Hitler's Niece (7 page)

“Did you win the contest?” Geli asked.

“Certainly, Fräulein Raubal. With much praise.” And then Hess fell into distraction as he watched her licking the sugarcane.

She smiled. “What did you buy with the money?”

Hess shook his head free of the question and got back on track. “The point of the story is that quite soon after the competition, I happened to attend one of Herr Hitler’s speeches for the first time ever, and I was absolutely stunned. He was sheer genius, pure reason incarnate, everything I’d hoped for and imagined—but
here, now
. Tears streaming down my face, I ran home to my fiancée and screamed in ecstasy, ‘I have found the man!’”

Then the office door opened. Hess hurtled to his feet. Count Rudinski was chuckling as he walked out of the office in a sable coat and hat, wrapping his neck twice in a long orange scarf. Hitler was just behind him, in knee-high woolen stockings, leather lederhosen, and a collarless white shirt, his hands holding the gift of
The Collected Poems of Stefan George
. “Rudi, you must listen to this,” Hitler said, then stiffly held the book far out from his face to try to read the front-matter inscription without his glasses, but couldn’t. “Well, you read it,” he said.

Rudolf Hess announced, “From Frau Winifred Wagner in Bayreuth: ‘Dear Adi, You are the coming man in spite of everything. We all still depend on you to pull the sword out of the German oak.’”

Count Rudinski smiled. “A lovely sentiment from a great lady.”

“It’s a glorious inscription,” said Hess.

“You think? And true, too. Count Rudinksi just now brought it to me.”

Hess took the book from him and shoved it among the others. The good-bye lasted a full minute more, during which time Hitler offered no acknowledgment that his half-sister and niece were there. Only when the count was gone did he grin at Angela and give her his hand. “Good evening, Frau Raubal!” Then he gently touched Geli’s light brown hair. “And to you, Fräulein. I’m happy you’re here.”

“We like your pantry,” Geli said.

Hitler winced and held his hands to his soft belly. “Oh, it makes my stomach ache! Look at how fat I’m getting! I can’t fit into my pants!”

Angela failed to argue the point; he looked paunchy. “Aren’t there prison sports in here?” Angela asked. “Or gymnastic exercises?”

“Well, yes,” he said, “but what would it do to ideals and discipline if I joined with the others in physical training? A general cannot afford the affront of being beaten at games by his infantrymen. Anyway, I shall again get the weight off by speaking.”

“What jobs are you forced to do?”

“Oh, I’m far too busy for labor.” Hitler lifted off the lid from a box of marzipan sweets and popped one in his mouth. “Are you in communication with Alois?” he asked.

She tore off an orange section and ate it. “Our brother, Alois? It’s been fifteen years.”

“Well, he’s in Hamburg now, selling razor blades. He married a woman named…” He frowned at Hess.

“Hedwig Heidemann,” Hess said.

“What happened to Bridget in England?” Angela asked.

“You see, that’s the problem. Alois is still married to her.”

To clarify things, Hess gave the word for it: “Bigamy.”

“Thank you,” Angela told him. “I have a tiny brain.”

Hitler found another marzipan, but on second thought put it back. “The office of the lord mayor of Hamburg has called Alois in for questioning. And Alois has written a letter to his first wife requesting that she have their marriage legally dissolved.” Hitler expectantly held out his hand. Rudolf Hess went to the secretary, got out a sheet of typed paper as well as Hitler’s glasses, and gave both to him. “We have his wording from our Hamburg friends,” Hitler said, and holding his folded glasses up in one hand, shook out the paper. “To Bridget Hitler our older brother writes: ‘Don’t think that I am at present a rich man, for to tell you the truth I am not. But I have got the chance to get rich by the aid of my brother’s reputation. This chance will be lost forever if I am found guilty, and if I am sentenced.’ And he goes on, ‘You must help me or they’ll put me in jail. This bigamy charge is mainly embarrassing, for should the newspapers learn about it they’re going to use it against my brother.’” Hitler handed the page back to Hess. “Quite true,” he said. His face was suddenly as red as a beet and his forehead was throbbing with veins. “By the aid of my brother’s reputation!’ And here I am, in prison, fighting for my life! Alois is
destroying
my reputation! I
cannot
have this! I
won’t!
Any member of my family—”

Rudolf Hess had begun whistling an old regimental song about the flower called Erika.

Hitler glanced at him as if he’d forgotten his part; then he glanced at Geli and remembered. “Would you come into my office, Angela? We have to talk further.”

Angela put an orange slice in her mouth as she went with him, and Hess shut the door, then sat with his hands chafing his knees, his face fraught with shyness and discomfort.

Geli inched up the hem of her funeral dress to look surreptitiously at her shins and ankles. She’d shaved her legs for the first time that morning and worried that she’d done a poor job of it. She decided it would do.

Silence seemed to paint the room a bleaker color. And then Hess finally said, “We have them right where we want them.”

“‘Them’?”

“We hear the people in München are still in favor of a parliamentary monarchy.”

Geli told him, “We were in München for only a few minutes.”

“You aren’t interested in politics?”

Geli shrugged.

“Are you interested in astrology?”

She was only fifteen and not quite certain if there was a difference between astrology and astronomy. She said yes, she was interested in the stars.

“I’m the mystic in the party,” Hess said, and he grinned in a way she thought goofy. “Well, no one surpasses Hitler,” he continued, “but I’m perhaps more adept in
The Secret Doctrine
and contact with the higher spheres.”

She was trying to decide what she disliked more, his shameless deference to her uncle or his sober prissiness.

“Shall I read to you from his book?” he asked.

“You mean he’s writing one?”

Hess got out a diary from an upper drawer in the secretary. “On the frontispiece is his motto, “Hess said. “I quote: ‘When a world comes to an end, then entire parts of the earth can be convulsed, but not the belief in a just cause.’ And below that he has written: ‘The trial of narrow-mindedness and personal spite is over, and today starts—
My Struggle
.’ We’re thinking that last bit may be the title. Or: ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.’”

“Couldn’t he be more specific?”

For a fleeting, agonizing moment Hess was like a dog besieged with thought. Then he said, “Oh. I see. You’re joking.”

Cell 7’s door was unlocked again, and the guard allowed in a prisoner carrying a high-backed chair that might have been a throne. His red-flannel shirtsleeves were rolled up and his biceps bulged like coconuts. His face turned toward Geli as he hauled his heavy load and she saw that he was a black-haired, handsome man in his late twenties, with a boxer’s tightly muscled build, features that seemed Corsican or Greek, and skin that even in jail was ginger brown. She’d never seen such huge, gorgeous chocolate eyes in a full-grown man. Like a fawn’s. “Where does he want it?” he asked.

Hess pointed to the crown of laurel leaves. “Under there.” And then he said, “Emil Maurice. His chauffeur. And this is Fräulein Raubal.”

She held out her hand but stayed seated, afraid that if she stood she’d be taller than he was. Emil Maurice grinned with fractured and jagged teeth and said,
“Je m’appelle Emil. Enchanté.”

“Et moi,”
she replied.
“Je m’appelle Geli.”

“She speaks French!” Emil cried.

“She’ll grow out of it,” Hess said. “She’s young.”

They all heard Hitler shouting. They couldn’t hear the words.

“Won’t he ever
cease?
” Emil asked.

Geli laughed, but Hess was horrified.

In a fair imitation of Hitler’s gestures and voice, Emil held Hess’s face in his hands and said, “Oh, my Rudi! My little Hesserl! Did I offend you?”

Hess flung away his hands, saying, “Quit it!”

Emil smiled at Geli. “We’re tired of each other already, and we have years to go.” Emil flopped into a chair, his knees spread wide, his hands holding the rattan seat in front of his crotch as he stared frankly at the only girl in the fortress.

She was intrigued by him, but embarrassed. She looked at the floor. She heard a squawk from the planking as Emil yanked a free chair next to his own and quietly asked, “Won’t you sit next to me, Geli? We’ll talk.”

“Don’t!” Hess shouted. Whether to Emil or to her she wasn’t sure.

Her face felt hot enough to char paper. She felt afloat on a raft of pleasant wooziness. And then the office door opened and Angela walked out.

“We have to go, Geli,” Angela said.

She got up. Emil winked. “Shall I say good-bye to Uncle Adolf?” she asked.

“We have to go,” Angela said.

Walking outside the fortress, they saw the headlights of the waiting taxi flash on and off. They got in. And when they were on the highway to München and there was only a high horizon of black forest behind them, her mother put a hand on the upholstery beside her, like a purse she could have if she wanted it. Geli tried to find her face, but she was a block of night in nighttime. “We’ll have money for furniture and new clothes,” Angela said. “Others will handle our rent. Paula’s last name shall be Wolf from now on. She’ll have a flat of her own.”

“Why?”

Angela thought for a while, then said, “It is necessary.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

M
ÜNCHEN
, 1925

She visited München
for the first time without Angela in April 1925, going there on a high school outing with a girl’s choir called “Seraphim.” She knew that her uncle had been paroled in December, so as soon as she and a friend, Ingrid von Launitz, got settled into their room at the first-class Königshof Hotel, Geli tried to telephone him at his Thierschstrasse flat, but she found that his number was unlisted. She then boldly decided that she and Ingrid would walk to the flat, thinking that if she failed to find Hitler there she could at least leave a note.

“And if we
do
find him?” Ingrid asked.

“Well, he’ll have to be friendly to us,” Geli said. “He’s a politician.”

They found a druggist’s shop at Thierschstrasse 41, but just above it was a three-story town home where they were greeted by Frau Maria Reichert, a friendly widow whose house it was. She was a hale and heavy woman in her late thirties, and the foyer with its white upright Bechstein piano gave evidence that she had formerly been well off. But she confessed to the girls that she was now a
Mädchen für alles
, a charwoman, and was renting out rooms for an income in these hard times. She told them as she walked to his flat just off the hall that her favorite renter was Geli’s uncle, whom she called “that funny bohemian.” She knocked twice and sweetly called, “Herr Hitler!” then withdrew.

And then there he was. Although it was four in the afternoon, he seemed to have just gotten dressed and shaved, for his starched, collarless white shirt looked like it was just out of its box, he was in purple carpet slippers and freshly pressed blue serge suit pants with leather suspenders, and Geli could smell Chlorodont toothpaste. Ingrid blushed to see the much-talked-about man; Geli stiffly held out her hand and offered him the old Bavarian greeting,
Grüss Gott
, “You greet God.”

Hitler frowned at Ingrid behind her, then focused his irritation on his niece. “And so, is this Fräulein Raubal at my door?” he asked. “What a surprise, your appearing here completely unannounced.”

She heard the formality in his tone and answered, “I do beg your indulgence, Herr Hitler. My friend Fräulein von Launitz and I are here with a singing group from Wien. We thought you’d be offended if we did not at least say hello.”

“Of course,” Hitler said, then looked back at the interior of his flat, found it satisfactory, and invited them in.

The flat was just one long room; his own watercolor sketches of architecture were tacked to the green walls, flaking pages of paint were falling away from the ceiling, and the floor was a worn green linoleum hidden here and there with ugly other-color throw rugs. His headboard obstructed half the window at the far end, and hanging above it was a photograph of his dead mother, Klara, when she’d been just a little older than Geli. The only other furniture was a plain chair and folding table and a tilting bookcase constructed with bricks and unplaned planks with rusty nails still in them.
Was he truly as poor as this?
Geli took it all in, and told her uncle, “This place was never new.”

Hitler was about to object, but then realized she was kidding. She saw he did not take kindly to it. Seeming to see his room for the first time, as she did, he said, “I’m hardly ever here, Fräulein Raubal. And it can be beneficial for a workers’ party to have a leader who seems a little down-at-the-heels.” He held out a box of English toffee to her, but she shook her head. “I have no kitchen. Otherwise I’d heat some tea.”

Hitler shyly offered Ingrid the box of toffee and, far later than other men Geli had seen, finally noticed that the girl was gorgeous. And then he fastened his stunning silver-blue eyes on Ingrid’s, holding her in an unrelenting gaze in which she could do or say nothing. She seemed amazed and bewildered. She flushed and her lips faintly parted, as if she were awaiting a kiss, and only when she fluttered her eyelids with weakness and looked to the floor was she able to catch her breath. Ingrid later told Geli that she was embarrassed to have been so spellbound by him, but she’d never felt such intensity in a stare. Even days later when they were in the railway car heading back to Wien, Ingrid confessed with utter seriousness, “Looking into those eyes of his may have been the greatest moment of my life!”

But Hitler seemed to grow bored with his hold on the girl, and shifted around to his niece. “You said you’re singing here?”

“With our high school group.”

“And what’s its name?”

“Seraphim.”

Her uncle smirked. “My Angelika, with the angels! You’re a soprano?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you singing?”

Ingrid too urgently said, “At Wilhelmsgymnasium, Herr Hitler. With the boys there. Eight o’clock. Won’t you come?”

“But I am so terribly busy tonight,” Hitler whined. “Will you both be singing again?”

Geli told him they would be, at three tomorrow, at the Theatine Church.

“Well, I can’t be seen in a church,” he said. And then his face was nettled with insight. “Oh no, you’re not singing
The Messiah?
”

“Yes.”

“Handel! That Englishman!”

She reminded her uncle that George Frideric Handel had been born in Germany.

“And he was a failure here, wasn’t he? While finding success in Dublin and London. Oh, they know their own.” Hitler shot his sleeve to look at his wristwatch. “I shall not pretend I’m sorry to miss
The Messiah
tonight, but would it be possible to have a little more time with you this afternoon?”

“Certainly,” Geli said.

“Walk with me to my office, will you?”

While he got out of his carpet slippers and put on a hard white collar, Ingrid sidled up to her friend and whispered, “Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

She shrugged, then signified his foolish little mustache by holding a finger beneath her nose. Ingrid giggled and agreed. Geli tilted her head to the left to read the titles in his bookcase: both volumes of
My War Memoirs
by General Erich Ludendorff;
My Life
by the composer Richard Wagner;
On War
by General Carl von Clausewitz; Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s two-volume
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
; Franz Kugler’s biography of Frederick the Great; a collection of heroic myths by someone named Schwab; four volumes of Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
—sober books that her uncle could claim he was reading, if asked. But on the first shelf were books that felt more authentically his: thrillers such as
The Crimson Circle
and
Sanders of the River
by an American named Edgar Wallace; twenty Wild West juveniles by the wildly popular Karl May; erotic picture collections that an Eduard Fuchs had titled
The Illustrated History of Morals
and
The History of Erotic Art
; and a flimsy, worn pamphlet called
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. She heard her uncle ask, “Did your father purchase his title, Fräulein von Launitz?”

She told him, “We inherited it.”

Geli surreptitiously opened
The History of Erotic
Art as her uncle said, “Old wealth, then! Would you like to join the party?” She heard Ingrid giggle.

A bookmark was just above a frightening painting by Franz von Stuck of a beautiful and frankly staring dark-haired female with skin as white as pastry and a face that Geli would have guessed was Jewish. Her hands seemed to be tied behind her back. Easing up between her lewdly opened thighs and undulating around her naked torso was a gigantic sleek black python whose fierce head hung over her shoulder to nestle just above her round left breast. She seemed to be taking dull pleasure in its weight. The title was
Sensuality
. Geli was mystified. Why was this erotic? What did her uncle see that she didn’t? She heard Hitler telling Ingrid about the hikes and picnics the National Socialist German Workers Party organized for the young, for whom life, he knew, was now so boring, but Geli could not shift her gaze from the vexing picture, though it was making her feel a little ill. And then Hitler called, “Er, Fräulein Raubal? Will you tie my tie?”

She closed the book. “You can’t?”

“I have trouble with it.”

She felt his chagrin as if it were catching. “I think I would have had to grow up with a father to know how.”

“I can do it,” Ingrid hurriedly said, and Geli watched closely as her uncle hesitantly offered his throat to her and oddly held his breath as she tied a four-in-hand, flushing with panic when she got one part wrong, and falling back with relief when she finished.

Sheepishly eyeing his niece, he put on a blue serge suit coat, a calf-length black cashmere overcoat, and a black slouch hat that could have had a former life in the Old West.

Geli told him, “You look like a desperado, Herr Hitler.”

Without humor he thanked her for reminding him, and got a handgun from underneath his pillow and slipped it into his overcoat pocket. “I have to worry about assassination all the time,” he told them.

Halfway up Thierschstrasse was the finance office of the Eher Publishing House, and the official party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
(People’s Observer). Walking
there
, Hitler took joy in telling the girls how he took over the weekly with an interest-free loan from Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl of six hundred American dollars, a fortune in Germany then, but shrewdly paid off the loan a few months later with fantastically inflated deutsche marks, “so I got offices, furnishings, Linotype, paper, and two American rotary presses for the price of a peppermint stick.”

“But I thought Putzi was a friend of yours,” Geli said.

Hitler’s face was full of childish wonderment over what the objection could possibly be; then he informed his niece that Herr Hanfstaengl was also a good Nazi. “Willingly, with no regret, a good Nazi gives all he has to his leader.”

And then he held open the front door to the finance office, and followed the girls inside. Geli saw Max Amann hastily put out his cigarette, get up from his cluttered desk, and proudly offer a straight-armed version of the Italian Fascist salute as soon as he saw her uncle stroll in. Hitler’s former sergeant major in the List Regiment, and a graduate of a business college, Amann was a short, gruff, and often irritable man in his thirties with crew-cut hair, a brown inch of mustache that frankly imitated his leader’s—who’d soon order it shaved off—and a face that seemed as hard and cruel as cinderblock. But he softened with adoration whenever Hitler was near. Quickly ignoring the girls, the grinning business manager held out forms and letters for Hitler’s signature and tried to illustrate with a wide green ledger some financial problem that the unofficial publisher ought to be aware of. But Hitler wouldn’t even sit, for a film of dust was on his favorite chair. Everywhere files and papers were heaped and scattered around Amann. An hourglass spider hurried across his hand-cranked adding machine. Everything he touched seemed to have turned into an ashtray.

Hitler sighed as he signed his name twenty times with a Mont Blanc pen, then curtly told Amann that the office stank of tobacco and escorted the girls outside. “Well, that’s done,” he said, as if he’d finished a hard day.

Geli told her uncle that she felt sorry for Amann, that he looked like a hound in a kennel visited only at mealtime.

Hitler laughed. “I’ll have to tell him that.”

“Will he enjoy it?”

Quizzically frowning at her, Hitler said, “
I
will,” as if that were enough.

They strolled farther, to the Schwabing district where on Schellingstrasse, a few blocks from the university, Hitler waved to a short, buoyant man inside the Hoffmann Photography Studio at number 50, then held open the door to the Müller Printing Press, the editorial offices of the
Völkischer Beobachter
.

Putzi Hanfstaengl and a few men in brown shirts stood and offered the Nazi salute when they saw their leader walking inside behind the girls, but it was only Rudolf Hess who also shouted out, “Heil Hitler!” Geli found it puzzling that
Heil
, “well-being” or “salvation,” an old Teutonic salutation that was unfashionable in Austria, was now being associated with her uncle’s name; but he seemed not at all embarrassed by it, and in fact received their Fascist salutes with haughty nonchalance.

“You may sit,” he said, and took off his slouch hat and coat. Looking around he asked, “Where is Herr Rosenberg?”

Hess said, “He just went out for coffee.”

Stamping his foot, Hitler played a child as he wailed, “But wasting time in cafés is my job!”

Everybody laughed too loud and too long.

Hitler turned to his niece. “Have you seen our paper?”

She hadn’t.

Hess handed him an old issue with the headline “Clean Out the Jews Once and for All,” and Hitler held it in front of himself as he fulsomely congratulated Hanfstaengl for thinking up the American format, the slogan beneath the masthead,
Arbeit und Brot
, “Work and Bread,” and for his getting a
Simplicissimus
cartoonist named Schwarzer to design the masthead.
Simplicissimus
, Hitler explained to Ingrid, was a famous satirical magazine with a pronounced hatred of the National Socialist Party, so he thought of Schwarzer’s—and Hanfstaengl’s—contribution as a great victory. The huge Hanfstaengl gracefully bowed to Hitler’s praise, which could not have been new, while Geli saw the forgotten Hess fuming with hurt feelings and anguish.
And now he must do something extra
, Geli thought.

Hess surged forward and told the girls, “We have been thinking about calling the months by their heroic old Germanic names. We would call May
Wonnemonat
, which means ‘month of delight.’ Rather than June, why not
Brachmond
, or ‘fallow moon’? October would be
Gelbhart
, or ‘hard yellow.’ And
Nebelung
, ‘mist,’ for November.”