic condition. Perhaps he was just driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic, but after four years in the First World War trenches Hitler would have almost certainly have been seriously unhinged. So, the question of whether he was mad was somewhat redundant. The only relevant question was, ‘How mad?’

  It was actually Heinrich Himmler who appeared to be the dottiest of all the Nazi leaders, claiming to believe that the inhabitants of Atlantis had been a super-race who had come straight from God, and that when Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves some of the priests had escaped by boat. For some inexplicable reason they had ended up in Tibet, or maybe Nepal. It was certainly the country furthest from the sea, both in distance and height. These same people had then apparently recreated their Nordic master race in their Himalayan retreat. Unfortunately, this race of ‘God men’ became polluted by the Jews and other lesser mortals. But Himmler was convinced that by means of a policy of racial purity and selective breeding, the race could be recreated.

  Hitler also believed in the creation of a master race, as long as he was its leader and messiah. Fortunately for the success of his political ambitions, he sensibly chose to play down the Atlantis story; though he did support Himmler’s decision, in 1939, to send an SS research team to Tibet to look for their Atlantean ancestors. In case they subsequently decided Nepal was a more likely location, Hitler gave the king a Mercedes.

  The King of Nepal died in 1955, but his (by 2010) 90-year-old mistress was allowed to continue living in the palace by the recently empowered Maoist government, who had finally decided to sell the 70-year-old Mercedes. The Mitford girls would have considered it ‘killing’.

  It seems doubtful that the research team actually believed Himmler’s ridiculous theory and far more likely that they chose to go along with it in order to facilitate their trip. By this time it was also becoming obvious that telling Himmler that he was barking mad would have been a potentially hazardous undertaking, regardless of the indisputable evidence.

  When Hitler was out of town and she needed to relax from the intensity ‘of it all’, Unity used to go sightseeing and walking in the mountains with Derek Hill. Perhaps they amused themselves by speculating which of their other friends might have been in the habit of sharing Nazi beds, since many young English girls like Unity escaped from their parents’ control and went to Munich to enjoy an active sex life with the Storms; as did a good number of their brothers and Derek’s chums.

  ‘It was Derek Hill who gave Unity her first glimpse of Hitler’4 at close quarters. For a fascist dictator intent on world domination he was surprisingly casual in his habits, far more so than even the most liberal of today’s democratic heads of governments. He would have lunch at the Osteria Bavaria in Schellingstrasse, Munich-Schwabing, and sit for an hour or two chatting with friends, apparently without a care in the world. When the weather was fine, he sat out at a table in the garden. Another haunt was a café, the Carlton Teeraum, in Briennerstrasse. ‘He would simply go to these places like anyone else’,56 accompanied by minimal security, an adjutant or two and various favourites, who were more often than not without any particular social or political qualification.

  At around 6 p.m. on 11 June 1934, only eighteen days prior to the Night of the Long Knives, Derek Hill was taking tea with his mother and an aunt at the Carlton Teeraum when Hitler arrived. All too aware of how excited Unity would be, given the chance of being in the same room as her beloved Führer, he telephoned her with the news.

  ‘Of course’, she told Diana in a letter written the next day,7 ‘I jumped straight into a taxi, in which in my excitement I left my camera which I was going to take to the shop. I went and sat down with them, and there was the Führer opposite. Derek’s aunt said “You’re trembling with excitement”, and sure enough I was, so much so that Derek had to drink my chocolate for me because I couldn’t hold the cup.’

  What was surprising was that Unity would have developed such a close relationship with a conscientious objector such as Hill while also retaining a relationship with Brian Howard, whose attitude towards the Nazis was so diametrically opposed to hers. He considered what the Nazis were doing to Jews, liberals, leftists and artists in the thirties, and what they were obviously going to do when they finally went to war, to be an indictment against not just the Germans, but the whole human race. He also failed to comprehend the wisdom of going to war to get rid of Hitler. ‘In order to get rid of an unpleasant lodger, it is not only foolish, but criminal to set fire to the boarding house. Other people live there.’

  But both Hill and Howard were highly intelligent and extremely entertaining which doubtless says a great deal about Unity; for neither man would have wished to have spent time in the company of the character subsequently portrayed by the Mitford family.

  * * *

  It was also somewhat surprising that, in 1934, so soon after Unity had taken up residence in Munich and been settled in by her mother, Sydney should have revisited Unity. What was
even more surprising was that she should subsequently have chosen to make such politically charged statements; particularly concerning a regime that she had formerly claimed to have found appallingly disdainful, in a country against which her father, Thomas Bowles (so Jonathan Guinness claimed), had ‘indoctrinated’ her to believe everything was tasteless and without merit.

  For someone whom her daughters had claimed was dizzy beyond belief, Sydney’s statement was surprisingly erudite. Either her writing had been skilfully edited or, as seems far more likely, she was not as green as she was cabbage looking, particularly concerning politics:

  From the time that the first German war ended, I believed that the victors had behaved badly and madly to the defeated … the Germans had tried to get the Versailles treaty altered by peaceful means; now at last they turned to a man who might get something done by a show of strength.

  And so when I went to Germany in 1934 [probably in late July] to visit Unity, I was hoping to see Hitler. Anyhow, what was this insignificant-looking man with a funny moustache and an untidy lock of hair, dressed in an old mackintosh? … I found very great beauty and charm in Germany. Nothing I thought could be lovelier than the little baroque theatre in Bayreuth [a town that an English woman would only have been likely to visit to pay homage to Wagner]. The lovely white, gold, pale blue and pink churches seem to me to be admirably fitted to the worship of God in happiness.