Hitler's Valkyrie

by David R L Litchfield

  * * *

  On 23 August Hitler received word from Moscow that the non-aggression pact with Stalin had been signed during the preceding night, thus leaving him free to declare war by marching into Poland.

  On 24 August, Unity happened to run into her friends the Wrede twins, who she took with her that afternoon:

  … to Tutzing, a village on the Starnbergersee, to have tea with Anna Montgelas in her house, Frauenberg. Leaving at about half past six, Unity and the twins went on to Schloss Buch on the Ammersee, an estate belonging to Count Hubert Deym, who [according to Pryce-Jones] said: ‘That night we had a large dinner party perhaps thirty or forty people. I’d seen Unity twice before with friends, she was an acquaintance. I was always being told about her, so I asked her out to Buch …

  After dinner, Unity begged to be allowed to switch on the radio, she ran to it, there was something very important which she had to listen to, a speech by Halifax.’ [The foreign secretary that night broadcast on the crisis, reiterating the government’s resolve to stand by Poland in accordance with the repeated pledge to do so … Unity came back distraught.]

  On 27 August Unity wrote to Diana displaying some degree of indecision:

  I feel awfully cut off, since all the foreigners and even journalists left; not that I knew any of them, but the feeling of security is gone. Tomorrow, I shall go round and see if the Consul is still there … on thinking things over, I have done nothing else the last few days. I thought I might disappear into the mountains in the Tyrol perhaps, if war is declared. Of course, the other thing seems the easiest way out, but it seems silly not to wait and see how things turn out, it might all be over in a few weeks, like Gen. Fuller predicts.

  On the same day she also wrote to Sydney, ‘(I may go to the Tyrol) as I think to stay here would make too many difficulties for everybody.’

  The next day she wrote to Diana:

  Your letter of the 30th just arrived. You can’t think how thrilling it is every time I hear the letterbox click, as I always expect every letter to be the last that will get through … in case you didn’t hear the Führer’s speech, this is what he said about England: ‘Again and again I have offered England friendship and, when necessary, the closest collaboration. But love cannot be offered from one side only, it must find a return from the other’.

  Hitler had in fact offered to defend Britain’s Empire in return for assisting Germany to gain Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Britain had reminded Hitler that they were bound by treaty to defend Poland if she were attacked.

  By 29 August, the Wrede twins had gone home, leaving Unity ‘alone with her wireless’7. Listening to the news became, for her, a matter of life or death. While she continued to eat out, she scheduled her meals around news bulletins.

  On 1 September, the seven o’clock news announced the invasion of Poland and the fact that Danzig had been incorporated into the Reich. Even out shopping, Unity listened to the Führer’s speech on the car radio. It was hot and sunny in Munich so Unity sunbathed on her balcony while the (nameless) putzfrau came to clean her apartment and the radio replayed Hitler’s speech about Danzig.

  Pryce-Jones assumed Unity lunched at the Osteria Bavaria through force of habit and because she was ‘unable to tear loose from haunts of the past’. But he forgets that over the years she had made many friends there, not all political or Nazi, whose company she still enjoyed. In the afternoon, having changed into a bathing suit, she lay on her balcony in the hot sun and wrote replies to letters from Diana and Janos.

  It was to be her last letter to him and referred in part to his astrological calculations. It read, ‘My darling … I am horrified to hear that the critical day is the 7th because I can’t bear it if the crisis drags on until then. Surely, we must know what England is going to do sooner than that.’ Unity’s impatience was understandable, as the accuracy of Janos’ prediction of whether and when Britain would declare war on Germany had now literally become a matter of life or death.

  In the evening Unity slowly dressed and walked to the Vierjahreszeiten cellar where she took supper, again amongst regular acquaintances. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht continued to ‘shoot back’ while advancing into Poland. Back in her apartment, she listened to the English news.

  * * *

  The British ultimatum to Hitler, to withdraw the German Army from Poland, was not delivered until nine o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September; two hours later there had still been no reply. Thus, Britain finally declared war against Germany, three days after the start of the invasion, by which time Poland, as such, no longer existed and thus there was nothing left for the British to defend other than the basis of a ‘just case for war’.

  That same morning ‘Unity received a message that there was a telegram for her at the British consulate’8. Having walked round to collect it, she found her parents’ confirmation that Britain had declared war on Germany that morning. Immediately she went home and replied:

  Darling Muv and Farve, I came round to the Consulate to get your telegram and hear that war has been declared. So this is to say good-bye. The Consul will kindly take this to England and send it to you. I send my best love to you all and particularly to my Boud when you write. Perhaps when this war is over, everyone will be friends again, and there will be the friendship between Germany and England which we have so hoped for. I hope you will see the Führer often when it is over. With very best love and blessings, Bobo. Fondest love to Blor. And I do hope Tom will be all right.

  Her next communication was with Rudi Simolin, who remembered:

  On Saturday, Erna and I came back from the Salzburg festival. The soldiers were already mobilised, and were mobilising further … on the Sunday morning Bobo telephoned me, just at 11 o’clock, and said there would now be a war … I asked her what she was going to do. I would be coming into Munich from Seeseiten on Monday morning. I urged her not to do anything until then and we would think what should be done for the best. There was no need to shoot herself at all, I told her, I beseeched her to wait until we could meet … the war might be over soon…

  On Monday I got a letter from her enclosing her keys … in it she had written that she had to kill herself and what I ought to do with her money and possessions. I went to the flat, and it had already been sealed. They had put a seal of paper over the keyhole. And then I went to Adolf Wagner in the Kaulbachstrasse, whose house I had visited with my cousin that time a few months before. I went to ask what had happened.

  While it is difficult to tell exactly how the rest of Unity’s story unfolded, Mary Lovell seemed to think, ‘Her next act was to go to Gauleiter Wagner’s office and ask if she was to be interned as an enemy alien. He assured her that she was not and even offered to obtain some petrol for her car.’ But the strain of indecision was becoming obvious and ‘he was sufficiently concerned to order that she should be discreetly followed’.

  His suspicions were confirmed a little while later when she returned to Wagner’s office in her car, handed him a ‘large, heavy envelope’ and left before he had a chance to speak with her. Lovell continued:

  In it he found a suicide note saying that she was unable to bear the thought of a war between England and her beloved Germany, a sealed letter for Hitler, and her two most precious belongings: the signed framed photograph of Hitler which she took with her even when she travelled back and forth to England, and her special Party badge.

  Wagner sprang into action and immediately alerted the Sicherheitsdienst (SS intelligence service). Apparently, ‘Everything was set in motion to prevent misfortune. But Unity had vanished.’

  In subsequent conversations with Kathleen Atkins, Unity had no difficulty recounting the details of her ‘attempted suicide’, though she said she had found the whole idea of dying alone to be extremely sad, ‘as if one were somehow ashamed of what one were doing’. And Unity was anything but ashamed or sad. Only the waiting and indecision had threatened her resolve. Now the time had come, she was so proud and so excited that there was
no room for fear. All fear had been driven from her by ‘the most powerful man in the world’ and the memory of her numerous ‘little deaths’.

  She would like to have shot herself over lunch at the Osteria, but she could not be sure that someone would not stop her before she could ‘complete the job’. She needed somewhere that she would be amongst people, but not people that would recognise her. Somewhere where she could be reassuringly anonymous. She had decided on the Englischer Garten, just inside the park, a few yards from the Königinstrasse, and close to the Haus der Kunst, an art gallery that had been built under Hitler’s direction.

  There, after a brisk walk from the gauleiter’s office she sat down on a bench in the warm sunshine and took the small pistol from her coat pocket. Unity had previously told Gaby that she wished she had asked for ‘something larger. Something in black.’ The tiny, chrome-plated, pearl-handled gun looked more like an ineffectual toy than an instrument of death, and as she pressed the pistol to her temple she hoped it would prove capable of taking her on the next great adventure.

  As she proudly lifted her head, she found herself looking straight into the pale blue eyes of a small blond-haired child, who, while walking in the park with his mother, had been fascinated by the woman in black, sitting on a bench. The boy was dressed all in white – his shirt and shorts, even his socks and sandals, were white, radiant in the bright summer sun. The power of the beauty and innocence in the child’s gaze frightened Unity as she recognised the threat to her resolve. So she closed her eyes and everything went black. Then ‘someone’ pulled the trigger and everything went white.

  8

  THE NEXT GREAT

  ADVENTURE

  * * *

  1939–48

  * * *

  Those who restrain their desires do so

  because theirs are weak enough to be restrained

  William Blake

  Unity was correct in questioning the suitability of the Walther 6.35, but for its ballistic rather than its aesthetic qualifications. To kill oneself with a .25 bullet from such a small pistol requires considerable care and attention, as such a tiny projectile is easily deflected by the bone of the skull, which is what appears to have happened in this case. The generally accepted, though rather suspicious, description of the bullet that had ‘entered her right temple, ploughed its way through her brain and ended up near the back of her head’1 was somewhat questionable; had it followed this trajectory, Unity would almost certainly have died. But Unity lived; suggesting that the injury may have been considerably less serious than claimed.

  The responsibility for her lack of success may also not necessarily have been entirely hers, for there is evidence to suggest that a third party had been instructed to assist her and in so doing ironically contributed to the failure of the whole enterprise. Many years later, Michael Prodger of The Sunday Times described it rather elegantly as ‘not quite suicide, but a wished for death by another’s hand’. Unity would even write to Jessica, ‘You know that I got shot in the head … that paralysed my right arm and right leg.’ The latter part of the statement was somewhat exaggerated unless she enjoyed quite remarkable powers of recovery. The allegation that Unity had been shot by the Germans was awarded further credibility when ‘Uncle Jack (the 4th Lord Redesdale) Mitford docked in New York on the Lancastria in February 1940 and told reporters that Unity’s bullet wounds were not self-inflicted, and his niece’s memory was a blank about the incident.’2

  Innocent of her necromantic commitment, Gauleiter Wagner’s fear of the consequences of having to admit to failing to adequately protect Unity, even from herself, appeared to be the most obvious reason for the delay in informing Hitler of the incident and it was not until later that evening that someone bucked up sufficient courage to inform the Führer. But far from being angry he displayed quite remarkable concern for her welfare, ordering immediate treatment by the best doctors at the Chirurgische Universitäts-Klinik. This was particularly puzzling as one would have thought that it might have been in everyone’s interest, both mortal and transcendental, to hasten her end. Particularly if, as was also claimed, she was at this stage still in a coma. Gaby Bentinck was told by various members of the diplomatic community that Hitler was convinced by Goebbels of the propaganda value of his actions.

  There were also conspiracy theorists who suggested Unity may have been ‘assisted’ in her suicide attempt by either an enemy within the top echelons of the Nazi Party who objected to her privileged position, or a British agent. Certainly, her refusal to leave Germany despite the outbreak of war was causing the British government increasing embarrassment and could have been an incentive for her elimination. Perhaps more likely was the involvement of Janos Almasy who, having already been subject to her blackmail threats and unaware that Hitler had approved of his sexual adventures with Unity, still feared for his own safety as long as she remained alive. Meanwhile, Hitler put a stop to any media speculation by ordering a media blackout and giving the event the status of a state secret.

  ‘The clinic on the Nussbaumstrasse was part of the university medical faculty, and its excellence justified its reputation … Dr Reiser had been little older than Unity when he had to look after her. He was lecturer in surgery in the university clinic, and private assistant to Professor Magnus.’3

  Flowers were sent by Goebbels, Ribbentrop, several gauleiters and Hitler. Some say he only visited her once, others insisted he returned on several occasions. He was also said to have spoken with Professor Magnus concerning the prospects of recovery and the possibility of extracting the bullet, but the professor seemed to think that while there was a reasonable chance of recovery, operating might endanger Unity’s life and could not be guaranteed to be successful.

  According to Doctor Reiser:

  We had also warned Hitler that she was not speaking. He accepted that. He went in and stayed about a quarter of an hour, and when he came out he asked those of us waiting outside in attendance whatever had we meant by telling him that she wasn’t speaking. She had found her tongue with him all right. Of course we asked what she had said, and he answered, ‘She would like to go back to England’. And then Hitler said he would set things in motion so that somehow she would be able to travel home.

  Even this evidence is somewhat suspicious as it was of course quite unthinkable that either the doctor or the professor would have asked the Führer what he and Unity had talked about. After the war, however, they would have been free to make whatever claims they chose, including whether they personally had abandoned the Hippocratic oath. Even if they had asked, he would certainly not have told them how distraught Unity was about her failure to achieve his wishes. Nor about his placating her by insisting how it had obviously not been meant to be, but that she must retain her faith and accept his conviction that in the fullness of time they would meet again ‘on the other side’.

  Later she was said to have told Sydney that Hitler offered her a choice: accept German nationality and stay in Munich, or return to England. She said she would like to go back to England for a few weeks, then return to Munich. An arrangement that he would have known would have been quite impossible. It was also claimed that Unity made another, even less effective, attempt to take her own life by swallowing her swastika brooch, which Gauleiter Wagner had returned to her amongst her personal effects.

  Of course, at this point in time the Mitfords would still have had no real idea of what had happened, though they would obviously have been aware that all was not well. Nancy wrote to Deborah, ‘Tell Muv I have written to the Duchess of Aosta and asked her to find out from the “wop” consul in Munich how and where Boud is.’ But on 2 October, Janos’ brother Teddy apparently sent a rather veiled telegram (presumably via the American Embassy) to the Redesdales to tell them that Unity had been ill but was now recovering. The same embassy supplied further news that, ‘Unity was in a surgical hospital in Munich and making a good recovery from an attempted suicide.’

  As always, rumours abounded con
cerning Unity and her fate. On 5 November 1939, Prince Nicholas Orloff, an English-speaking White Russian radio announcer who had fled Berlin, gave an interview to the Sunday Dispatch stringer in Belgrade, telling him that Unity had shot herself dead, which put a stop to all the secrecy if not the speculation.

  Meanwhile, the clinic was informed by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that Unity was to be returned to England via Switzerland, from where she would be collected by English doctors. A special railway carriage was to be prepared, in which she would be accompanied by a Sister of Mercy and the young Doctor Reiser. With the health of the patient now dramatically improved and the Sister attending to Unity’s nursing requirements, there was little chance of the Doctor being required, other than in an emergency, so their trip soon qualified as a welcome interlude. But he was also about to be presented with an entertaining travelling companion, as he later recalled:

  One day a Hungarian count rang up out of the blue and said that he knew the Redesdales very well and wanted to come too. He had spoken to the Innenministerium and had been given permission to travel with us. Professor Magnus had no objection, so the count came too, which was very nice for me.

  ‘The Count’ may of course have been offering his support in the hope that he could try once again to assist Unity in crossing over to the ‘other side’ on a more permanent level. But, fortunately for Unity, the opportunity never presented itself. In fact, Almasy ended up spending more time alone with the Doctor than he did with Unity: