Hitler's Niece (5 page)

A band of musicians was supposed to form in the front and play marching songs, but they’d neither been paid nor been given breakfast, so they’d offered a raucous version of Hitler’s favorite march, the “Badenweiler,” and had then skulked off. Which left in front Ludendorff in his formal helmet and a brown overcoat, Hitler in his white trench coat and slouch hat, and beside him a confidant, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, followed by Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring, then the hundred men of the “Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler,” a bodyguard that was a forerunner of the SS and was outfitted with carbines, hand grenades, and steel helmets as large as kettles. Easing along behind them was an automobile with machine guns on its backseat, then there had been a full regiment of the hung-over SA, holding rifles from which the firing pins had been removed, and perhaps a thousand shopkeepers, workers, officer candidates, and university students, “all higgledy-piggledy” as one witness said.

Wet snowflakes had been falling on a cold, gray noon as the putschists walked through the Marienplatz, where the Nazi flag had been flying atop city hall, and toward the gray, high-arched, Italianate Feldherrnhalle, where a hundred green-uniformed state police were forming a blockade. Scheubner-Richter had shaken Alfred Rosenberg’s hand and said, “Things look ugly,” then had linked arms with Hitler and taken off his pince-nez, telling his friend, “This may be our last walk together.”

The parade had begun singing “O Deutschland hoch in Ehren”—“O Germany, High in Honor”—and those with carbines and bayonets had leveled them on the waiting police. Hitler had shouted, “Surrender! Surrender!” And then someone had fired a shot and a police sergeant was killed. The police had hesitated, and then, a fraction before the shouted order to do so, had fired a salvo on the parade. Scheubner-Richter had been killed with those first shots, and as he’d collapsed he’d pulled so heavily on Hitler’s arm that he’d dislocated Hitler’s left shoulder. Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard, had flung himself in front of Hitler and been hit eleven times before falling, but had lived. Alfred Rosenberg had crawled to the rear. Old soldier Ludendorff had thrown himself flat to the street at the first sounds of gunfire, hiding behind Scheubner-Richter’s body until there was silence, and had then gotten up again and frowned as he’d marched forward, his hand in his left coat pocket, still confident that no one would shoot him. They had not.

Hermann Göring, who as a flying ace had won Germany’s highest medal for valor in the war, the
Pour le Mérite
, and wore it ostentatiously over his fine, black leather jacket, had been hit in the upper thigh and groin. On his hands and knees he’d gotten to a hiding place behind the lions in front of the Residenz Palace where a friend had found him and helped him to the house of the first doctor he saw, at Residenzstrasse 25. The friend had asked if the owner would help them. “Of course, I’ll give aid to any wounded man,” Dr. Robert Ballin had said. “But I call your attention to the fact that this is a house of Jews.” And still they’d gone inside.

Twenty men were killed, four of them police, and hundreds were injured in a skirmish that had lasted less than a minute. Of the sixteen Nazis whom Hitler would finally make heroes and martyrs, four were merchants, three were bank officials, three were engineers, and there had been a hat maker, a locksmith, a headwaiter, a butler, a retired cavalry captain, and a judicial official of the Bavarian Supreme Court whose bloodstained draft of a new Nazi constitution had been found folded in his pocket.

Quickly as that the putsch was over. A journalist would later call the day
Kahrfreitag
, Kahr Friday, a play on the German for Good Friday,
Kar-freitag
. A few revolutionaries had run off to a nearby girl’s academy and had scrambled under the beds to hide from the police; others had fled to a
Konditorei
and had concealed their weapons in pastry ovens and flour sacks; some had just returned to their jobs as if they’d only been onlookers.

With Dr. Walter Schultze helping him, Hitler hurried away in agony, his hair falling over his face, white with failure and shame, and got into a yellow Opel automobile that had a red cross painted on its side. An old friend, Emil Maurice, got behind the wheel and drove them south toward the Austrian border as fast as he could. “What a fiasco,” Hitler sighed, then said nothing more until Mur-nau, where he remembered that Ernst Hanfstaengl, the party’s foreign press secretary, owned a country home not far away, in Uffing, on the lake called Staffelsee.

They went there. The quiet was stunning. The fields and lawn were white with snow. A farmer was walking his brown milk cows along the five-foot-high granite wall that surrounded the house. Emil Maurice and Dr. Schultze hunkered low in the Opel as Hitler trudged up to the front door and was greeted by Egon, a three-year-old boy whom Hitler often played with, and who knew him as Onkel Dolf. Egon yelled upstairs for his mother and Frau Helene Hanfstaengl came down. She was a pregnant, serene, and glamorous American woman of German descent with whom Hitler thought himself in love. Without saying anything of the putsch, or why his left arm was in a sling, he kissed her hand and meekly asked if she would let him stay for the night, and she put him up in an attic room. And it was there, still threatening suicide, that he was arrested by the police on Sunday night and taken to Landsberg fortress.

Ernst Hanfstaengl himself had fled to Rosenheim, on the Austrian border, where a physician’s secretary helped him find his way across the frontier illegally. And he was surprised to later learn that the führer had selected Uffing rather than Austria for his hideaway. In fact, Hitler’s odd reluctance to go back into his homeland again only became a greater mystery for Hanfstaengl when, in 1938, at the time of Germany’s
Anschluss
with Austria, he heard that the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, took it as one of their first obligations to haul off from police headquarters in Wien a box of dossiers having to do with Adolf Hitler in his twenties. And those who knew what was in them were soon found dead.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

T
HE
M
ERRY
W
IDOW
, 1923

Urged by Lorenz
Roder, Hitler’s lawyer, to stay away from Germany for a few more months, Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl hid in the house of a National Socialist in Salzburg until the ennui was so great that he journeyed east to look up his leader’s family just out of curiosity.

The Raubals owned no telephone, so they weren’t listed in the Wien directory, but through a few inquiries Hanfstaengl found out that Frau Angela Raubal worked full-time in the kitchen of a Jewish girls’ hostel in the Zimmermannsdamm area. Angela was highly thought of there, he was told. She’d once quelled an anti-Semitic rally in front of the hostel simply by the challenging force of her presence, and she prepared meals that were so perfectly kosher that an Orthodox rabbi brought Jewish housewives to the hostel kitchen to have her show them how it was done. A girl at the hostel thought the Raubal family was renting a flat on the fourth floor of a five-story building on Blumengasse, near the Westbahnhof.

Imagining Angela a formidable lady, the female version of the tyrant Adolf could be, Ernst Hanfstaengl took along as gifts of homage a box of Empress chocolates and a book of art reproductions that his family’s firm published,
Old Masters in the Pinakothek
, and visited the Raubals’ flat on a Wednesday afternoon in December. Children already old with misery forlornly watched him as he went up scuffed wooden stairs as cupped as spoons with wear, watched him, too, as he waited in a filthy hallway for one of the Raubals to answer his knock. And then he heard, “Who is it?”

“Herr Hanfstaengl, my lady. A family friend.”

Paula Hitler hardly opened the front door five inches as she warily peered up at him. “Which side?”

“Adolf’s.”

She slammed the door and called, “Angela!”

Hanfstaengl heard Angela hurrying down the hallway, and then she opened the flat’s door wide. She was far less like Hitler than he had expected, just a handsome, solid, ill-used
Hausfrau
of forty, the kind of charwoman his wife would hire on streetcorners whenever their city house wanted cleaning. “Ernst Hanfstaengl,” he said. “I’m the party’s foreign press secretary.”

She disliked Hitler’s politics, he could tell, but she tried to hide it by considering her chafed and reddened hands. “We heard about the riot. And the arrest. How is Adolf?”

“We lost some dear comrades in the fighting, so he’s sick at heart, but otherwise well. You know how he thrives on adversity.”

She didn’t. A flicker of unease seemed to cross her face, as if she were unused to the size and heartiness of men. “Won’t you come in?” she asked, but then flushed and withdrew farther from him as he filled the foyer.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, and handed her his gifts.

“Chocolates! And a book!” Angela cried, as if she’d just noticed them. “You are too kind.”

“You’re tall, aren’t you,” Paula called. She was a stout woman of almost twenty-eight. She was hiding behind the icebox in the kitchen so that only her tilted head showed. She was just a little fuller in the face than Adolf; otherwise the resemblance was obvious.

Hanfstaengl doffed his hat and smiled. “You must be Fräulein Hitler!”

“Oh, yes; must be, forced to be, had no choice.” She fell back from view and called, “We don’t have any money! You go away now!”

“Quiet, Paula!” Angela shouted. She turned back to Hanfstaengl and with chagrin confided, “She’s strange, you know.” His frown told her he didn’t know; Hitler had hidden that. She realized it was the hour for
Kaffee und Kuchen
. “Shall I take your coat?” Angela asked. “We still have some coffee, I think.”

But Hanfstaengl was focused on the squalor of the flat, seeing Leo’s foul straw mattress in the hallway, the old three-legged green sofa that was Geli’s bed, and the few frail pieces of other furniture that hadn’t yet been sold. “I hope you will pardon the observation, Frau Raubal, but it looks like you have had a difficult life here lately, just as we have had in Germany.”

She told him, “We all get to eat at the hostel, so we have it better than most.”

“We have lost a war,” he somberly said, “and the world won’t let us forget it.” Then his gaze shifted farther down the hallway, and Angela saw that he was smiling at Geli.

She’d been studying geometry on the floor of the bedroom that Angela shared with Paula, but she’d been so intrigued by the American accent she’d heard that she’d hastily fussed with her hair and changed into her finest gray wool skirt and the pink angora sweater that Angela thought was too formfitting for a girl of fifteen. And then she’d sashayed out to find in the foyer a homely but jolly man with a jutting jaw and underbite, fully six feet four in height, in a chalk-gray English suit and black cashmere topcoat, a gray fedora in one huge hand, his brown hair oiled slick and middle-parted and still grooved by his hat.

“And you must be Angelika,” he said. “Aren’t you pretty!”

“My friends call me Geli.”

She felt her hand lose itself in his as he introduced himself first as Herr Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, and then as his friends and family knew him: Putzi, a childhood nickname that meant Cutie. “Say it, please.”

“Putzi.”

“And so we are done with formalities,” he said, and offered Geli’s hand back to her.

Angela held up the gift box and said, “Look, Geli, chocolates!” And then she shouted to the kitchen, “Paula, won’t you have some?”

“Hah!” Paula said.

Putzi Hanfstaengl’s hand found Geli’s forearm as he tilted toward Angela to offer, “You know what I would like to do, Frau Raubal? Rather than have coffee with you here, I’d far rather take your family out.”

Leo
Raubal was still at his high school, where he assisted the night janitor, and The Straggler preferred to stroll Stadtpark as she always did, one hand in a sack of crushed zwieback toast, hunting in vain for pigeons to feed. So only Angela and Geli went with Hanfstaengl to the swank Café Sacher for mocha
mit Obers
and their famous Sacher torte.

Riding there in a taxi he cordially lectured Angela on
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a little pamphlet that Adolf insisted she read in order to understand fully who the party’s archenemy was. With an intensity she associated with high school acting, Putzi informed Angela that the Jewish Nationalist Movement of the Zionists had been founded at a congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Ostensibly their intention was to lead the Jews back to a homeland in Palestine, he told her, but in their secret sessions the Zionist elders had been hatching a heinous plan for a Jewish conquest of the world. Each of their speeches had been recorded in shorthand and the collected papers had been sent by courier to Frankfurt am Main where they were to be stored in the archives of the Rising Sun Lodge of Freemasons. Czarist secret police had somehow intercepted them, however, and the pamphlet had been published in Russian just before the revolution. It was then that Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic architect who was often called “Hitler’s co-thinker,” had fled to München and, fearing that a Jewish conquest was already well under way, had joined the National Socialists, for whom he had translated the text into German. The famous automaker Henry Ford had been so shocked by the protocols that he’d had them published in America under the title
The International Jew
.

“And what do they say?” Putzi rhetorically asked. “‘We’—the Jews—‘shall create unrest, struggle, and hate in all of Europe and thence to the other continents. We shall poison the relations between peoples by spreading hunger, destitution, and plagues. We shall stultify, seduce, and ruin the youth. We shall use bribery, treachery, and treason as long as they serve the realization of our plans. We shall paint the misdeeds of foreign governments in garish colors and create such ill-feeling toward them that the people would a thousand times rather bear a slavery that guarantees them order than enjoy the freedom offered them by others.’”

Angela frowned. “Are you saying this is occurring right now?”

“Oh, so you’ve seen it in Austria as well?”

“The Jews I know aren’t like that,” she said.

“There are Jews and there are Jews,” he said. “I would only caution you to be suspicious.” Putzi found his fountain pen, tore out a page from his address book, and wrote on it
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. He handed it to Angela and watched with satisfaction as she dutifully put it in her purse. And then he saw Geli in the front seat, hiding a yawn. “All this grown-up talk,” he told her with a smile. “We
do
go on, don’t we?”

“I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I was just enjoying the ride. I haven’t been in a taxi before.”

They were in front of the Sacher, and as Putzi Hanfstaengl got out his wallet, he grinned and said, “We’ll make this a night of firsts.”

Coffee in the Sacher Café was a first for Angela, too. She found herself frightened by the high prices on the menu, the haughty ladies in furs, the Old World opulence of the furniture; and she was embarrassed by her faded dress with its cooking stains on the front, the shine on a green gabardine overcoat that she’d bought before the war, the hair that she’d been cutting with kitchen shears since the hard times after the armistice. She was forty, and just four years older than Putzi Hanfstaengl—whom she could not call by his nickname—and yet she felt dull and male in his company, without fascination or joy. She forgot the Jew-hating after a while and found herself liking this huge, generous, genial man; she even liked his ugliness—it gave a flavor of wry comedy to whatever he chanced to say. But he seemed to find it hard to unfasten himself from Geli’s admiration, and he seemed to be talking only to the girl when he said he was from an old family of art dealers and publishers on the Continent and in America, that he’d graduated from Harvard and had belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club, that he’d worked on Fifth Avenue in New York City for twelve years, then had returned to Germany to work on a doctorate in eighteenth-century history, that he was German on his father’s side and American on his mother’s, that his grandfather had been a Civil War general and a pallbearer at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.

Angela thought she ought to know that name; she glanced anxiously at Geli.
Lincoln?

Without shifting her fond gaze from Putzi, Geli said, “A president of the United States.”

“I was just thinking that,” Angela said.

But that was only the beginning of Angela’s being left out. Geli flirted with him outrageously, giggling at the faintest humor, finding reasons to touch his hands, flattering him with awe.

“I first met your uncle at the Kindl Keller beer hall,” Putzi said. “While I had some misgivings about him and his program, I was utterly conquered by his oratory. And I recalled something that Teddy Roosevelt told me long ago when I visited him at his Sag-amore Hill estate. The former president told me it was wise in my business to buy only the finest art, but I ought to remember that in politics the choice is often the lesser of two evils. And so I became a member of the party.”

“The lesser of two evils,” Angela said. “High praise.”

But Hanfstaengl was too focused on Geli to hear her. Confessing that he and his wife, Helene, had taken Hitler on as their joint project, Putzi told how they’d spruced up her famous uncle, found him a tuxedo and a good tailor, taught him the graces of the dining table, and forbade him from adding four teaspoons of sugar to one of Prinz Metternich’s finest Gewürztraminer wines. “I haven’t yet got him to change that postage stamp of a mustache, though. He looks like a fourth-form schoolteacher or a bank clerk who lives with his mother.” Putzi told them he’d offered Hitler their parlor for his afternoon reading, invited him to parties with their wealthy friends, cheered him up by banging out Wagner preludes on the piano “with Lisztian
fioriture
and a fine romantic swing.”

The headwaiter refilled his coffee cup and then he continued, “While in the first days of his remand at Landsberg, Hitler followed the Sinn Fein of Ireland in trying a hunger strike. Roder, his counsel, got in touch with my wife, and Helene forthwith sent a message to Adolf saying she hadn’t prevented his suicide in Uffing just so he could starve to death in the fortress. Wasn’t that exactly what his enemies wanted? Well, Hitler has such a great admiration for my wife that her advice turned the scale, and he’s far fitter now.”

“You have our thanks,” Geli said.

Putzi tilted forward in a bow while saying, “And you have
my
admiration.”

“Will you be staying in Wien long?” Angela asked.

Geli glared, as if she’d heedlessly thrown cold water on a cake.

“Oh no,” he said. “Who can work here?” And he offered his observations on the gaiety and frivolity of Wien, falling into French to say,
“Elle danse, mais elle ne marche pas.”

It was left to Angela’s fifteen-year-old daughter to translate: “The city dances, but it never gets anything done.” And then in the way of teenaged girls with their mothers, Geli added, “French.” She smiled at Putzi. “I want to hear you speak English.”

Hanfstaengl gave it some thought before saying in English, “You are quite the saucy morsel.”

Geli grinned in fascinated ignorance at Angela. “Did you understand him?”

Angela shook her head.

Hanfstaengl said, “I told her she was not unattractive.”

Angela stared glumly at Geli and said, “Yes, it’s true, isn’t it.”

Only then did he turn to the older woman. “You often hear gossip in high society about Herr Hitler and glamorous women, that he fancies this one, that he’s marrying another, but I assure you, Frau Raubal, there’s absolutely no substance to it.”