Unity Mitford
Unity Mitford was a 20 year old former debutante when she arrived in Munich in 1934, intent on meeting Adolf Hitler. Unity was the fifth of seven children born to England’s Baron of Redesdale and his wife. In her teen years prior to her debut she developed a fascination with Nazism, partly in competition with one of her sisters with whom she shared a bedroom, who supported communism. In 1933 the sisters attended the Nuremberg Rally, and Unity saw Hitler for the first time and decided to relocate to Germany, enroll in a German language school, and join the Nazis.
During the 1930s Hitler’s movements about Munich were well known, and after learning his habits, including where he dined or had coffee during the day, Unity traced his movements until after nearly a year of pursuit she was invited to join his table. After meeting Hitler Unity wrote to her father, “For me he is the greatest man of all time.” Hitler and Mitford were soon close, a fact noticed by an increasingly jealous Eva Braun. Mitford was soon working with the Nazis in several areas, including writing and delivering anti-Semitic speeches and articles. She also published an open letter in Der Streicher in which she published her full name and concluded, “I am a Jew hater.”
For the next five years Unity was a member of Hitler’s inner circle of friends and advisors. Hitler had Mitford at his side when he announced the annexation of Austria into the German Reich in 1938. British intelligence reported her actions in Europe, which included the distribution of Nazi propaganda in Prague before the Munich agreement, as treasonous. Hitler provided her with an apartment in Munich, and she spent time with him at the Berghof. Mitford lobbied Hitler to make a peace arrangement with England, a position which placed her under suspicion from other Nazis, who were concerned that she was a British agent.
In 1939 Hitler warned Mitford (and her sister Diana, also in Germany at the time) that a confrontation with England was imminent, and that they should return to England if they were so inclined before war made it an impossibility. Diana returned to England while Unity chose to remain in Germany. When England declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland, Unity finally realized that everything she had hoped to achieve, an ongoing alliance between England and Germany, was no longer a possibility, and that she would be arrested for treason if she attempted to return to England. Unity attempted to kill herself, shooting herself in the head with a pistol Hitler had given her.
She survived the attempt, at least for a time, and was hospitalized in Munich. In December 1939 she was relocated to a hospital in neutral Switzerland. Hitler personally paid her hospital bills. In 1940 she was returned to England, unable to walk. Eventually she recovered some of her faculties, but she developed meningitis, caused by swelling of her brain in the area of the never removed bullet she had fired into her head. She died in 1948. During the war she was suspected of spying for the Germans by interrogating British pilots which she attempted to seduce before her injuries caused by the bullet overwhelmed her.