The newly discovered diaries of Unity Mitford reveal her obsession with the Führer – and raise questions about her stay in a maternity home

The recent publication of Unity Mitford’s newly discovered diaries – a macabre fanzine to Adolf Hitler – has reignited speculation about the nature of the young British aristocrat’s relationship with the Nazi leader.

Spanning 1935 to 1939, they recorded Mitford’s grotesque infatuation with the man whose regime would murder six-million Jews in the Holocaust in World War Two. Her diaries, written in breathless girly style, using capitals and red ink when detailing one of her 139 meetings with Hitler, make for queasy reading.

This historical record reveals Mitford, then aged 20, to be naïve and doltishly enthralled by “the Fuhrer”, who was 25 years her senior. It exposes her as a vile anti-Semite who writes “I am a Jew-hater” and “I’m practising to kill Jews”. She describes the first day that she met Hitler as “THE MOST WONDERFUL DAY OF MY LIFE” and moons on about “Him” like some Enid Blyton character off on a jolly in Munich. “The Fuhrer was heavenly… he is an angel.”

Yet beneath the eccentric depictions of this breezy toff’s life – in an early meeting she shows Hitler her copy of Vogue, keeps a white rat called Ratular in her handbag, buys a monkey which she takes to dinner and then takes back demanding a refund, and loiters around Hitler’s favourite Munich restaurant, Osteria Bavaria, for hours a day, waiting for him like a deranged fan who boasts of her collection of 304 postcards depicting him – the diaries raise more serious questions.

What was her relationship with Hitler? Was it sexual? Why was she not interrogated when she returned to Britain in 1940 as the only foreigner to have infiltrated his inner circle? And was there any validity to the rumours that she came home pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy in a maternity hospital in Oxfordshire in 1940? And if so, could this have been Hitler’s love child?

Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was born in London on August 8 1914, the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale. She was one of the six Mitford sisters – Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah – who have long held a position of almost fetishistic fascination. Their aristocratic provenance, their bonkers patois – they called their father Favre and their mother Muv, while Unity was nicknamed Bobo – and their glittering network of establishment connections (they were cousins of Churchill on his wife Clementine’s side of the family) made them seem unspeakably glamorous. They’d regularly pop into “Buck Pal” for parties and debutantes’ balls.

Mitford’s older sister Diana, whom the family nicknamed Nardy, was a famed beauty who left her husband, Bryan Guinness, the 2nd Baron Moyne, for Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Unlike Diana, Mitford was physically ungainly. At nearly 6ft and blonde, she was, according to Joe Kennedy Jr (brother of JFK) in a letter he wrote to his father, “not at all pretty but she had a certain fine Aryan look”. She would also have appealed to the Germans as her middle name was Valkyrie. Her Redesdale grandfather suggested Valkyrie after the Norse war-maidens from his friend Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas. Remarkably, Mitford was conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold.

What prompted Mitford’s fascination with Hitler is unknown but so determined was she to meet him that she moved to Munich aged 20, where she learnt German and began to stalk the Nazi leader. There are so many references to her meeting Hitler in Osteria Bavaria that you wonder how the dictator had time for any political machinations, he spent so many hours toying with Mitford over his “trout meal”.

“It was a very flirtatious relationship,” says historian Charles Spicer, the author of Coffee with Hitler. “I do not think there is any concrete evidence either way as to a sexual relationship. Hitler’s own sexuality was rather dubious. He took an awful lot of drugs, so he was no lothario. But he became obsessed with young girls and had a dodgy relationship with his niece who killed herself.

“If there was a sexual element between Unity and Hitler, it was not the most important element. Their attraction was much weirder and more psychologically complex.”

Spicer believes that Hitler, who “was fascinated by the English aristocracy and wanted to ape them”, was taken by Mitford’s whimsical manner and teasing. “She and Diana Mitford took him out of himself. They didn’t take him completely seriously, which he liked in women. Hitler and Unity used to leaf through Tatler together, trying to decide who they would shoot or imprison when they invaded Britain if Operation Sealion succeeded. He wasn’t going to bomb Eton [where Unity’s brother, Tom, went], because he wanted to turn it into a training school for the sons of the SS. Unity would decide what stately homes should be protected.”

Mitford’s final diary entry is made on September 1 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, aged 25, she was so distraught at the prospect of war between Britain and Germany, that she shot herself in the head in Munich’s English Garden Park.

She failed to kill herself and the bullet remained lodged in her skull, forcing her to return to Britain brain-damaged. According to Spicer, it was Hitler “who arranged for her to be taken in special trains with medical care via Switzerland back to the enemy UK. He had just launched what would be the world’s worst war, yet the fact that he took the time to make those arrangements hints at a tenderness in the relationship”.

Certainly Mitford was afforded a unique protection on her return to Britain. Despite the fact that she was in a once-in-a-lifetime position of being in Hitler’s inner circle at the outbreak of war, she was never interrogated. Investigative journalist Martin Bright, who broke the story in 2002 that the British Intelligence Officer Guy Liddell was stopped from interviewing her, says: “Guy Liddell was trying to do the right thing for his country in a moment of extreme crisis. Historically, it remains a serious question – why was Unity not debriefed? There was the idea that after the gunshot she was in no state to be interviewed. Yet this notion that she was a dribbling idiot that couldn’t string a sentence together doesn’t hold water, because we know that she had an affair with an airman in the RAF in 1941.

“There is some suggestion that Churchill intervened. For me, it is the class element that is interesting. There was one rule for normal people and another rule for the aristocracy, even those supporting Nazi Germany. There was an element of ‘How very dare you? This is a special class of person. They don’t get debriefed.’”

There is a further theory that Bright investigated in his documentary Hitler’s British Girl that Mitford was pregnant. Could this have been why she was spared interrogation? Bright discovered that Mitford went to a maternity home for the gentry in the tiny village of Wigginton in Oxfordshire after her return from Germany. The niece of the woman who ran the maternity home rang Bright and told him that her aunt had confided in her immediate family that Mitford had given birth to a baby boy, later given up for adoption. When asked who the father was, Mitford was reported to have said of the baby, “It was Hitler’s”.

“It’s very difficult to come to any conclusions about whether she was pregnant or not,” Bright says. “But I have no reason to believe that the niece of the woman who ran the maternity home was lying. It was the talk of London society at the time that Unity was pregnant. Rumours were multi-sourced in various diaries. It is possible that she had a baby with Hitler.”

Mitford died in 1948, aged 33, of an infection from the bullet, which was still lodged in her head.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of Mitford’s diaries is that they still do not answer the critical questions. “It’s frustrating that it is still very hard to work out what Unity’s relationship with Hitler was,” agrees Bright. “She clearly had an obsessive relationship with him and the fascism he idealised. The diaries nail down her appalling anti-Semitism and show that she was an utterly amoral black hole.”

For all the shocking gush that Mitford spouted in her red ink about the Führer, we are no closer to knowing if she had a sexual relationship with him or not. And if she did, it remains within the realms of possibility that there is a descendent of his living in Britain today.

“It is impossible to imagine what life would have been like for any child of Unity’s, let alone one she bore to a senior Nazi,” says Bright. “If it happened, let’s hope the child never discovered its parentage.”