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Unity Mitford and 'Hitler's baby'
Posted on Thursday, December 20, 2007 (CST) by Thoth
 Journalists on national newspapers get used to crank calls from people claiming the government is controlling their minds using radio waves or the Duke of Edinburgh is opening their post. So when Val Hann first called me at the Observer almost exactly five years ago, I was, I have to say, extremely sceptical about what she told me.
She had read an article I had written about Unity Mitford, the 1930s society beauty who became a groupie to Adolf Hitler and shot herself in Munich at the outbreak of war. Although the bullet entered her brain, Unity survived and lived out the rest of her short life as an invalid. But my caller claimed to have an extraordinary new angle on the story.
Val was a little nervous as she explained that her aunt Betty Norton had run a maternity home to the gentry in Oxfordshire during the war and that Unity Mitford had been one of her clients. Her aunt's business, in the tiny village of Wigginton, had depended on discretion and she had told no one except her sister that Unity had had a baby. Her sister had passed the story on to her daughter Val.
I casually
asked who she thought the father might be and there was a short silence
on the other end of the line before she said: "Well, she always said it
was Hitler's."
I must say I was tempted at
this point to put down the phone. Christmas was coming and I was very
busy. But for some reason I decided to carry on listening to this
bizarre tale. Val didn't sound mad, and she said she was merely passing
on a family story.
The child was a boy, she
believed, and he had been given up for adoption. She didn't want any
money; she just wanted me to look into it. So here was the prospect of
Adolf Hitler's love child alive somewhere in Britain - it was either
the scoop of the century or completely bonkers. But it had to be worth
a few hours of my time, even if it turned out to be a dead end.
My original story had cast
doubt on the official version of events about Unity Mitford's return
from Germany. In the millions of words written about the Mitfords,
accounts of Unity's movements in those early months of 1940 remain
sketchy. And, despite the obvious trauma to the family, only a handful
of the hundreds of letters that the letter-writing sisters have had
published discuss this period.
The newly released diaries
of Guy Liddell, number two at MI5 during the war, suggested that the
security service was not even convinced Unity had shot herself in the
head. Liddell was determined that Unity should be searched and
interrogated on her return from Germany and then interned for her Nazi
sympathies.
Writing on 2 January 1940,
Liddell made a powerful case. "Unity Mitford had been in close and
intimate contact with the Führer and his supporters for several years,
and was an ardent and open supporter of the Nazi regime. She had
remained behind after the outbreak of war and her action came
perilously close to high treason. Her parents had been associated with
the Anglo-German Fellowship and other kindred movements, and had
obviously supported her in her ideas about Hitler.
"We had no evidence at all
in support of the press allegations that she was in a serious state of
health and it might well be that she was being brought in on a
stretcher in order to avoid publicity and unpleasantness to her family."
However, Liddell failed to
convince his superiors and the home secretary himself, Sir John
Anderson, finally intervened to say that nothing should be done on
Unity's return. In fact, Liddell was wrong about her injuries. She had
indeed shot herself and later died of an infection caused by the bullet
in the brain.
Nonetheless, it still seems
astonishing that she was never questioned, considering how close she
was to Hitler. As Liddell wrote at the time: "If we had been dealing
with Miss Smith or Miss Joyce, the probability was that we should not
be arguing the case."
If it hadn't been for
Wigginton, I would never have taken it any further. Val gave me an
address for the maternity home, Hill View Cottage, and I contacted the
present owner, who agreed to show me around. She confirmed that Nurse
Norton had indeed used the cottage in her work as a midwife. She also
agreed to introduce me to the one person in the village who remembered
Unity being there. Audrey Smith was a little girl at the time, but by
pure chance her sister (now dead, unfortunately) had worked at the home
and had talked about Unity. Audrey herself claimed she had seen Unity
wrapped in a blanket and looking very ill. However, she insisted that
she was at the home not to have a baby, but to recover from a nervous
breakdown.
By now I was intrigued and
wrote to Unity's surviving sister, Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire.
She had been angry at my original article and had written a furious
letter to the Observer denouncing Liddell's claims that her sister
might not have shot herself. She also suggested I take less notice of
the gossip of villagers. The Duchess of Devonshire was adamant that
there was nothing in the Wigginton story and claimed she could, if
necessary, produce her mother's diaries to prove it.
At this point I decided to
return to the National Archives, where I discovered a file on Unity
that had been sealed under the "100-year rule" - reserved for only the
highest classification of top-secret files. An official told me that it
was possible to have the classification of such files reviewed and I
applied to have the file opened. To my great surprise, the Home Office
agreed. Inside was a startling new piece of information: it wasn't
quite the birth certificate of a child, but here was hard evidence that
Unity might not have been quite the invalid it was supposed.
By October 1941, while she
was living at the family home in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, the police
picked up rumours that "Unity Mitford has formed an attachment for an
officer in the RAF". Further investigation found that she had been
"consorting with Pilot Officer John Sidney Andrews, an RAF test pilot".
As a result, Andrews, married with a child, was transferred to the far north of Scotland.
At this point, the trail
went cold. There were too many loose ends for a news story and my
research sat in my notebooks until this year when I mentioned it to
Mark Roberts, an executive from Channel 4, who agreed to put the story
on film. Further research, including an exhaustive trawl through birth
records at the Oxfordshire register office, confirmed that Nurse Norton
had helped dozens of wartime mothers give birth at her maternity home.
But no record of Unity Mitford. Airman Andrews, it turns out, was a
former bank clerk, and died in a Spitfire crash in 1945. There is no
evidence that he ever saw Unity after his transfer to Scotland.
So what is the truth about
Unity Mitford's missing months? Is it possible that the sightings in
Wigginton were a case of mistaken identity? Or was she there to recover
from a nervous breakdown? One woman still alive who could add to the
story is the Duchess of Devonshire, formerly Deborah Mitford, who
travelled back to Britain with Unity in 1940. But she has so far
declined to be interviewed for the programme. She has also told people
close to her that any suggestion of a child is fanciful.
Five years on from that
original phone call, I have taken this story as far as I can. It
remains a mystery and I remain as sceptical as I was when I first spoke
to Val Hann. But one nagging thought remains: if Unity Mitford was in
Wigginton during the war, what was she doing at a maternity home?
"Hitler's British Girl" will be shown on Channel 4 on Thursday 20 December at 9pm.
Copyright: New Statesman
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