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Subject: Unity Mitford
Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:37:15 EDT



The Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (August 8, 1914 - May 28, 1948), was one of
the noted Mitford sisters. She is said to have been conceived in the mining
town of Swastika, Ontario and born in London, England, a daughter of the 2nd
Baron Redesdale. She was also a cousin of Clementine Hozier, the wife of
Winston Churchill.
Educated at home, she eventually became a devout believer in fascism. In
1933, Mitford traveled to Nuremberg, Germany for a rally and met the man she had
become obsessed with, Adolf Hitler. She became a member of Adolf Hitler's
entourage and a passionate though naïve supporter of National Socialism, along
with her sister Diana Mitford, who married the British fascist leader Sir
Oswald Mosley.
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 and she returned to England,
mentally damaged. She spent the rest of her life on the island of
Inchkenneth. Doctors had decided it was too dangerous to remove the lodged bullet, and
she eventually died of meningitis caused by the cerebral swelling around it.
Mitford was interred in the Swinbrook Churchyard, Oxfordshire, England.
Swastika legend
There is a legend Unity Mitford suggested to Hitler that he adopt the
swastika as the Nazi symbol due to the place of her birthplace but this is wholly
unsupported. The Nazi movement was already using swastikas when Mitford was a
child and the symbol had been used by the far right nationalist movement in
Germany since before she was born.



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