Martin Bright, writing in the New Statesman magazine, said that in 2002 he received a phone call from a woman named Val Hann who had read an article he had written about Unity Mitford, a British high-society fascist who was reportedly Hitler's lover.
Unity Mitford, who was born in 1948 in London, was reportedly conceived in the town of Swastika, in Ontario, Canada, a coincidence that did much to impress the circle of Nazi leaders she subsequently ingratiated herself with during her stay in 1930s Germany.
Mitford, who was also a cousin of Winston Churchill, lived in Nazi Germany until the outbreak of WWII, returning to Britain after a failed suicide attempt in Munich in 1939.
Val Hann "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."
Norton's business, in the small Oxfordshire village of Wigginton, was known and valued for its discretion, and Betty Norton "had told no one except her sister that Unity had had a baby. Her sister had passed the story on to her daughter Val."
After Martin Bright had enquired as to the identity of the father, Val Hann said, after a small pause, "Well, she always said it was Hitler's."
Val Hann, who received no money for her story from the New Statesman, said she had been led to believe that the child was a boy, and that he had been subsequently given up for adoption.
A former employee at the maternity home also claimed to remember a visit by Unity Mitford.
Mitford's sister, the present Duchess of Devonshire, who returned to Britain from Germany with Unity in 1940, has dismissed the claims. However, she has refused to be interviewed.
A program on the subject is to be aired on Britain's Channel 4 on December 20. Like Martin Bright, however, the documentary ultimately remains skeptical about the story.
