Churchill Cousin Had Hitler Love Child?

Sounds like something out of the tabloids and for all you know, it may well be nonsense. No doubt though it makes for interesting fodder for the gossip wags.

SHE was the English aristocrat who became so enamoured with Hitler that she shot herself in the head at the outbreak of war.

Unity Mitford had been so entwined in the Fuhrer's inner circle that British secret services described her as "more Nazi than the Nazis".

But could this cousin of Winston Churchill have been closer to Hitler than anyone suspected?

An article published yesterday raises the possibility that Mitford, who survived her suicide attempt, may have given birth to his child.

If the theory that this baby was born in a tiny Cotswolds village and rapidly adopted were true, Hitler's child could be living in Britain today.

Mitford was one of six well-known sisters who included Diana, the wife of the Hitlerite Oswald Mosley, and Jessica, a committed communist.

She first went to Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were on the rise, and the young woman was so overwhelmed by a visit to the Nuremberg rallies that she became determined to meet Hitler. This she managed in spectacular style, ingratiating herself to the point where he described her as "a perfect specimen of Aryan womanhood".

When her homeland declared war on the Third Reich in September 1939, Mitford was so devastated that, in the English Garden in Munich, she shot herself in the head. She suffered serious brain damage and returned to Britain. As the history books tell it, Mitford then lived with her mother in the Cotswolds until her death 1948, aged 33.

Martin Bright, writing in the New Statesman, describes a call he received from a woman called Val Hann that suggested there could be more to it: "She explained that her aunt Betty Norton had run a maternity home to the gentry in Oxfordshire during the war and that Unity Mitford had been one of her clients.

"Her aunt's business, in the tiny village of Wigginton, had depended on discretion and she had told no one except her sister that Unity had had a baby. Her sister had passed the story on to her daughter Val." Asked who the father might be, Ms Hann replied: "Well, she always said it was Hitler's."