by Michael Dean
‘What’s that?’ she said, nodding at it.
Hitler was still pouting, expecting more praise. ‘It’s a mausoleum,’ he said. ‘A citadel for the dead.’
She held onto the back of her armchair, looking down at him as he put the drawings back in the folder. ‘Which dead?’ she asked.
‘The dead in coming wars.’
‘There ... there will be wars?’
He shrugged. ‘Naturally. The species is in danger. Sacrifices must be made today for the future.’
‘But ... why?’ Her voice was thin, high and frightened. She thought she sounded silly, but he noticed nothing.
He looked at her, blinking behind his glasses. ‘Because life has no other object but the preservation of the species. The life of an individual should not be given high value. The fly lays a million eggs; they all die. But flies survive. What remains alive beyond the individual is the race.’
Ello’s voice was still thin and high. ‘But don’t the deaths ... concern you?’
‘No, no. Conscience is a Jewish invention. It’s a blemish. Like circumcision.’
*
Ello turned on her heel and made her way to Geli’s room, clutching her picture. She shut the door, but there was no key in the lock. It was freezing cold. The room was vividly familiar to her, with its light-green wallpaper and painted antique furniture from Salzburg. There was a thick smell of polish. A bunch of red chrysanthemums, Geli’s favourite flower, were in a simple vase on the bureau.
Anni Winter had obviously been in. Ello’s silver-fox coat was hanging on a hook on the back of the door. The day dress she had asked for from her room was folded on the sofa. Next to it, her silk brassiere and panties with the rosebud pattern and her silk suspender belt were wrapped round her Jean Desprez perfume. Her nightdress had been laid out on the bed. Her toiletries were lined up in rows on top of the hand-painted chest of drawers. Nothing had been put away. Why not?
Ello opened the painted wardrobe. It was still full of Geli’s clothes and shoes. The whiff of camphor was sickening. Ello hastily shut the door. On the painted antique bureau was a bronze bust of Geli.
Ello knew of this bust, though she had never seen it before. It was by the Munich sculptor Ferdinand Liebermann. Hitler had commissioned it after Geli’s death. Geli was shown in profile, fixedly smiling, marcelled hair in a broad metal wave; her neck rising out of the plaster plinth which replaced her body.
And then Ello remembered. Geli’s room was kept as a mausoleum to Hitler’s dead niece. Nothing was ever changed: Geli’s writing paper was still there, on the bureau, with the name Angela Raubal in black English script, at the top left. Next to it, the framed photo of Muck, Hitler’s German shepherd dog. There was a photo of Ello herself, with Henni and Geli, taken on one of the picnics at Lake Tegern.
Ello shivered. No wonder the room was so cold, only Hitler and Anni Winter were ever allowed in, and neither of them stayed long. Frau Winter brought fresh chrysanthemums every day. And of course Geli herself was always there, fixed and unmoving, beautiful but lifeless, just as Hitler wanted her, dead for all time in Liebermann’s bust.
The knock on the door was timid, more of a scrape. Ello assumed it was Frau Winter.
It was Hitler. He was carrying paper and pencil.
‘Ellochen,’ he said. ‘My little Ello. I want to draw you.’
She backed away from him, one arm across her breasts. Frau Winter appeared in the doorway, her flat oily face wreathed in smiles.
‘But, sir,’ she said to Hitler, ‘Can’t you see how tired the poor girl is? Well, mein Führer, my husband has put a hot drink in your room. It will help you sleep.’
She led him unprotestingly away, but quickly came back, alone.
‘My husband forgot to put the key in the lock,’ she said, in a businesslike way. ‘Here it is.’
She inserted it and turned it, to make sure it was still working. ‘Excuse me, my dear Fräulein von Hessert. For this oversight. I will see you in the morning. I have arranged breakfast for seven, madam. And then Schreck will drive you to the university. I don’t imagine Herr Hitler will be up by then.’
‘Thank you, Anni.’
‘Not at all, madam.’ Anni Winter gave a bobbing curtsey and was gone.
Ello strode across the room and locked the door as soon as she left.
Chapter Two
Rüdiger von Hessert was a probationer, the lowest rank on the legal ladder. He was doing the Criminal Law station, as they called it, of his three-year probationary period. Glaser was not one of his supervisors.
Every probationer required a satisfactory political report from each supervisor, before he could move to the next station. Glaser, while widely respected as a lawyer, would never have been entrusted with writing such a report, as he was himself not politically acceptable. It had therefore been easy enough for him to ignore the fresh-faced son of Cajetan von Hessert, Hitler’s paymaster, when he first appeared at Prielmayerstrasse.
But Glaser gradually became intrigued by von Hessert’s less than deferential public references to the Nazis, especially to the Nazi military camp which he had just attended. All law students now had to attend one of these camps for two months before they were admitted as probationers.
Von Hessert’s clear-skinned, small-featured face creased in contempt as he described the lectures: Tactics at the Battle of Sedan, The Stab in the Back, The French Occupation of the Ruhr. ‘So banal, I can’t tell you.’ The rest of the time had been spent on basic drill and competitive games: ‘I have never experienced such utter tedium. And my uniform was of coarse cloth and didn’t fit.’
At the end of his spell at camp, he had refused the privilege of Nazi Party membership. News of that had done the rounds at Prielmayerstrasse pretty rapidly. Glaser reckoned only the family name had allowed von Hessert to pass to the probationer stage at all. He admired the young man for the courage of his stand. Then, for reasons known only to the probationer, frequent unannounced visits to Glaser’s tiny office began.
Glaser’s flinty exterior was resolutely battered by the von Hessert charm: ‘Do call me Rudi, Dr Glaser. My father called me Rüdiger after the hero of the Saga of the Nibelungen. I never felt up to it. I told him I want to be called Hagen, the one who betrays and kills Siegfried. He was so much more interesting.’
Glaser had burst out laughing.
Out of the blue, von Hessert bounced into Glaser’s office yet again in the late afternoon. His black silk lawyer’s gown fluttered, fanning a smell of Yardley’s lavender round the room.
‘Hello, old man.’ That with a cheeky grin. Without waiting for a reply, the imperturbable youth then invited Glaser to meet his older sister that evening: ‘There’s something we want to discuss with you, Dr Glaser.’ It was arrogantly short notice.
There was no question of Glaser setting foot in the von Hessert villa in Karolinenplatz, with its Nazi associations. But he was intrigued by the chance to talk to Geli Raubal’s closest friend. He agreed to after-dinner drinks at Ello’s room, at the university.
*
In comfortable student quarters, Ello von Hessert was laid out on an expensive ottoman, presumably on loan from the family mansion. Her jet-black hair was loose down her back. She was wearing a sleeveless, tiger-stripe lime-and-black dress, cut away steeply at the shoulder. It was riding up her thigh, some way below which there were blue-and-black striped knee socks and red Turkish slippers.
Glaser’s first impression was negative. When Ello finally deigned to look at him at all, she favoured him with a languid blink, all the rage at the moment and known as the Bergner Look, after the film star Elisabeth Bergner. Glaser was a plain man, physically. Under the close-shaven beard, he had a face like a Dutch cheese. And for all his sophistication, he abhorred the stylish, especially in women. He was deeply unimpressed.
‘Wine for Dr Glaser,’ Rüdiger murmured.
The von Hesserts served an outstanding Trollinger – a delicate red. Another mistake. Glaser held it alo
ft, viewing it with suspicion, before taking a sip. It came from vineyards within walking distance of his family’s home. The Glasers knew the owners of the wine company and the cellarman. This far from Swabia, this particular Trollinger was extremely rare. Had the wealthy von Hesserts done this deliberately? Flashy. Too clever by half.
But, not least because of the mellow influence of the wine, he began to relax as the brother and sister told him tales of the Thursday soirées at the Karolinenplatz villa. The driving force was the mother, Elsa. The soirées were held at dusk because Elsa had once had smallpox and avoided bright lights, which showed the scars. The von Hessert parents had taken Hitler up; made him the centrepiece of their gatherings.
‘That was when I first got interested in psychology,’ Ello said, sipping wine, then giving herself a hefty top-up.
The psychologist Hans Prinzhorn had been among the guests. Ello described him, a little wistfully, Glaser thought, as a handsome and accomplished ladykiller. He got the impression Prinzhorn had been her first lover, young though she must have been, at the time.
Prinzhorn, Rüdiger said, taking up the story, compared the paintings and drawings of mental patients and those of artists. Glaser knew that, but he had not read Prinzhorn’s book Image Making by the Mentally Ill. Both von Hesserts had.
Ello had by now abandoned the languid pose. She was sitting up properly – as Glaser thought of it – on the ottoman. Whether still in love with Prinzhorn or not, she was clearly still fascinated by his ideas. She added detail to Rudi’s narrative with smiling charm and enthusiasm. Glaser was impressed – he was something of an intellectual snob. His conversion to admirer of the young von Hesserts was well under way.
So when Ello shyly said, ‘Dr Glaser, Rudi tells me you worked on poor Geli’s case. And that you’re not convinced by Hitler’s alibi,’ he nodded, knocked back more wine and launched into the story of the shooting of Geli Raubal.
‘Hitler’s alibi depended on the time of Geli’s death,’ he said evenly. ‘I suspected the police doctor, Müller, had recorded it as later than it really was. So I prevailed on our pathologist, Dr Bandl, to take some samples.’
Both von Hesserts were listening with total concentration. Glaser continued: ‘Dr Bandl calculated that Geli died anything up to twenty-four hours earlier than the time on her death certificate. At that time, Hitler was still in the apartment. His alibi for the next day is an elaborate charade. And irrelevant.’
‘So Hitler killed her?’ Ello said.
Glaser ran a hand over his beard. ‘I’d be amazed if he didn’t,’ he said.
‘But why?’ Rudi asked. ‘Why would Hitler kill her?’
Glaser’s face was neutral as he replied: ‘Dr Bandl said Geli was pregnant. About two months. My guess is she wanted to leave, and there was a quarrel.’
‘I tell you this, Dr Glaser,’ Ello said. ‘Geli would never, never have committed suicide.’ Ello looked serious. ‘She was such a fun-loving person, you see. Warm, funny. Full of life. And she was very much in love with Emil.’
Rudi shot her a questioning glance, eyebrows raised. ‘You never told me that,’ he said, very much the younger brother, sounding like a child.
‘No. I’m sorry, darling. But it doesn’t matter now, does it?’
*
It was after midnight when Rudi spoke deliberately, showing less effect from the wine than Glaser or Ello. He announced what Glaser felt had been the purpose of the evening all along:
‘Dr Glaser, Hitler has become interested in Ello. He wants ... The young probationer’s face contorted oddly. ‘He wants to defile her.’
Ello started to say something, but Rudi waved her to silence. ‘Dr Glaser, Ello and I think Hitler is a dangerous lunatic. We think he must be stopped,’ he said. ‘We think he must be killed, if necessary. We would like your advice on how to achieve that.’
Chapter Three
The chemistry laboratories at Munich University were five minutes’ walk from the main building, where Ello’s student room was situated. She arrived at five-thirty on a Wednesday, knowing that her contact there would be alone.
‘Grüss Gott, Herr Fritsche.’
She held her hand out wordlessly. Fritsche, in a lab coat slightly too big for him, handed over that month’s supply of ampoules in a brown paper bag. Ello snapped open her black patent-leather handbag, costing the equivalent of three months of Fritsche’s salary, and popped the paper bag inside.
‘I need to do some work here, for a while,’ Ello said easily, as if this were a regular occurrence. It was not.
Fritsche sneered and waited. Ello fished in her handbag again and handed over an envelope. Fritsche opened it. Five twenty-Reichsmark notes. This must be important.
‘Lock up, when you leave,’ he said, handing over a key. ‘I’ll need that key back tomorrow.’
Ello nodded. She waited, concealing her impatience, as Fritsche, with a show of dumb insolence, slowly removed his lab coat and donned a greyjacket. He then languidly gathered his personal belongings – an apple, a novel, a Thermos flask – and put them into a navy duffel bag, which he slung over his shoulder, tightening the drawstring. When he finally strolled out, she let loose a sigh, revealing the tension she had tried so hard to keep from Fritsche’s notice.
She set up the apparatus she needed on one of the wooden workbenches: a Bunsen burner, a retort, a condenser, some filters, a glass jar – not much, the operation was simple enough. She poured some water into a retort and heated it over a Bunsen. The resultant steam was led through the condenser. Just before it boiled, she dropped in greeny-purple deadly-nightshade leaves and roots, gathered from waste ground near the allotments out at Ramersdorf. She let the water reach boiling point, then moved the Bunsen away.
When the distillate had cooled, she filtered it into the glass jar to remove impurities, leaving atropine in what she hoped was reasonably pure state. Just to make sure, she added a few Dr Koester pills she had bought at the local pharmacy, and stirred them in. Not too many, or the strychnine in them would give the game away.
She stared at the result of her work, as a clock on the wall ticked, suddenly loud, in the silent laboratory. She intended to kill her Uncle Dolf, next time he came back to Munich. And with any luck it would look like a cumulative overdose of his regular anti-flatulence medication.
Chapter Four
Hitler returned to Munich from Berlin for his birthday, planning to tour the art ateliers of his beloved City of Art. But before that there was a luncheon at the Prinzregentenplatz apartment. Ello was invited. She had chosen a dress with slit pockets, so she could keep the atropine capsules handy. The capsule form, she thought, would be easier to manipulate than powder.
She arrived at Prinzregentenplatz at noon, calculating, correctly, that Hitler would just have got up. She was concerned at her reception. Her Uncle Dolf had a remarkable facility for completely forgetting anybody who was not actually in his presence. That was why the house staff, people like Schreck and the Winters, who saw him daily, had such great influence, regardless of their function and station in society.
But she needn’t have worried. Hitler’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. She presented her birthday gift to him; a hand-rubbed, calfskin-leather belt, modelled on a British Sam Browne. When he had belted it above his wide hips, she helped him with the strap over the right shoulder of his brown uniform. The intimacy of this manoeuvre was having its effect on him, as she had intended. He was pouting and his mouth was dry.
They sat at the low nest of armchairs, where they had sat that last time, when she had got him to draw for her. And when he had tried to draw her.
‘Shall we have coffee?’ she said. Coffee before anybody else appeared would be perfect. She touched the atropine capsules in her pocket.
‘No, we are eating soon,’ he said absently.
He started to tell her of his routine in Berlin. How at the beginning they had piled files on his desk at the Chancellery for him to read. ‘But I soon stopped that. I’
ve trained them not to bring me every little thing.’
She smiled. ‘Are you still drawing?’
‘Oh yes, yes. Every afternoon.’
*
Then the luncheon guests started to arrive. To her disgust, the first of them was Adolf Ziegler, the President of the Munich Academy. Tall and classically handsome, he was everything she detested in a man. He never took his eyes off the most attractive woman at every gathering; his gaze implying that his selection could be his whenever he gave the word.
He painted female nudes, like the one in front of them in Hitler’s apartment; large-busted, given spurious respectability by their subject – Classical myth. All the naked women appeared to have the same face, and wore expressions of uniform wooden deadness. They were in no way a renaissance of Greek culture, as the Nazis so often claimed. They were representatives of an anonymous, neutral, dead style created by National Socialism.
Ziegler gave a full salute to his Führer, acknowledged by a swatting flap through the air by Hitler. He then smoothly bent over the seated Ello, took her right hand, raised it and stared at it, as if appraising it for auction. He finally planted a lingering kiss in her palm. Ello gave him her sweetest smile, reserved for those males she especially loathed.
Ziegler presented his birthday gift, carried in by a minion. It was a painting, a seascape. Ziegler announced it as Burning Sea by Capri, by Karl Boehme. Hitler appeared pleased by it, leaving it balanced against the wall where he could see it. Ziegler then took over the conversation, discussing the arrangements for the afternoon’s visit to the ateliers. Ello was ignored.
Other lunch guests began to arrive, ushered in by Anni Winter in one of her inevitable floral dresses. There was Hess and his wife, poor Ilse, for whom the word frumpy could have been coined. Her dress, Ello thought, appeared to be on loan from a folkloric museum. Hess, naturally, was in uniform, complete with holstered pistol. The Hesses greeted her cordially.