Hitler's Valkyrie
Page 21
Most people of Churchill’s social class and those in his own party, in the government and in the establishment in general, still regarded him as a bit of an adventurer and a warmonger, with the monstrous failure of his First World War Gallipoli campaign, and its huge loss of life, still casting a shadow over his future. But, like Hitler, Winston was a master political tactician, and in 1937 appeased the privileged classes while confusing the working class with the rather weasel-worded statement, ‘I will not pretend that if I had to choose between Nazism and Communism, I would choose Communism.’
A few years later, during a conversation with Tom Mitford at a ball in Blenheim Palace, Churchill remarked, with a sweeping gesture of his hand to indicate the magnificent house and treasures earned through war by his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, ‘Chamberlain says war produces nothing. But look at all this!’
Unity also ‘introduced her brother Tom to Hitler on 8 June 1935, despite having wanted to avoid doing so’; apparently because she feared he may have displayed insufficient reverence:
She took Tom to the Osteria Bavaria, obviously at his request, but did so at a time earlier than Hitler’s usual one, her intention being to get Tom out of the restaurant before Hitler arrived, if he did. But for once in his life Hitler came at 1:45, and asked them over.
In a letter to Diana Unity wrote: ‘Although I didn’t want him to meet him (Tom) I am quite pleased now. He adored the Führer. He almost got into frenzy like us sometimes, though I expect he will have cooled down by the time he gets home and I am sure the Führer liked him and found him intelligent to talk to. So I really think no harm is done.’22
In September 1936, ‘when Diana was in Berlin making preparations for her forthcoming wedding to Mosley’, Hitler invited her to dinner ‘on the spur of the moment’23. Or that was how she claimed it had come about. She subsequently wrote to Unity:
He was so wonderful and really seemed pleased we had gone to the Party Conference every day … He asked after Tom and I said ‘Der Judenknecht ist fast Nationalsozialist geworden’ [The lackey of the Jews has almost become a National Socialist] and he roared with laughter and said, ‘Ihr Bruder ist ein fabelhafter Junge’ [Your brother is a splendid boy] twice over. Isn’t Tom lucky.
* * *
While the recounting of Unity’s transcendental experience could all too easily be seen as something profound and magnificent, as with Hitler’s relationship with the occult it was leading down a dangerous path, a path that would lead to the ‘heart of darkness’.
For Unity, her meeting with the ‘deity’ was the equivalent of a confirmation, and the profound effect it had on her was manifest in her intensified hatred of Jews and her enthusiasm for the Nazis’ increasingly aggressive laws threatening their very existence. Like millions of Germans, her revulsion was inflamed by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher and his publication, Der Stürmer. Pryce-Jones wrote:
Streicher’s own speeches were invariably on the same single note, but on 19 April 1935, for instance, at an Easter meeting in Nuremberg of Nazi teachers, of which he had been one himself, he said, ‘The number of Jew bastards in Germany is terribly large. We must not believe that we have yet obtained the victory. A hard path lies before us’.
On 9 May, in another speech at Nuremberg, Streicher gave what must have sounded like encouragement from the home front to Unity. He had had occasion, he said, to congratulate the leader of the British fascists upon one of his speeches. The very next day the Nazi press published the text of the telegram in reply from Mosley to Streicher: ‘Please accept my very best thanks for your kind telegram which greeted my speech in Leicester … the power of Jewish corruption must be destroyed in all countries before peace and justice can be successfully achieved in Europe’.
Meanwhile, Streicher’s publication continued to advertise the Nazis’ increasingly aggressive policy towards Jews:
The Stürmer had been a provincial sheet with a circulation of 28,000 when Streicher bought it for 40,000 Reichsmark from the previous owner’s widow and transformed it into a blend of anti-Jewish raving and incitement to violence. The Stürmer had to be bought by some institutions and distributors under compulsion, so its circulation figures, and even its influence, are uncertain.24
It had been in the very first issue of Der Stürmer in 1934 that the British fascists were attacked for their lack of aggression towards the Jews: ‘Mosley is the tool of the Jews. Mosley has admitted that he had Jewish blood in his veins.’ It was doubtless this criticism that encouraged Diana to make her ‘little jest’ to Hitler, when referring to her brother Tom as a ‘lackey of the Jews’.
But by the forty-eighth issue, in 1935, it would be the same paper that would announce, presumably in response to Unity’s influence: ‘Mosley is a great speaker, a fearless fighter but above all things a subtle diplomat. With his nationalist policies, he has for a considerable time been annoying and challenging the Jews’.25
* * *
After Unity’s invitation to Hitler’s table, she suffered considerable insecurity, wondering if it had been a unique coming together or the start of a relationship that she had previously only dreamt of in her most auspicious fantasies. But on 18 February 1935 her dreams once again became reality.
‘Having tea at Carlton Tearooms, Hitler came and sent Brückner over to ask us to join them, Werlin, the Mercedes man and pressman Dietrich. Nobody else.’ (The person with Unity during this episode seems to have been Mary St Clair-Erskine. It is difficult to establish Unity’s company for certain events because she had five different friends all going by the name ‘Mary’, who were with her at one time or other, namely Mary Ormsby-Gore, Mary St Clair-Erskine, Mary Gerard Leigh, Mary Crum and Mary Woodise.)
Wilhelm Brückner, a dedicated Nazi, was ‘more of a bodyguard than an adjutant’26; Jakob Werlin, director-general of Mercedes-Benz, was a political opportunist, while Dr Otto Dietrich was in control of press and publicity for the NSDAP. Following Hanfstaengl’s fall from grace he would also assume responsibility for foreign correspondents.
Unity believed their encounter was to be more diversionary than transcendental. Bored by Werlin, Dietrich and Brückner, Hitler invited Unity to their table to enliven the meeting with light, sparkling conversation. Her intuition was sufficiently well attuned not to require telling that mystic conversations should only take place when they were alone or amongst very close members of Hitler’s inner circle, who either shared his occult convictions or were sufficiently loyal to appreciate the extreme discretion with which such conversations must be treated.
Some friends had been grudgingly prepared to admit, ‘Unity and Hitler were alone together rather rarely.’27 But it is highly likely that, considering the lengths he went to in hiding his relationship with Eva from the public, by the time Unity had reached the stage of being invited to stay with Hitler, she would also have fully appreciated the importance of her discretion. It was said she ‘stayed with him once or twice, if one can call it that, in a sleeper on his special train; his habit of taking her on train journeys accounts for her nickname among his entourage of “Mitfahrt” (travelling companion)’.28
Unity told Gaby Bentinck that she didn’t always record her time spent with Hitler and there was certainly no evidence to suggest that Unity stayed with Hitler in Berlin. But on the weekend of 14 February 1935, incredibly just five days after allegedly meeting Hitler in person for the very first time, she apparently began to make regular visits to the city as a houseguest of the Goebbels family.
These visits gave Unity ample opportunity to spend time in the company of the Führer as her stays were often quite lengthy, lasting for weeks rather than days, during which time Hitler would often arrive, apparently unannounced.
Like all well-placed Nazis, Goebbels acquired property, whether through fees or sinecures due to him as a propagandist and editor, as a Minister, and Gauleiter of Berlin. Schwanenwerder, where Unity stayed, on an island in the Wannsee just outside Berlin, was the home which he bought after the Röhm purge …
Although not a lecher like Streicher, Goebbels was a womaniser, and one wonders what impact Unity made on him. Mosley’s autobiography states: ‘Diana was very fond of Frau Goebbels, who, with her husband, was often at dinner with Hitler. Goebbels, distinguished in public by his qualities as an orator and master of mass propaganda, had in private life an almost exaggerated sense of humour which, surprisingly, Hitler shared; it was one of the bonds between them’29.
But Unity’s close friendship with the top echelons of the Nazi Party had a side effect that could prove dangerous for the unwary. In English society it would have come under the category of ‘telling tales’; something which Nanny would have discouraged at the nursery stage and which also, for those with sufficient determination to develop the habit, would have been cruelly punished by fellow schoolchildren. Under the English rules of ‘fair play’, it was not something ‘one did’. Yet in Germany it became the very bedrock of fascism; even amongst the privileged. Like all things Nazi, Unity adopted the habit with considerable enthusiasm.
Pryce-Jones wrote of one such case:
Paul Wallraf … Dined … with Lali and Freddy Horstmann, Berlin’s most fashionable couple, in their house on the Tiergarten … at this dinner party one Prince Lippe-Bisterfeld had openly railed against the Nazis to Unity Mitford, the young lady seated next to him, only to be arrested with his wife forty-eight hours later. ‘Everybody knew that if you ran into Unity you had to be careful,’ Paul Wallraf said, ‘she was a very dangerous woman, I saw her afterwards at parties and kept well away.’
* * *
Unity’s friend, and fellow English student in Munich, Mary St Clair-Erskine, was regularly recruited by Unity as a companion ‘in waiting’ in the early days of her pursuit of the Führer. Shy and retiring, she could be relied upon not to ‘get in the way’, as it were. She was with Unity at the Carlton Tea Rooms on 18 February when Brückner approached them, and later recalled the events:
[Brückner said] ‘The Führer invites you to his table’, and over we went. We’d seen Hitler almost every day … I went over to their table too, and had tea with them, about six of us in all.
After that, a phone call would come to the pension from Brückner to say, ‘Will you have tea with the Führer’ and in case it rang, Bobo would sit by the telephone until about two o’clock, that became the pattern of her day, first the tension, then the anti-climax or the frenzy of getting ready. A car came for us.
Mary St Clair-Erskine was also somewhat more truthful than the various friends of the Mitford girls, who were so insistent that Unity rarely visited Hitler at his home:
We went a lot to his flat in the Prinzregentenstrasse, it was round the corner. The curtains would be drawn and it was always dark. Lovely flowers everywhere. He ordered lots of cream cakes which he’d be disappointed if we left, but he’d eat a bit of Knäckebrot [crisp bread]. He had a great big globe on a stand; and liked to show us any new pictures he had. He was extremely nice and kind to us. A pleasant host.
Mary was extremely discreet, insisting that their conversation was limited to entirely innocent subjects, mainly concerning the state of the British nation. She made no mention of Unity’s more personal conversation, partly because her German was not sufficiently advanced to understand what they were talking about, and if it had been, she would have been deeply embarrassed by such ‘nonsense’. However, Mary was also bright enough to be aware that Unity and Hitler obviously had a very special and deeply personal relationship which, if she wished to continue her studies in Munich and remain on amiable terms with Unity and the Führer, made her discretion imperative; particularly in view of the fact that Unity would often insist in regaling Mary with the most intimate details.
Fortunately for Mary’s somewhat sensitive, nervous disposition, she was not always required to act as Unity’s companion, particularly when Hitler wanted to spend time alone with Unity or with his special inner circle of friends, who were sufficiently sympathetic to his needs to know when to involve themselves in conversation, leaving their Führer free to devote his attentions to his Valkyrie.
Hitler and Unity had actually met on several occasions on a rather superficial and, for Unity, somewhat frustrating level before she was summoned for afternoon tea, on the strict understanding that she should come alone. A car was to be sent for her. The fact that Hitler sent a car to collect Unity and that she spent the afternoon and early evening alone with him was confirmed by her friend, Mary. Gaby Bentinck’s friend, Marie France Railey, recounted the rest of the story.
More by force of habit than for any specific reason, Unity probably gathered up her book of Blake as well as her notebook, which also served as a sketchpad. As the bell rang, she ran down the stairs and climbed into the black Mercedes. But it was only as they pulled up on Prinzregentenstrasse that she realised she had been summoned to Hitler’s private apartment.
Unity was greeted with warm but formal affection by the Führer, while a maid took her coat, before pouring their coffee or tea and serving them with rich cream cakes. She then left them alone.
Once again Hitler took an interest in the books Unity had with her. He even opened her notebook before she had a chance to reply to his query of whether it was private. He was amused by her obvious embarrassment at the erotic content of her drawings and waived aside her apologies for what she thought might have caused him offence. He then complimented Unity on her skill as an artist and assured her that he was no prude, while gesturing towards the Ziegler nudes hanging above his fireplace. He also reassured her that, as well as being, like him, an artist, she was a Valkyrie and as such, beyond moral judgement.
Not for the first time Unity was excited by her conviction that he was referring to her adventures with his Storms. It also seemed likely that he enjoyed a degree of vicarious sexual excitement in his knowledge, for he would certainly have been kept aware of such things and should he have disapproved, could have put a stop to it immediately. But he did not.
* * *
Accounts of Unity’s movements during the spring of 1935 appear somewhat variable. Lord and Lady Redesdale had accompanied Unity when she travelled back to Munich after one of her brief visits to the family in England. ‘Having outgrown even [Madame Laroche’s] minimal supervision’30, she had, supposedly against her parents’ wishes, insisted on remaining in Germany. If in fact they had seriously objected they could easily have discouraged her by the simple expedient of ‘tightening the purse strings’ but there was no evidence of any such thing.
Pryce-Jones seemed quite prepared to believe that Unity ‘put her foot down to her parents and they gave in, as ever’. Before returning to England, her parents also travelled to Berlin to introduce themselves to the British ambassador, something a family of their elevated status would have done as a matter of form.
Sir Eric Phipps, a small man whose forbears had fought both at the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo, had taken up his post in Berlin rather inconsequentially in September 1933. Phipps was somewhat undecided about Hitler, vacillating between believing that ‘he may perhaps be more moderate than his followers’ and that he was ‘possibly quite mad’. Perhaps there was also something to be read into the fact that he chose 1 April to warn Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon:
Let us hope our pacifists at home may at length realise that the rapidly-growing monster of German militarism will not be placated by mere cooings, but will only be restrained from recourse to its ultima ratio by the knowledge that the Powers who desire peace are also strong enough to enforce it.
The somewhat theatrical Lady Phipps, while appearing infinitely more dynamic, seemed quite prepared to accept the Redesdales’ story. ‘The Redesdales were distraught parents who came out in the winter of 1934–35. They’d been in Munich, they couldn’t bear the idea of Unity having bolted.’ It was difficult to know exactly who was responsible for this exaggeration.
Unity was only able to survive in Germany, or anywhere else for that matter, due to Lord Redesdale providing
her, as he did all his daughters, with an allowance of about £125 a year. This was hardly a fortune, but due to the advantageous rate of exchange and her father also paying for her rent and travel expenses, which included her own car, it was more than sufficient for her to enjoy an extremely comfortable and highly independent standard of living.
Perhaps the Redesdales exaggerated their concern in order to gain ambassadorial protection for their daughter. But while Lady Phipps seemed quite prepared to accept the reason for their ‘distress’, she was less taken in by Unity or her parents’ social status:
They stayed at the Adlon, which was next to the embassy in the Wilhelmstrasse. I don’t remember whether we’d already had Unity to lunch or not. These sloppy English girls were always having affairs with dreadful SS types, and Eric had the trouble of clearing it up. If you were at all snobbish you asked the ambassador for help. Anyhow Unity came as a Deutsches Mädchen battleship of a woman, walking upstairs into the drawing room, and giving a Nazi salute … I remember her telling me that her favourite among Nazis was Streicher (known as ‘the Jew Baiter’). She brushed aside my protests, and said Jews were traitors … with Hitler I got on rather easily. I sat next to him at a New Year banquet with the whole diplomatic corps. He was affably trying a few words of English saying ‘Young lady, young English lady, Freeman, honourable lady, charming lady’. Then I realised it was Unity Freeman-Mitford he was talking about.
Lady Phipps would have perhaps been less ‘easy’ towards Hitler if she had been aware that he referred to her as ‘that sanctimonious cow’.