On September 3, 1939, a young Englishwoman entered Munich’s English Garden, sat down on a bench, and pressed a pearl-handled pistol to her head. The gun was a gift from Adolf Hitler. She pulled the trigger. The bullet penetrated her skull but did not kill her.
Her name was Unity Mitford, and she was one of six sisters who would scatter across the extremes of twentieth-century politics. Unity’s older sister Diana had married a fascist in Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin home, with Hitler as a guest. Another sister, Jessica, had fled to Spain to fight alongside communists in the Spanish Civil War. A third, Nancy, was quietly passing information about her sisters to MI5.
Raised in the same household, the six Mitford sisters would find themselves on opposite sides of the most devastating conflict in modern history. Their father, David Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale, returned from the Western Front in 1918 with a limp and a visceral hatred of the modern world. He wanted dogs, fresh air, and silence. Instead, he and his wife, Sydney Bowles, had six daughters born over sixteen years: Nancy in 1904, Pamela in 1907, Diana in 1910, Unity in 1914, Jessica in 1917, and Deborah in 1920.
There was also a son, Tom, born in 1909. David and Sydney shared a firm conviction that formal education was unnecessary for their daughters. The girls were never sent to school, and instead tormented a series of governesses who rarely lasted long. This lack of structure, combined with rural isolation, created a pressure cooker of intelligence, boredom, and ambition.
The only plan for the daughters was marriage; the only approved ambition was to marry well. In the family’s various homes, the sisters built a private world in a linen closet they called the Society of Honourable Men. Nancy, the eldest, was the presiding genius of cruelty and sharp wit. Pamela was quiet and loved animals and farming.
Diana was the beauty, pale-haired and poised. Unity was tall, loud, and disruptive. Jessica was the rebel who read Marx. Deborah, the youngest, watched and learned.
In 1926, David sold Aston Manor and built a drab new house at Swinbrook that the children loathed. One by one, the sisters began to plot their escape. Nancy was presented at court in 1923 and discovered she was brilliantly funny. Her first novel, Highland Fling, appeared in 1931, and she found her weapon: she could turn the oddity of her upbringing into art.
Diana’s escape was more dramatic. In 1928, at 18, she married Brian Guinness, heir to a brewing fortune. Despite wealth, beauty, and a devoted husband, she grew bored within two years. In 1932 she met Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s most charismatic and dangerous politician.
Mosley was married and had recently returned from Italy, determined to build a fascist movement in England. Diana left Brian Guinness, abandoned her two young children, and gave up one of England’s largest fortunes to become Mosley’s mistress. In October 1932, Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, modeled explicitly on Mussolini’s movement. The Daily Mail published the headline “Long Live the Blackshirts” as the movement reached roughly 50,000 members in 1934.
Diana was at the center of it all, attending rallies and using her beauty and social connections to open doors for Mosley. On October 6, 1936, Diana married Mosley in Goebbels’s Berlin drawing room. Hitler was among the guests and presented the couple with a silver-framed photograph of himself. The ceremony was secret and not publicly acknowledged for almost two years.
MI5 had opened a file on Mosley in 1933, and Diana’s name appeared almost immediately. An intelligence assessment described her as “far more intelligent and more dangerous than her husband. ”
Meanwhile, Unity had discovered Hitler. She arrived in Munich in the summer of 1934 and sat in the same restaurant, day after day, until Hitler finally noticed the tall English girl.
On February 9, 1935, he invited her to his table. Unity met with Hitler approximately 140 times over the next four years, recording each meeting in her diary. Those she considered especially significant were written in red ink. The word she used most often for Hitler was “Angel.
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Unity attended the Nuremberg rallies as Hitler’s personal guest and was given an apartment in Munich, reportedly confiscated from a Jewish family. In 1935 she wrote a letter to Der Stürmer, Germany’s most violently anti-Semitic publication, praising the regime’s treatment of Jews. The letter was published and picked up by the British press. Eva Braun, Hitler’s long-time companion, was jealous and referred to Unity as “the Valkyrie.
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While Unity and Diana were integrated into the highest circles of the Nazi regime, Jessica fled to Spain. In 1937, at 19, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Winston Churchill’s nephew and an avowed communist who had fought in the International Brigades. David was so furious that a Royal Navy destroyer was sent to search for her. Jessica refused to return home and married Esmond in France in May 1937.
Nancy, in the late 1930s, began providing information to MI5 about her own sisters. She told them about Diana’s visits to Germany and Unity’s involvement with Hitler. The dossier that resulted contained the assessment that Diana Mosley was “far more intelligent and far more dangerous than her husband. ”
By the summer of 1939, war was inevitable.
Unity had told friends and family that if England and Germany went to war, she would kill herself. No one believed her. On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Unity walked to the English Garden and shot herself in the head with the pearl-handled pistol Hitler had given her. The bullet entered her right temple and lodged in her brain.
It did not kill her. Hitler arranged for her repatriation in January 1940, even as his armies massed on Western Europe’s borders. She was transported through Switzerland, and Sydney flew to collect her daughter. Unity was conscious but barely functional.
The bullet had destroyed parts of her brain responsible for higher reasoning and impulse control. She could walk, but with difficulty. She could speak, but in halting sentences. She continued to speak of Hitler affectionately but vaguely.
David and Sydney took Unity to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland, where they cared for her in a cottage with no electricity. Unity lived another nine years. She died on May 30, 1948, of meningitis caused by inflammation around the bullet still lodged in her brain. She was 33.
In 1940, Diana Mosley was imprisoned in Holloway Prison under Defence Regulation 18B, without charge, trial, or hearing. She was 30 years old, and her youngest son was just 11 weeks old. The baby was eventually allowed to join her in prison. The Mosleys were released in November 1943 on grounds of Oswald’s failing health and placed under house arrest for the rest of the war.
Their release sparked a protest, and 20,000 people signed a petition demanding their return to prison. Jessica rebuilt her life in America. Esmond Romilly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was shot down over the North Sea in November 1941. Jessica, a widow at 24 with a young daughter, stayed in America.
She moved to Oakland, California, where she married Robert Treuhaft, a labor lawyer and communist. She joined the Communist Party USA and became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, organizing voter registration drives in the segregated South. Tom Mitford, the only brother, was killed in action in Burma on March 30, 1945, just weeks before the end of the war in Europe. He was 36.
His death devastated the family. After Tom, the Mitfords were not a family in any functional sense. Deborah, the youngest, had expected to be poor. In 1941 she married Lord Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire.
But in September 1944, Andrew’s elder brother was shot dead by a German sniper, and Andrew became heir to the dukedom. When the 10th Duke died in 1950, Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire, and they inherited Chatsworth. Chatsworth was one of the largest treasure houses in England, but in 1950 it was a financial disaster. The 10th Duke died just 14 weeks before a family trust came into effect that would have protected the estate from inheritance tax.
The tax rate was 80 percent, and the liability was roughly £3 million, equivalent to more than £100 million today. Andrew and Deborah had three options: sell everything, hand the house to the National Trust, or try to pay the tax. They chose to fight. Sales began immediately and continued for 17 years.
Estates were dismantled piece by piece, hundreds of acres were sold, and paintings by Rembrandt were donated to the nation. The last death-tax payment came in 1974. The estate had been halved, but Chatsworth survived. Deborah then turned her attention to restoration.
The house was in poor condition after being occupied by a girls’ school during the war. She repaired, cleaned, catalogued, and then opened the doors to the public. Chatsworth became one of the first great English houses to embrace tourism as a calling rather than a necessary evil. Deborah opened a farm shop to sell produce from the estate’s own farms, which eventually generated £5 million in annual revenue.
The Chatsworth brand expanded to include preserves, homewares, and more. The estate now employs over 500 people, and the Chatsworth trust holds assets valued at over £1 billion. Deborah, who had never received a formal education, had saved the estate by learning accounting, marketing, and the art of managing a business. Nancy fictionalized her family.
Her novel The Pursuit of Love, published in 1945, sold 200,000 copies in its first year and preserved the Mitfords’ childhood in comic form. She died in Versailles on June 30, 1973, after a long illness. She was 69. Jessica’s American career followed a very different path.
Her investigation into the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death, published in 1963, triggered congressional hearings and changed federal regulations. She marched for civil rights in Alabama and taught writing at San Jose State University. She died on July 22, 1996, in Oakland, at 78. Diana outlived all but Deborah.
She and Mosley lived in France after the war. In every interview, she was asked the same question: did she regret supporting Hitler? She never wavered. She said Hitler had been a lovely man.
She said the war had been unnecessary. She died in Paris on August 11, 2003, at 93. She had never apologized. In the churchyard of St.
Mary’s Church, Swinbrook, the sisters who had been scattered throughout the century finally lie side by side. Tom lies in Burma. Jessica is buried in Oakland, California. Deborah was the last to go.
She died on September 24, 2014, at 94, at Chatsworth, the house she had saved. In 2024, Unity’s diaries were discovered in the attic of a family home. The contents, still being studied, confirmed what had long been suspected: the 140 meetings, the red-inked notations, the word “Angel. ”
The Mitford sisters were not anomalies; they were products of a class that had ruled England for centuries and had lost its reason for existing by the 1920s.
In a void of purpose, six bright, undereducated, chronically bored young women went searching for something to believe in. Two found fascism, one found communism, one found literature, one found farming, and one found a farm shop. Privilege without purpose is a loaded weapon, and the Mitford sisters demonstrated this across the wreckage of their lives.
Deborah understood what none of her sisters ever did: purpose is not something you find, it is something you build.