Unity Mitford
The Hon.
Unity Valkyrie Mitford (
8 August,
1914 -
28 May,
1948), was one of the noted
Mitford sisters.
She is said to have been conceived, appropriately (given her life) in the town of
Swastika, Ontario, where her family owned mines; she was born in
London,
England. She was a daughter of the eccentric 2nd
Baron Redesdale. She was educated at St. Margaret's School in Bushey, Hertfordshire.
Mitford's parents held right-wing political views and supported the
British Union of Fascists and in 1936 their daughter,
Diana Mitford, married its leader,
Oswald Mosley.
Unity went to Nazi Germany and met
Adolf Hitler,
Heinrich Himmler,
Herman Goering,
Joseph Goebbels and other leaders of the
Nazi Party. Hitler told newspapers in
Germany that Unity was "a perfect specimen of
Aryan womanhood".
British
SIS reports from 1936 stated that she saw a lot of Hitler whenever he was in
Munich and they viewed her as "more Nazi than the Nazis." The same report said she gave the "Hitler salute" to the British Consul General in Munich who immediately requested that her passport be impounded.
When Britain declared war on Germany in September of 1939, a distraught Mitford sent a farewell letter to Hitler and shot herself in the head in the
English Garden in
Munich. The suicide attempt failed, but she suffered serious brain damage. She was returned to
Great Britain via neutral
Switzerland, and spent the rest of her life on the island of
Inch Kenneth. Doctors had decided it was too dangerous to remove the lodged bullet, and she eventually died of
meningitis caused by the cerebral swelling around the bullet. She was 33 years old.
Mitford was interred at
Swinbrook Churchyard,
Oxfordshire,
England.
In his memoirs,
Inside the Third Reich,
Albert Speer said of Hitler's select group:"One tacit agreement prevailed: No one must mention politics. The sole exception was Lady Mitford, who even in the later years of international tension persistently spoke up for her country and often actually pleaded with Hitler to make a deal with England. In spite of Hitler's discouraging reserve, she did not abandon her efforts through all those years."
There is a legend Unity Mitford suggested to Hitler that he adopt the
swastika as the Nazi symbol due to the name of the place where she was conceived but this is wholly unsupported. The Nazis were already using swastikas when Mitford was a child and the symbol had been used by the radical nationalist movement in Germany since before she was born.
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