Unity Mitford
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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 town of Swastika, Ontario, where her family owned mines; she was born in London, England. She was a daughter of the eccentric 2nd Baron Redesdale. She was also a cousin of Clementine Hozier, the wife of Winston Churchill. She was educated at St Margaret's School in Bushey, Hertfordshire.
She eventually became a devout believer in fascism, in direct opposition to her sister Jessica, who at that time professed communist beliefs. 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 his 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, but she suffered serious brain damage. She was returned to Great Britain via neutral Switzerland, and spent the rest of her life on the island of Inch Kenneth. 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.
In his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer said of Hitler's select group: "One tacit agreement prevailed: No one must mention politics. The sole exception was Lady Mitford, who even in the later years of international tension persistently spoke up for her country and often actually pleaded with Hitler to make a deal with England. In spite of Hitler's discouraging reserve, she did not abandon her efforts through all those years."
Swastika legend
There is a legend Unity Mitford suggested to Hitler that he adopt the swastika as the Nazi symbol due to the name of the place where she was conceived 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.
Notes
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| last = Speer | first = Albert | title=Inside the Third Reich | publisher=The MacMillan Company | year=1970 | id=ISBN 0684829495 | pages = p. 40 }}de:Unity Mitford