Unity Mitford

3 september 1939

On this day, Unity Mitford is walking through the English Gardens, a park in the heart of Munich. She takes a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle from her bag and shoots herself in the roof of her mouth. She’d told her sisters this is what she would do if England declared war on Germany, which happened this morning.

Unity was one of the Mitford sisters. There were six of them, and each one was more eccentric than the other. There was the writer Nancy; the farmer Pam; Diana, wife of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley; the communist Decca; the Duchess Debo and Unity, who is best known for her adoration of Adolf Hitler.

It all began at a young age. In 1932, shortly after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, eighteen-year-old Unity and her sister Diana traveled to Munich to see how the Nazis were faring there. Both were enthusiastic members of Mosley's British Union of Fascists and were astonished when they were invited to the first Nazi party convention in Nuremberg.

Things got really serious for Unity when, starting in the autumn of 1934, she spent a year in Munich learning German. She discovered that Hitler usually had lunch at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant when he was in Munich. So Unity did the same. She tried to attract Hitler's attention by occasionally dropping her handkerchief and carefully picking it up, but mostly by staring at him shamelessly.

It worked. With her bright blue eyes, blond hair, and slender figure (one Mitford woman was more beautiful than the last and Diana was the most beautiful) she could hardly have been more Aryan. On February 9, 1935, Hitler invited her to sit next to him in the restaurant. He tells her about his love for London's architecture. "It is the most wonderful and beautiful day of my life," Unity writes to her father that evening.

In the years that followed, the two saw each other very regularly. From her letters, which the sisters wrote to each other daily, it appears that they met a total of 140 times. This is a remarkable number for a man who spent only a fraction of his time in Munich and who was also busy preparing for a world war and eliminating opponents.

Unity, a cousin of Clementine, Winston Churchill's wife, tried to convince Hitler to sign a treaty with the United Kingdom, but he preferred looking into her eyes rather than listen to her.

Hitler had warned Unity and Diana, who also happened to be in Munich, that the situation in Germany was becoming too dangerous. He advised them to fly back to England. Diana followed his advice, but Unity did not.

Just before entering the English Gardens, Unity dropped off an envelope at the nearby Nazi party headquarters. In addition to a personal letter to Hitler, it contained a framed photograph with Hitler's signature and her membership card for the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. She requested that she be buried with both objects.

But she didn’t die. Seriously wounded, Unity was admitted to a clinic in Munich, where Hitler visited her regularly and paid the bills. A few months later, she recovered enough to fly back to England.

Unity survived the war she never wanted to see. In May 1948, she contracted meningitis, likely caused by brain damage from the gunshot wound. She was buried near Oxford, without Hitler's portrait or her Nazi membership card.