Hello, Ugo!
Uh....? Sorry, who are you?
Don't you see? I am a ghost.
Ah... sorry, yes... I was... I see you are a ghost, all bluish and transparent. But may I ask you...
Of course you may. I am the ghost of Unity Mitford.
Unity Mitford? Adolf Hitler's lover?
Yes, it is me.
Oh... that's interesting. But, excuse me, why are you appearing to me?
Because I read your book.
My book? Do you mean "The Etruscan Quest"?
Yes, that book. The story you wrote takes place when I was alive. It is a very interesting book.
Thank you. But do ghosts read books?
Yes, of course. We have a ghostly Amazon service in Hades, and we have ghostly books delivered by ghostly couriers.
Are you teasing me?
Why? What do you know about Hades?
Right, Unity, sorry. Just, you see... I am surprised. Why did you read my book?
Well, it was because one of the protagonists of your book is Margherita Sarfatti. She was the lover of the Italian Duce, Mussolini. And I was the lover of Adolf Hitler. We never met in real life, but we knew of each other. So, I was curious. In many ways, we had similar experiences.
Ah... yes, you know that Margherita's ghost appeared to me, here....
Yes, you seem to be liked by ghosts. Maybe one day you'll write a novel about me. Anyway, I saw that you understood very well who Margherita was, right?
Not everything, but she told me she was an agent of the British secret services.
Like me.
You were a British agent, Unity?
Are you surprised?
Not really. I read something about you, and I was thinking exactly that.
So, you would like to hear my story, won't you?
Absolutely, Unity. I would be honored.
It is an interesting story; not so much because of what I did, but for the many silly things said about me. Lies so blatant that I still get angry when I think of what they wrote about me. Anyway, the official story about me is that I was so infatuated with Adolf Hitler that I left my home in England and I went to Germany to seduce him. It is not completely wrong. In 1934 I was 20 years old, and I had been exposed to Nazi ideas. You know that there was a British Nazi party at that time. Actually, the official name was the "British Union of Fascists." But they were sympathetic to the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists. The boss of the party was named Oswald Mosley. I knew him well: he married my sister, Diana. See, I was born into a rich family of aristocrats, and I was raised in this atmosphere; the Nazis, the Fascists, this kind of people. I must say that it was a lot of fun for a girl as I was. But I wasn't dumb. I saw it immediately. The British secret services had infiltrated the party.
I am not surprised about that.
It was obvious. They are continuously scheming about this and that. Sometimes, though, they tell you exactly what they want to do. And that was the case for me. Actually, it was the foreign branch of the secret services, the M16, that contacted me to propose to me this mad idea of going to Germany and seducing the Fuhrer. And I accepted. I was so young, and I thought it was the adventure of my life. So, it was arranged. In 1934, I went to Munich, I took lessons in German, and then I started patronizing Hitler's favorite restaurant. Adolf had this habit of appearing like "one of us," so there was this story that anyone could meet him when he had dinner at the Osteria Bavaria just by booking a table there. Silly to the extreme. It could happen, yes, but these "casual encounters" were always carefully arranged by the German secret service, the Geheime Staatspolizei; everybody called them the "Gestapo." And it was the Gestapo that arranged my meeting with Adolf.
Did they know you were working for the M16?
Of course they knew -- they were no fools. But, you see, it is the way secret services operate. Sometimes, they collaborate with each other. Both the M16 and the Gestapo thought I could be useful to them. The British thought I could influence Adolf, and the Germans thought they could use me to feed false information to the British.
But did Hitler know that you were a spy for the British?
Good question. What did Adolf know or not know was everyone's guess. I can only tell you that he was no fool. But about me being a secret agent, I can't say.
I understand. Yet, I wonder what it was like to be, I mean, so close to Hitler...
You mean if he really was so evil as propaganda painted him? What I can say is that Adolf could hypnotize others. The voice, the tone, the expression; he could enthrall you completely. And he could hypnotize himself, too. I think he really believed what he said in his speeches. But what did he really think? I could never say for sure. Hitler was not the kind of person who opens his thoughts to others. Many people in Germany at that time were perfectly attuned to what he said in his speeches: the superior Arian race, the evil Jews, the fight against the Plutocracies. That kind of stuff. But this is well known: you only have to read his book, the Mein Kampf, to understand his views. But one thing that's not written in the book is that he loved Wagner's music and Wagner's operas. I think he saw himself as Sigfried, the hero. You know that Adolf fought during the Great War, and he felt betrayed when the Germans surrendered. This idea of the "stab in the back" that was so popular in Germany at that time was inspired by the story of Sigfried, who was stabbed in the back and killed by Hagen.
I had never thought about that! The story of the "stab in the back" was so successful because it resonated with Wagner's work in the minds of Germans.
Yes, and especially with Adolf's mind. Anyway, what was I saying? Ah... Yes. I was telling you how I met Adolf at the Osteria Bavaria. I was a rather noticeable girl at that time. Blond, tall, long legs, heavy makeup, fashionable clothes, the kind of girl men notice.
I can see that. Absolutely.
Well, now that I am a ghost that's no longer important. Thank you anyway! But do you know that my middle name is "Valkyrie"? I really had the physical aspect of a Valkyrie, one of the warrioresses of Wagner's dramas. I guess Adolf was attracted by my looks. But my name helped, too.
But were you really so eager to become a Nazi?
I understand what you mean. But please understand that I was a 20-year-old girl at that time. Everything in Germany was new, fascinating, and exotic. At that time, I couldn't possibly know what would happen. All the disaster that followed; well, that was much later. But, yes, I was truly eager to be a Nazi. I knew the Nazis were not nice guys, and just when I was there, in 1934, there was this ugly thing: the massacre of the leaders of the stormtroopers. Their boss had crossed Adolf's path, and that sealed his destiny. Ugly, indeed. But I told myself that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. I had this idea that Fascism was the future, a great idea for many reasons. You know that there were those Nazi rallies; a very special atmosphere. Electric. And when Adolf spoke... I told you that he could hypnotize people. He could, really. I was hypnotized, one among many. I felt the elation growing inside me. Adolf always said that he was married to Germany, and in those rallies, you saw a kind of collective orgasm. Strange to say that, but it was the way things were.
Fascinating, Unity. Please keep going.
Well, what else is to be said? I stayed in Germany for about 5 years. I don't think I was doing anything especially important. I was just the occasional lover of an extremely busy man; and he had several other lovers. In the West, they said he was impotent. Well, I can tell you he was not -- it was just propaganda. But it is true that he didn't have much time for women; as I said, he had this idea that he was married to Germany. In a certain way, it was true. Neither I nor the other women could compete with Germany; how could we? Anyhow, getting back to my role as a secret agent, you may be sure that Adolf never told me anything worth reporting to the British services. Sometimes, I was rather close to him and his staff. But their really important decision, well, they knew who I was, and they were careful not to pass me sensitive information. Nor was there much I could reveal to Adolf about British plans, just because nobody would inform me about such plans. Then, in 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, I became completely useless.
I can understand that.
Of course. Could you imagine the Führer keeping a British mistress while Germany was at war with Britain? No way. I had become a liability for both the German and the British secret services. And, you know, the typical way of operating of these people is that when an agent becomes a liability, they get rid of him -- or her. A bullet to the head, and it is done. But in my case, I was lucky. Nobody wanted to make too much fuss about me -- they wanted me to disappear as quietly as possible. In addition, I was still the scion of a wealthy, aristocratic family in Britain, and they intervened to make sure that I could get out of Germany still alive. Funnily, they did that by staging a fake suicide attempt. It was so clumsy and so silly that, today, I still wonder how anyone could buy into that story. The official version was that I managed to slip free of my bodyguards; then I sat on a bench in a park, and there I shot myself in the head with a handgun, and I survived, although badly wounded. The story includes such details as the gun being a "harlot gun," or a "silver gun" or that it was "pearl-handled." And that even though nobody ever saw that gun! A non-gun that shot non-bullets. And they even said that Adolf Hitler gave it to me as a personal gift for personal defense. Yes, sure, they thought the Gestapo would have been happy about having a British spy who had access to the Führer carrying a gun with her. Naah.... impossible.
Well, at least the story of your suicide attempt was challenged by someone.
Oh, yes, almost 70 years after the alleged "suicide attempt," someone published an article wondering whether I had really shot myself. Fantastic. Even more fantastic was that my sister Deborah intervened, saying she had X-ray plates showing the bullet stuck inside my head. Sure, but no one ever saw those plates. They are just like that "harlot gun" -- things that never existed. Simply, I never shot myself. I just had my head bandaged in a hospital in Munich, and they told me I should do my best to look sick and dazed. Then I was whisked to Switzerland and then back to England. Officially, I was impaired. I was "incontinent and childish," and I couldn't even walk. It wasn't true, but I never denied that I had tried to kill myself. My condition prevented an official inquiry into what I had done in Germany, and nobody wanted that -- for sure, I didn't. And that's basically the end of my story. I died a few years later of meningitis; they say it was caused by the bullet lodged in my brain. But meningitis can be caused by plenty of other things. The truth was that I was spent. I was empty inside. It is not easy to live after seeing all your dreams shattered, everything you believed turning out to be false or evil. And to be considered a traitor in your own country: They put up with me only because I was supposed to be crippled. But it was a punishment I had inflicted on me myself, and I deserved it. So, really, I had little left to do and to care for, and I slipped away, quietly.
A truly fascinating story, Unity. Thanks for telling it to me. But is it really all?
You are clever, Ugo. Yes, there is something more that I could tell you. You see, I told you that Adolf was convinced that the Germans were the master race of the world, the herrenvolk. All the others were inferior creatures; some to be exterminated, like the Jews and the Slavs, and some to be kept as servants, as the French. But he made an exception for the British. He thought they were of the same stock as the Germans, except they had the misfortune of falling under the yoke of the Jewish worldwide conspiracy. And that if they could free themselves from that, they could become Germany's allies. It was part of his worldview, otherwise he couldn't have kept a British mistress. And I was doing my best to reinforce this idea in his mind. I always told him he should ally with Great Britain, not fight it. And he agreed on that, at least in part. But I also told him that the British hated the Russians because they were Communists, but even more than that because they challenged Britain's supremacy. And that if Germany were to go to war against Russia, then Britain would help Germany. I even mentioned the people in Britain who would have pushed the government to do that. Mind you, I wasn't the only person in Germany thinking that Britain and Germany should join forces to destroy the Slavic brutes. But I was close enough to Adolf that sometimes he would listen to me. He was also superstitious, and he had this idea that I had been sent to him by some superior powers. So, he may have trusted me, and the idea stuck in his mind. And it happened! You know that Hitler let the British troops escape from France more or less unscathed. Then, there was the famous Battle of Britain in 1940, but it didn't last for long. Less than 4 months, then the Germans gave up. It was because of this peculiar view Adolf had. He didn't want to destroy Britain -- he saw the British as potential allies. So, he proceeded to attack the Soviet Union. I don't know if he was really expecting that the British would send their troops to help the Germans. More likely, the idea was that the Germans would defeat the Soviets, force them to come to terms, and then turn back to Britain, and say something like, "Did you see what we can do? Now, let's talk." And then, Arians would rule the world. Instead, Germany found itself fighting on two fronts, an impossible task. And you know how it ended.
Do you think it was a trap set by the M16?
I think it was. I am sure that the British Secret Service used me as a tool to convince Adolf to attack the Soviet Union.
So, you could have been the person who destroyed Adolf Hitler, just like Margherita Sarfatti may have destroyed Benito Mussolini?
Maybe. History is strange, you know. You should have lived in Germany in the 1930s to understand how deeply they were immersed in this Wagnerian fantasy world. I think that Adolf destroyed himself with the idea that he was Sigfried. He lived in a fantasy world, and then he tried to put his fantasies into practice. And the destiny of Sigfried was to die stabbed in the back. Which happened, and perhaps it was Adolf himself that made it happen. I played the part of Brunhild, who committed suicide; another Wagnerian fantasy.
What a story, Unity! Thanks for telling it to me. It is remarkable how the Germans were immersed in this Wagnerian dream at that time.
They were completely hypnotized by the press and the radio. And they had TV, too! The first public television in the world.
Ah, well, in our times, too, people believe just about everything, provided it is written in newspapers or told on TV.
I know that. I am afraid that with these tools you have to hypnotize people, your destiny may not be much better than that of Germany at the time of the Nazis. You have a big war ongoing in Eastern Europe, and many young people are coming to Hades from there. Maybe someone has been listening too much to Wagner's music?
Well, Wagner's music is not so popular anymore today, but people tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
There is nothing more dangerous in the world than trying to put one's fantasies into practice. But we all come here, eventually. Hades is not a good place to be but, sometimes, the powers that be give us a chance to chat with mortals. And it is fun. Thanks, Ugo, for listening to me. Now I have to vanish... see you here... not so soon, I hope!
Ugo Bardi's novel, "The Etruscan Quest," was published in 2023 by "Lu::Ce Edizioni". The story told in the novel takes place during the time of Fascism in Italy, in the 1930s, and it touches many of the elements of madness that overcame the country at that time.
