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The 500 or so people of Swastika, Ont., are well aware that their town’s name has negative connotations.

But for 80 years they’ve resisted a name change on one simple principle: They thought of their name before Hitler, and they’ve never had anything to do with Nazis.

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“You don’t write off history just because one person uses something wrong,” town historian Carolyn O’Neil told the National Post in 2008.

The lack of Nazis is mostly true.

Because Ontario’s oddly named community indirectly spawned at least one Nazi — and one of the most notorious.

British socialite Unity Valkyrie Mitford was a rabid anti-Semite, an obsessive hanger-on of Adolf Hitler and even the rumoured mother of his love child.

Had Britain fallen to German forces, she might well have become a key figure in whatever puppet government the Nazis installed in London.

And in 1913, Mitford was conceived in Swastika.

“I am always with you however far away you may be. You are always next to me. I will never forget you,” wrote Adolf Hitler on Mitford’s presentation copy of Mein Kampf.