The Mitford Girls Page 18

  No one could have foreseen the tragedy that resulted from the Redesdales’ decision to allow Unity to go to Germany.

  8

  UNITY AND THE FÜHRER (1934-5)

  In the spring of 1934 the Rodds, back from their honeymoon, attended several BUF rallies, and even bought black shirts. ‘Prod looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ Nancy wrote years later to Evelyn Waugh, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’1 Prod had flirted briefly with Fascism at Oxford, before transferring his political allegiance to the Labour Party, and for a few months early in their marriage he and Nancy supported Mosley’s movement by paying a subscription. With hindsight, however, and bearing in mind Nancy’s lifelong support of socialism, it is more likely that they were actually supporting Diana, though they must have been interested in hearing what Mosley had to say. Equally importantly, Nancy was gathering material for another book. Later that year, from her small house at Chiswick, she began working on Wigs on the Green, probably the least known of her novels. This time the leading character was Unity. One cannot say it was ‘Unity to the life’ because Nancy’s characters were always larger than life, unmerciful caricatures, but it was clearly Unity to everyone who knew her, despite Nancy’s disclaimer that ‘all characters in this book are drawn from the author’s imagination’.2

  ‘BRITONS, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion!’ cried Eugenia Malmains in thrilling tones. She stood on an overturned wash-tub on Chalford village green and harangued about a dozen aged yokels. Her straight hair, cut in a fringe, large pale-blue eyes . . . well-proportioned limbs and classical features, combined with a certain fanaticism of gesture to give her the aspect of a modern Joan of Arc . . .3

  This was guaranteed to make the sisters, at least, scream with laughter, for to their merriment, and to the astonishment of the postmistress, Unity had taken to appearing in Swinbrook’s only shop (Chalford was Swinbrook to the life) and throwing up her hand in a smart Nazi salute before ordering a twopenny chocolate bar.

  ‘The Union Jack Movement is a youth movement,’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old . . . We see nothing admirable in that debating society of aged and corrupt men called Parliament which muddies our great empire into wars or treaties . . . casting away its glorious colonies . . . And all according to each vacillating whim of some octogenarian statesman’s mistress—’>

  At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd . . . ‘Eugenia, my child,’ she said brokenly. ‘Do get off that tub . . . Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’

  ‘Go away, Nanny,’ said Eugenia . . . The old lady again plucked at Eugenia’s skirt. This time, however, Eugenia turned and roared at her, ‘Get out you filthy Pacifist, get out and take your yellow razor gang with you.’

  It was all there, TPOM and TPOF, the insults that Decca and Unity hurled at each other in pseudo-earnestness, a brilliant parody of the BUF anthem sung to the tune of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’; and sly little digs at Fascism. ‘“I really don’t quite know what an Aryan is.” “Well, it’s quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes ...”’4

  When Decca came home from Paris for the Easter break she was fascinated to hear the grown-ups tut-tutting about the latest prank of one of the unacceptable Romilly cousins, Esmond. A year younger than Decca he had run away from Wellington College where he had been running a left-wing magazine called Out of Bounds and because of his relationship to Winston Churchill the newspapers were on to it. ‘Mr Churchill’s 15 year old Nephew Vanishes’ ran a typical headline; others referred to him more luridly as ‘Churchill’s Red Nephew’. It was said that he was under the influence of a group of London Communists, but his mother told reporters coolly, ‘We are not worried about his safety. We have a good idea where he is ...’5 There was a great deal of family sympathy for his parents for having to put up with such appalling behaviour, but Sydney blamed Nellie for it.

  Listening to the conversation of the grown-ups, Decca thrilled to the exploits of this swashbuckling cousin whom she’d never been allowed to meet, although once she had missed him by only days, when she had gone to stay at Chartwell and found the Churchill nannies agog with stories of his wickedness. In the previous autumn, while she was settling herself in Paris, Esmond had declared himself a pacifist and had wrecked the Armistice service in the school’s chapel by inserting pacifist leaflets in the prayer books. Diana has sometimes been held responsible for indirectly setting Decca on a left-wing path, by steering Unity towards her right-wing allegiance. But it was Nancy who was the biggest influence in Decca’s life. ‘Watching her,’ Decca wrote, ‘all through her engagement to Hamish, and [seeing] how she loathed Swinbrook and longed to be free of Muv etc, her fate - to be stuck in that life because she hadn’t any way of escape being without money even after she started writing - was a huge influence on me, then and ever [afterwards].’6 She was determined not to be stuck at home like Nancy, obliged to marry to escape.

  There was one last sitting for the annual family photograph taken in front of the house, with everyone in their usual position, Unity with Ratular on her shoulder, Diana, Debo and Nancy clutching dogs, David looking handsomely serious with his thick hair now turning white, Sydney expressionless but revealing that the girls took their beauty from both sides of the family, and Tom in a bright lumber jacket. It was the last time they would all gather like this for a ritual photograph. Then Sydney departed, taking with her Decca, Idden and Unity. Decca and Idden were about to embark on their final term at the Sorbonne, but before leaving them Sydney spoke firmly with Madame Paulain, making it clear that her daughter and niece required their bedlinen to be changed more often than once every three weeks. Then she departed with Unity for Munich, to oversee the settling-in process at Baroness Laroche’s.

  The Baroness, whom Diana remembers as a charming woman, took her girls en pension. They joined her for lunch and dinner at which the food was always delicious, and all conversation was conducted in German.7 They were given formal German lessons by a governess, Frau Baum, and when Unity made her first appearance in May she had already missed the first few. She wore her black shirt and BUF badge to classes but these emblems had no power to shock as they did in England as Nazi emblems were common everywhere. Her fellow students were a year or two younger than Unity, and were being ‘finished’ prior to coming out. Indeed, one or two were already discreetly dating young ‘storms’, as they called the storm-troopers. Because she was already out Unity did not have to attend the deportment classes, but she did not waste her free time; she worked hard at her German for she had a good incentive to do so. Within weeks of her arrival she had conceived a plan, and begun what was to be her daily programme for the next year or so. She discovered from Frau Baum, a keen Hitler supporter, that Hitler sometimes took lunch in a restaurant called Osteria Bavaria. Unity’s objective was to meet him, but she had discovered that to communicate with him she would need to speak German for he spoke no English. So she concentrated on her studies, and made a few exploratory sorties to the Osteria, and to the Carlton tearooms, which Hitler also patronized.

  In June, she finally got to see him. Derek Hill, a young English painter who was visiting Munich, was an old friend of Unity and was in the Carlton tearooms one evening with his mother and aunt when the Führer arrived. There was no pomp when he attended a restaurant, except that he was always accompanied by several henchmen, or members of his inner circle, and the inevitable bodyguard. The party simply came in unannounced and sat down quietly, keeping themselves to themselves. Derek Hill immediately phoned Unity, who jumped into a taxi and sped to the tearoom. ‘I went and sat down with them [the Hill party] and there was the Führer opposite,’ she wrote to Diana. Hill noticed that Unity was trembling so violently with excitement that he had to steady her cup.

  Three weeks after Unity’s first sighting of Hitl
er the Night of the Long Knives took place, when Ernst Roehm and over a hundred officers of the brown-shirted SA (Sturm Abteilungen, storm-troopers) were brutally assassinated on Hitler’s orders. Some were shot on their front doorsteps, others were formally executed or hacked to death in secret, some - thinking the attack was part of an anti-Hitler plot - died screaming, ‘Heil, Hitler.’ Like many of those killed, Roehm had been an old comrade of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and had helped him to power. But the SA had been a problem for some time, with Roehm refusing to accept Hitler’s right to give direct orders to SA troops. It seems unlikely that he was guilty of plotting against Hitler, as was claimed at the time, but was disposed of because he posed a threat to the more disciplined black-shirted SS (Schutz Staffeln, Protection Squad) troops, whose leader, Heinrich Himmler, made his rival’s death the price of future co-operation. Hitler called personally on his former friend to arrest him, saying that he alone could arrest a chief of staff. Unity wrote breathlessly to Diana about the massacre, which had shocked Munich burghers to the core.

  I am terribly sorry for the Führer - you know Roehm was his oldest friend and comrade, the only one that called him ‘du’ in public . . . it must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Roehm himself and tore off his decorations. Then he went to arrest Heines8 and found him in bed with a boy. Did that get into the English papers? Poor Hitler.9

  The words said to have been used by Hitler when he arrested his old friend became a catchphrase among the girls at Baroness Laroche’s, ‘Schuft, du bist verhaftet [Wretch, you are under lock and key],’ but Unity was unable to see the funny side of this, and was upset that her beloved Führer had been in danger.10

  It was a subtly changed Unity who returned to Swinbrook for the summer. Photographs show that she had a poise and a singular beauty, where since the age of thirteen she had merely looked fair and awkward. She and Decca squabbled as usual about politics, but they were loving squabbles, and they sat down cheerfully afterwards to discuss what they would do should either of them be placed in a position where they had to give orders for the execution of the other. Only one thing marred Unity’s summer: she received a postcard from Tom, who, having grown up with six sisters, had learned a thing or two about teasing. He was in Bayreuth, he wrote, and he had been invited to supper with Hitler and Goering. She believed him and was miserably jealous for days, until she heard that it was untrue. But she was so enthusiastic about her life in Munich that Sydney decided to take Decca and Idden there for a short holiday in September after the beginning of Unity’s autumn term.

  Unity went back early, in August, so that she could attend the 1934 Parteitag and Diana joined her there a few weeks later. Putzi Hanfstaengl refused to help them, saying that their excessive make-up embarrassed him and, besides, there was not a ticket to be had for the rally. If they went to Nuremberg, he warned, they would find every bed reserved and would end up spending their nights sitting in the railway station. The sisters decided to go anyway and found it, just as he had predicted, crammed. They sat in a café and Unity was thrilled simply to be there. ‘Do be glad we came,’ she kept repeating happily to Diana. But luck was with them: an old man with whom they shared a table in a beer garden was wearing an unusual emblem. Unity engaged him in conversation, curious about his badge, and it turned out that he was one of the first members of the Nazi Party and his card bore the number 100. It entitled him to various privileges and, impressed with the enthusiasm of the English girls, he arranged accommodation and passes to the stadium for them.

  Diana’s motive for visiting Germany at this point was not simply to attend the Parteitag. She had already begun to do what Professor Lindemann had suggested and was learning to speak German. It was not possible for her to be away from Mosley or her two boys11 for extended periods, to learn as Unity was learning, so she took some Berlitz courses in London and was now looking to improve on this base. She enrolled in a short course at the university run for foreigners, due to begin in November, and returned home in the meantime. In November she moved into a flat that Unity had found just off the Ludwigstrasse. It was full of Biedermayer furniture, centrally heated and the rent included a good cook. Unity was no longer staying with the Baroness and had taken a room at a hostel, a Studentheim, for women university students, which she always referred to as ‘the heim’. She left it and moved in with Diana.12

  With the help of Putzi Hanfstaengl Diana obtained a press card, which enabled the sisters to get into meetings at which Hitler was to speak. Whenever her classes allowed she joined Unity at the Osteria. Otherwise Unity went there alone. Initially she persuaded friends to accompany her, but after a while she was content to eat a light lunch on her own and read a book to pass the long hours of waiting. She was rewarded and saw Hitler on a number of occasions, which was always a terrific thrill for her. When she was not waiting for Hitler she and Diana were fond of visiting the Pinakothek (Munich’s Museum of Art, now the Alte Pinakothek, one of the leading art galleries in the world), the palaces, museums and parks such as the Englischer Garten, and they wandered around the old and new parts of the city, the ‘new’ parts designed by King Ludwig I over a century earlier in the neo-classic style. Ludwig bankrupted himself and the city to bring about his ideals, and eventually lost his throne because of his affair with the dancer Lola Montez. Diana had enjoyed the city in the summer, but found it just as attractive in the winter: its proximity to the mountains made it possible for many of its citizens to be on the ski slopes in under an hour, and at weekends there was almost a holiday atmosphere. ‘The icy air out of doors had a special smell so that had one been set down there blindfold one would have known at once it was Munich. Possibly the smell was of brewing, combined with the little cigars the men smoked.’13

  But whatever they did their timetable was subject to any possibility of seeing or hearing Hitler. The two young women have been referred to in recent years, crudely, as ‘Hitler groupies’ and because of what Hitler subsequently became those who admired him were inevitably to be reviled. Then, however, he was not universally regarded as a monster, but as a statesman in whom everyone was interested, leading an administration with a new and radical form of government that appeared to be working well. Few intelligent English visitors to Germany in the thirties would have turned down an opportunity to see or speak to Hitler. Numerous visitors who would become pillars of the British establishment or distinguished in the fields of literature, art, entertainment and politics tried every possible method to meet him, including courting Unity and Diana when it was known that they had access to him. And Diana, because of her allegiance to Mosley and the British Fascist movement, had reason to be more interested than most.

  In September Sydney, Decca and Idden joined Unity. It was Sydney’s first visit to Germany and she wanted to see things for herself, and also to try to moderate Unity’s passionate enthusiasm. She was agreeably surprised to find, instead of the heavy, dark, ugly buildings and furnishings that everyone had told her to expect, great beauty and charm. She thought that nothing could have been lovelier than the small baroque theatre in Bayreuth, and the gilded, pastel-coloured churches of Bavaria seemed to invite the worship of God. However, in her written account of that visit one of her chief memories was of an almost daily squabble with Unity. Outside the Feldherrnhalle a plaque commemorated the 1923 putsch when several of Hitler’s closest comrades had been killed. Two SS men stood guard beside it and everyone who passed this spot saluted as a sign of respect. It soon became obvious to Sydney that no matter where she and the girls went, they always seemed to pass it, whereupon Unity would throw up her hand in an almost theatrical Nazi salute. Sydney was slightly embarrassed by this, and as a foreigner she certainly did not feel obliged to salute. When she insisted that they avoid the building Unity simply went off on her own, leaving her to find her own way back to the hotel. If it proved unavoidable Sydney would take the opposite side of the street, leaving Unity to make her salute, but there was no animosity about this.
‘We met at the other side [of the building], with great laughter,’ Sydney wrote.14

  We do not know Decca’s reaction to Munich for although photographs of the visit survive, she never mentioned it in her memoirs, or in any surviving letters and papers. She did say in Hons and Rebels that in 1935, the year after her visit to Germany, it occurred to her ‘over and over again’ to pretend to be a convert to Fascism, so that she could accompany Unity to Germany and meet Hitler face to face. ‘As we were being introduced,’ she fantasized, ‘I would whip out a pistol and shoot him dead.’15 But that was after she had read The Brown Book of Hitler Terror,16 one of the first testaments to the horrors lurking at the heart of the Nazi regime. Like Cry Havoc, Beverly Nichols’ indictment of the First World War, it had a major impact on Decca. It explained the new anti-Semitic laws in Germany, and how they were being implemented, while pictures showed the effects of treatment meted out to Jews by storm-troopers. At that stage it was beatings and brutal handling, but the book also prophesied what would happen if the regime continued unchecked. There was little demand for such works in England and they were largely distributed through left-wing bookshops and Communist channels.

  Decca, now as strongly aligned to the Communist movement as Unity was to Fascism, read the book carefully, accepted it absolutely and was consumed with righteous anger. She brought it to the attention of David and Sydney, who told her what the majority of the population would have told her at that time: that they believed the book to be Communist-inspired propaganda and an exaggeration. That she could not make them see the dangers that to her were so evident made her sick at heart. Every day she read more about such horrors in the Daily Worker and in her left-wing pamphlets, and increasingly she spent a lot of time crying in her room from frustration that she could do nothing constructive, or even make the family see the dreadful problems. Much later she stated in an interview, ‘People say they didn’t know what was happening to the Jews until after the war, but they did know because it was all there.’ She referred to the books Cry Havoc and The Brown Book of Hitler Terror which had made such an impression on her. But by this yardstick, those who supported Communism should have known about the millions of people being murdered by Stalin in the thirties. Vague reports of those atrocities also filtered into England only to be regarded by supporters of the regime as anti-Communist propaganda.