Jessica Mitford Had Every Reason to Side With Power and Refused
Jessica Mitford was born the child of aristocrats and the sister of fascists who celebrated the rise of Adolf Hitler. But she betrayed her class to become a communist, embedding herself in the life of the working class and railing against the powerful.
Jessica Mitford was born into Britain’s ruling class: her parents were aristocrats, her siblings were fascists, and her cousin was Winston Churchill. A new book shows how she ditched her background to become a communist and radical journalist. (Janet Fries / Getty Images)
In twentieth-century Britain, the Mitford name became entangled with the rise of European fascism. On October 6, 1936, the most beautiful of the six sisters, Diana Guinness (née Mitford), married Oswald Mosley — accomplished fencer and founder of the British Union of Fascists — at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, overlooking the Tiergarten. Adolf Hitler was guest of honor. Just two days earlier, Mosley had been beaten back at the Battle of Cable Street, where tens of thousands of communists, trade unionists, and Jews used their bodies as barricades to prevent his Blackshirts marching through the East End of London, England’s most densely populated Jewish district.
Unity, Diana’s younger sister, had moved to Bavaria in 1933 in the hope of meeting Hitler and, in 1934, watched a forest of swastika flags beneath a torchlit procession during the first Nuremberg Rally with Diana. Unity succeeded in her ambition, reinventing herself as Hitler’s englisches Fräulein, indulged as no other foreigner in his inner circle. “I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying,” Unity wrote to her mother, Lady Sydney Redesdale (or “Muv”): “I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world.” But when Britain finally declared war on Germany in September 1939, Unity calmly walked into Munich’s English Garden and fired a bullet from her pearl-handled pistol into the back of her skull. The suicide attempt failed, leaving her with permanent neurological damage. Hitler sent roses to her hospital bedside.
The Making of a Class Traitor
Growing up, Jessica “Decca” Mitford, the fifth of six sisters, shared a bedroom with Unity. In Hons and Rebels (1960), she later recalled how they divided the space with rival insignia: on the window, Unity’s “swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring,” Nazi pendants, and Italian fasces; on Jessica’s side, “for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle,” along with a bust of Lenin and stacks of the Daily Worker. While Jessica would ultimately forgive Unity for her love of Hitler (“Perversely, and although I hated everything she stood for, she was easily my favourite sister,” she reflected after Unity died of meningitis at thirty-three), she felt no such charity toward Diana and her husband.
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