{"id":348,"date":"2007-12-28T15:17:59","date_gmt":"2007-12-28T19:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=348"},"modified":"2007-12-28T15:17:59","modified_gmt":"2007-12-28T19:17:59","slug":"unity-sees-the-bright-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=348","title":{"rendered":"Unity sees the bright side"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is more to the story I told in the previous entry<\/a> about the SS man who found he was a Jew. Here is how it ended, in Unity’s telling to Diana.<\/p>\n\n

Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt<\/em> [shattered] when he heard it, & wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out.<\/p>\n\n

Though, officially, he doesn’t count as a Jew as both the grandparents were baptized. But for Heinz, being a real Nazi ‘aus überzeugung’<\/em> [by conviction], that naturally made no difference. His father made him promise not to do anything until they had had a reply to their Ersuch<\/em> [request] to the Führer, but so far there has been no reply, & in the meanwhile of course he is having what is practically a nervous breakdown. Well it seems that there are several half-Jews who have, at one time or another, been allowed to remain in the Party on account of special Verdienste<\/em> [services]. So they hope that he also will, though of course this will anyhow, from his own point of view, have ruined his life. So she came to ask me if I would help her, & I told her that if she would write a personal letter to the Führer I would give it to him personally. Isn’t it awful for them, poor things. I must say it gave me an awful shock when she told me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Unity is in many ways less unpleasant than Diana, whose combination of intelligence with quite psychotic self-deception is horrible. In later life, she is constantly roused to indignation because vulgar lower-class people will claim that her husband was anti-Semitic (is if there were anything wrong with that<\/em>) or, most exquisitely, when a journalist quotes her as saying she was “very fond” of Hitler. This seemed to her a monstrous misunderstanding of “Off the Record”. So the last word goes her refutation, in 1976, of the suggestion that Unity might have made a snobbish remark about the Queen Mother, who was known to the Mitfords as “Cake”:1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n

The nastiest, well one of the nastiest, is Mr Float [The rector of Swinbrook] … He (apparently) told such an obviously false story of Bird [Unity] saying, in conneciton with the abdication, that Cake was like a shop girl. It is so particularly offensive and silly and, as we know, Birdie had strong race<\/em> feelings, but not so much as a soupçon of class<\/em> feeling and thus its something she couldn’t have said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Italics in the original. What does it take to have such an inexhaustible fountain of self-righteousness?<\/p>\n\n\n

1<\/sup> Hence “Cake’s Dump”, a reference by Debo to Clarence House.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is more to the story I told in the previous entry about the SS man who found he was a Jew. Here is how it ended, in Unity’s telling to Diana. Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}