by Ron Hansen
Seeming exhausted, Hitler slumped back into her father’s chair and sipped his heavily sugared tea, waiting for his niece to respond, but she didn’t know what to say. She thought she’d failed to understand him, for his story seemed full of awfulness softly rendered, but his face was pink with vibrancy and his freakishly pale eyes were finely tuned on hers.
“We used to read about the battles in school,” she said. “It was horrible. The girls used to cry.”
Hitler held his stare for an uncomfortable minute more. She worried that he was trying to read her mind. And then slowly, like a man just getting used to his body, he curled to his left to gently put his Dresden teacup and saucer down on a shined side table, the clack as faint as when good teeth meet.
“Another time I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades,” he said. “Suddenly I seemed to hear a voice saying to me, ‘Get up and go over there.’ It was so clear and so insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it were just another military order. At once I got to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying with me my fork and my dinner in its tin can. I found a shell box and sat down on it to go on eating, my busy mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and a deafening boom came from the part of the trench I had just left. A shell had detonated over the friends I’d just been with. All of them were killed.”
“We’re so glad you’re still alive,” she said.
Leo rushed into the flat with the rolls and flinched when he saw Geli alone with their uncle. “Wait for me, Uncle Adolf,” he said. “Don’t tell her anything more.” But when he took the rolls into the kitchen, Angela told him to get changed for dinner. Walking down the hallway, Leo called, “Two minutes!”
Confidentially, Hitler leaned forward and told his niece one more story. “October,” he said, “1918.” In Belgium, near Werwick, his infantry regiment, filled to overflowing with defeatists and pessimists and future deserters, had been attacked by British artillery with a poison called mustard gas and his regiment was forced to retreat. Hitler had lost his voice and his face had swelled like a penny balloon until he was blinded. At a hospital in Pasewalk just outside Berlin, he’d heard the news of Germany’s surrender in the forest of Compiègne, and his heart had ached as it had only once before, after his mother had died in the agony of cancer. Would he ever see again? The question was no longer that. The question was: Would his beloved motherland die as his mother had?
At that point Uncle Adolf placed a surprisingly damp hand on her knee as he said, “But, Angelika, as I was lying on my cot that night—and you must picture it: frightened, confused, full of hatred, in the blackest state of despair—a miracle came to pass! Like Joan of Arc, I heard voices. Each one crying out, ’Save Germany!’”
Geli giggled, for she thought he was kidding, but his face was serious and his eyes were aflame with fury. She thought for a second that he might strike her.
But he controlled his emotions and calmly said, “To be sure, it’s peculiar. Quite out of the ordinary. But you see, when I opened my eyes, I was no longer blind! And I vowed then and there that I would become a politician and offer my life in the hope of changing Germany’s fate.”
“A politician?” she asked. She thought they were all aristocrats. She felt his hand staying on her knee. Would he waggle it as he did when he was teasing?
“You see what these stories have in common? I am a child of providence, Fräulein Raubal.” He released his hand and smiled. “You will hear much about me. Just wait until my time comes.”
Adolf failed to offer Angela money for food though his soldier’s pay had accrued to a tidy sum on the front and the Raubals’ poverty was as obvious as the canning jars they used for glassware. And yet she made him such a feast that even Adolf noticed, he who was like an infant in his alertness only to himself. Tucking a napkin at his throat and fanning it over his medals and ribbons, he smiled at a dining table filled with Tyrolean dumplings on sauerkraut, red beets in a horseradish cream, and four squabs on a bed of celery stalks and onions. And he said, “Such prodigality, Angela! Where is the fatted calf?”
“Well, it’s not like we often see you, Corporal Hitler.”
A fierce glare was flung at Angela, but then it softened as Hitler chose to pinion a squab with his fork and vulgarly dump it onto his dinner plate. And then he sawed so hard at the fowl with his knife that the flames trembled on their candlewicks. Would he be sucking his fingers next? Angela thought. The Raubals just stared, until with a strictness and confidence worthy of his father, Hitler said without lifting his gaze, “Everybody, begin.”
Eating did not halt his talking. Only his listening seemed affected. Inquiry about Angela’s or Paula’s jobs, other opinions, or the children’s hobbies and schools never occurred to him as he told the Raubals and his sister that for a while he had served as a fence guard in a prisoners-of-war camp, near Traunstein, on the Austrian border. But higher-ups had become aware of his perspicacity and loyalty to Germany, even if it was now a republic headed by Jews, and he had been sent back to München to confirm the fidelity of Reichswehr soldiers by spying on the fifty or more organizations of Communists, Anarchists, Socialists, Centrists, even the Bavarian Royal party—politics being one of the few industries that flourished in postwar Germany. Technically an education officer, he had taken courses in propaganda and politics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, where he’d been fortunate in that all the lecturers were, like him, nationalists, anti-Left, and anticlerical; and he could now say with certainty that four years of war had been the equivalent of thirty years in a university. “I have a doctorate in sorrow, a doctorate in treachery, and a doctorate in the ways of the world. I have no use for whatever subject is not included in those.”
Hitler told them he was now a proud member of the “Instruction Commando,” and regularly giving talks to Reichswehr soldiers on “The Conditions of Peace and Reconstruction” and “Social and Economic-Political Slogans,” which were meant to ignite their German patriotism. And he had heard many compliments from his audience, who called his talks “spirited” and hailed him as “a born popular speaker.”
Paula bluntly said, “You think you got all the talent in the family.”
Adolf ignored The Straggler and turned to Angela. “But I have no talent in cooking,” he said. “My older sister got all that.”
“Wasn’t I the lucky one,” Angela said, and rose to collect the dinner plates. And Hitler was talking again. Angela saw that Paula was openly yawning, Geli’s chin was on her fist as she dully fiddled with her fork, and Leo was staring wide-eyed at his uncle, as if thunderstruck by Hitler’s ability to take such pleasure in himself while offering only boredom to others. Angela bent to kiss her son’s head and thought, You all are also a fortune that Adolf is squandering.
Waking at noon on Saturday in Angela’s room, Hitler was astonished to find no one but Geli still in the flat. Angela and Paula were at work—he was not interested enough to ask where—and Leo was at soccer practice in the Wurstelprater park. Geli watched him dither for an hour, sitting and getting up again, hunting for food in the icebox, agitatedly stalking by the front windows, holding up framed photographs of distant family that he frowned at—having forgotten their names—and noisily put down.
Geli asked, “Was there something you wanted to do, Uncle?”
“Something important,” he said, and turned to her. “But I suppose I can’t abandon you here.”
She did not say that she was eleven years old and often alone in the flat. She instead connived to be with him by saying, “You could take me.”
And so he did. Hitler did not tell his niece where they were going, he just strolled gracefully ahead of Geli up Rotenturmstrasse to Sankt Stephansplatz, dourly accepting the praise of Austrians who tipped their hats to his Iron Cross. Geli wore a favorite navy blue sailor dress, with a blue bow and grosgrain ribbon in her lilting, light brown hair, and she thought she looked pretty, but Hitler’s far-off stare failed
to find her. She tried to hold his hand, but he withdrew it. At times she was forced to skip to keep up. When he turned onto Spiegelgasse, she asked him, “Are we going to the Hofburg?”
“Well, not all of it, of course. Only the Schatzkammer. Have you been there?”
She shook her head.
“Shocking,” Hitler said. And then he confided that he’d found a dear friend in the Thule Society, an occult group of deep thinkers in München. They’d taken the name “Thule” from a long-forgotten island in the North Atlantic between Scandinavia and Greenland that had been the origin of Nordic civilization and of a master race of blond, blue-eyed vegetarians. The friend he’d found had told him he must visit the Schatzkammer.
She worried about the odd interests of males. She asked, “Was it a boy friend or a girl friend?”
Hitler halted at the insinuation he heard, then understood her. The friend, he said, was Dietrich Eckart, a poet, a playwright, and the editor of the anti-Semitic, anti-Republican, anti-Bolshevik weekly Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German). “We are seeking together a national messiah.”
And then they were at the Hofburg, the common name for the Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was now in foundering pieces. The Weltliche Schatzkammer was a treasury within the palace, and was filled with crowns, scepters, jeweled ornaments, weighty robes, and the other fineries of majesty. But as Geli walked the aisles of the museum with her uncle, she got the impression that Hitler was disgusted by either the wild extravagance of royal wealth or by the hundreds of Czechs, Hungarians, Croatians, and Jews who were crowding around the displays, for he did little beside frown and fan imagined odors from his face until they got to the official crown of the Habsburg emperors. Then he hoisted Geli up higher so she could see the rubies and sapphires on it as he told her, “Everything wrong with Austria begins here. Who could remain a faithful subject of the House of Habsburg when they chose as their insignia the crown of Bohemia rather than the magnificent crown of the German emperors?”
She said, “Uncle, I don’t understand why you wanted to come here.”
And he put her down. “You will.” Walking on, he furiously sidestepped through an official party of foreigners, hurried past a few more exhibits, and then halted in front of a glass case on which was a sign that read: HEILIGE LANZE. Lying on red velvet behind the glass was a leather case and within it was a hammered iron spearhead, blackened by age, a nail tied to it with gold, silver, and copper wires.
“What is it?” Geli asked.
Hitler would say nothing. He folded his arms and stared in a funereal way, as if right then he could tolerate only his own thinking.
The girl found a hand-printed placard that stated that many considered the Heilige Lanze to be the Spear of Longinus, reputedly used by the Roman centurion to thrust into the side of Jesus as he died at the Crucifixion. A nail thought to be from the Cross had been attached to it in the thirteenth century. Otto the Great had once owned the lance, but he was just one of forty-five emperors who’d taken possession of it between Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome and the fall of the old German Empire one thousand years later. Each had believed in the legend that whoever held the spear held the destiny of the world in his hands.
“Are you interested in history?” Geli asked.
“In power,” he said, and then he stood there in silence, shaking; and he stayed that way, lost to his niece, until the Schatzkammer closed an hour later.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE BEER HALL PUTSCH, 1923
Months passed, and then the Raubals got a letter from Lance Corporal Hitler telling them that he was enrolled on the staff of the “Press and Information Bureau” of the Seventh Army District Command, and working for a Captain Ernst Röhm. And they’d become such fast friends that each was soon calling the other by the familiar “Du,” which had helped Adolf to achieve some useful importance among the officer corps.
One night at the Brennessel Wine Cellar, Röhm and Dietrich Eckart, the famous translator of Peer Gynt and “a co-warrior against Jerusalem,” had invited him to join the forty members of the German Workers’ Party, saying they needed a good public speaker like him who was also a bachelor—“so we’ll get the women”—who was shrewd in politics and firm in his convictions, was not an officer or an intellectual or in the upper class, and who’d proven he could face gunfire, for the Communists would try to kill him.
At first Hitler had been unimpressed by the faltering party—it was “like a high school debating society,” he wrote in his memoirs, and “club life of the worst sort”—but the High Command thought it offered a good defense against the antimilitary and antinationalist sentiments of the working classes, and the Command had promised him all the financial support he would need. And so he’d become a member and was now chief of propaganda, with his own Adler typewriter and with former sergeant Max Amann as his business manager in a “funeral vault of an office” in the Sterneckerbräu beer hall on the Herrenstrasse. With Röhm’s help, theirs was now a party of soldiers, he wrote Angela, and often one could see whole Reichswehr companies marching through the streets in civilian clothes, hunting down and bloodying those he called “Germany’s enemies,” by which he meant Bolsheviks, Weimar Republicans, and Jews.
A few weeks ago, he wrote, in the great feast hall of the Hofbräuhaus, he’d talked heatedly for two and a half hours to a hostile audience of about two thousand Communists and Socialists. But they hated the ineffectual Weimar Republic as much as he did, if for different reasons, and by the time he’d finished there was frenzied applause for whatever he said. “Walking away from that meeting,” he wrote the Raubals, “my heart burst with joy, for I knew a great and fearsome wolf had been born, one who was destined to rage against that flock who were the pitiful seducers of the people.”
The Raubals received another letter in July 1921, informing them that he was now a private citizen and was renting a flat above a drugstore at Thierschstrasse 41, not far from the Isar river. On his insistence, his organization was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but was primarily known by an acronym formed from the first and sixth syllables, Nazi, which was, he told the Raubals, Bavarian slang for “buddy,” for, “We are friends of the common man.” It was he who had designed their blood-red flag with the black Old World peace symbol of the hooked cross or swastika, now reversed on a white field in order to represent chaos and conflict, “for we are at war.”
Within the last year, he wrote, he’d been the featured speaker at eighty mass meetings, harping on the financial collapse under their Jewish-Marxist government in Berlin and arguing for a change to a “patriotic dictatorship.” It was he alone who had been responsible for the burgeoning growth in the party’s membership to three thousand people, and yet the founders feared his prominence and the influx of so many full-throated former soldiers into their meetings, and had sought to enfeeble his influence by an alliance with a socialist group in Augsburg. “Hearing of that, I faced them down by offering to quit. Without me, they knew there was no future for them, and so they went the other way.” In fact, in a fulsome letter the party had noted his great successes, his cunning, his sacrifice, and his “unusual oratorical abilities” and had offered to make him its first chairman, dispensing with further parliamentary debates and the confusions of democracy. And so he was now called its führer, its imperious and omnipotent leader. Which was, of course, as it should be.
“And he asks how we are,” Angela said, folding up his letter.
Leo smirked. “And says how much he misses us?”
“That isn’t funny,” Geli said.
Their mother said, “Adolf is so busy, he just forgets about others.”
“But isn’t it nice that he’s doing so well,” Paula said. “With no skills or education.”
Leo’s uncle mailed the high school boy a flyer announcing the party’s gymnastic and sports division, which offered su
ch things as boxing, hiking, and soccer games to its youthful members, and harnessed their strength “as an offensive force at the disposal of the movement.” At the bottom of the flyer in Hitler’s own handwriting was “Are you interested?”, along with the notation that the name had just been changed to Sturmabteilung (SA), or Storm Detachment. The feisty young men in the SA, he wrote, were being given uniforms of Norwegian ski caps and brown shirts and swastika armbands to “infuse them with feelings of solidarity and discipline.” Captain Ernst Röhm was their commander, and “he thinks of them as his private army, though their allegiance is solely to me.”
Leo Raubal was, in fact, interested in the Sturmabteilung, but primarily because he wanted a father so badly and because his famous uncle finally seemed interested in him. Working after school and on weekends, Leo saved enough money to purchase a railway ticket to München for the first Reich Party Day of the NSDAP on January 27, 1923.
The Ruhr Valley, which was Germany’s foremost manufacturing and mining region, had just been invaded by one hundred thousand French and Belgian troops on the pretense that Germany had failed to fulfill the outrageous obligations of the Versailles Treaty in its huge shipments of coal and timber. Angry Germans were fighting back through strikes, massive demonstrations, passive resistance, and sabotage, and as a consequence the Rentenmark lost such value in the world market that in a few weeks it fell from the already inflated seven thousand marks to the dollar to almost fifty thousand to the dollar. Within eight months the Rentenmark would be practically worthless at one hundred thirty billion to the dollar. Currency values were changing so frequently that factory workers tossed their wages to their wives as soon they were paid so the women could hurry off and buy groceries before prices went up again. The Weimar government was forced to use forty-nine office boys carrying huge wastepaper baskets filled with notes just to pay a railway bill. Children stayed indoors because they had no stockings. Coal was so precious that houses went unheated. There was epidemic unemployment, chronic hunger and illness, chaos in the streets, nihilism and purposelessness, and of all the chancellors, industrialists, generals, and quarreling politicians who spoke for the foundering Reich, only Adolf Hitler seemed as personally offended as the people, and the National Socialists achieved greater esteem the more he furiously protested Germany’s avalanche of misery.