David R. L. Litchfield - Hitlers Valkyrie: The Uncensored Biography of Unity Mitford

To Robert Kearns and Caroline Schmitz

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 Dawn of the Daughters of Albion 12641906

2 The Golden Years 190418

3 Fascism and Fantasy 191830

4 Dancing on the Edge 193034

5 Bavarian Rhapsody 193436

6 The Great Affair 193638

7 Ride of the Valkyrie 193839

8 The Next Great Adventure 193948

Epilogue

Bibliography

Sources

Notes

Copyright

Hitlers 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 Unitys 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 authors own family and friends, Hitlers 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.

Hitlers 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, Sturmfhrers or Storms as Unity referred to them, and what it may have contributed to her spiritual and physical relationship with my Fhrer.

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. Hitlers 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 Irelands 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 Englands 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 Unitys 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 Nancys 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 Unitys relationship with Hitler, including her leaking the story of their possible marriage. All of which resulted in her daughters ever-increasing celebrity status and Nancys 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 Hitlers 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.