Hitler's Niece

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Hitler's Niece Page 8

by Ron Hansen


  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 salu
te 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.”

  “I find the idea ridiculous,” Hitler said. “We are a party of the common people, not mystics.” And as Hess’s face fell, Hitler turned to an interior page to show the girls a cartoon he thought hilarious, of a handsome Germanic knight on his steed hauling away from his fortress a squalling, fat priest and an ugly Jew whose nose was as large as a gourd. The knight was ruefully thinking, “Must we always have to deal with these two?”

  The girls looked at each other: Why is that funny? And then Ingrid quietly hinted, “We have to go practice.”

  “What was that?” Hitler asked.

  Geli smiled. “Sotto voce.”

  “But I have so much yet to show you!”

  “I have the morning.”

  “Excellent!” her uncle said.

  Putzi Hanfstaengl grinned and asked, “Are you aware that morning generally comes before noon?”

  But Hitler kissed the girls’ hands and insisted, “You have my word of honor that I will be at the Königshof Hotel for you at nine a.m. tomorrow!”

  Instead Geli was met in the hotel lobby by a shy young man in a trench coat who introduced himself as Herr Julius Schaub, Hitler’s adjutant. A former shipping clerk at the Eher Publishing House, Schaub was a tall, sullen, old-seeming man of twenty-six with slicked-back hair, ears like handles, and staring eyes that he kept focused on the floor as he shook her hand and told her, “My job is to do whatever the leader asks. And he has asked me to give you a tour of München.”

  “But he promised me he would do it himself.”

  Schaub flickered a smile and asked, “Did he swear to God when he said that?”

  “He gave me his word of honor.”

  Schaub shrugged. “It’s the same thing. It means he strongly wishes he could oblige you. He cannot; I can. Shall we go?”

  Hobbling through the lobby and outside, he told her that his feet had been frozen on the Russian front in 1917 and that he’d lost his toes. “You are so young you may not know it, but the German army was undefeated on the field. Yet we lost the war. We were sabotaged by the higher-ups at home.” Schaub considered her jacket. “Are you going to be cold?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t complain then.” He held open the passenger door to an old green Selve automobile. “Your uncle’s old car,” he said. “Herr Hitler is so generous that he gave it outright to me when he got his Mercedes eight-seater from his friends, the Bechsteins.” She sat inside, and he added, “I hope you aren’t bothered by the smell. The front seat is stuffed with seaweed.”

  “In case you get hungry later?”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “I was teasing, Herr Schaub.”

  “You are glib, Fräulein Raubal,” he said as he got in the car, and then he hunted for what he was. “I am—”

  “You are prickly, Herr Schaub.”

  Concentrating hard, he frowned through the windshield and finally pronounced, “I find life a chancy and tragic affair, worthy of serious attention.”

  She smiled. “You can say that while sitting on seaweed?”

  Schaub was so offended he hardly looked at Geli again as he headed to the famous sites in München. “We are called ‘the City of Good Nature,’” he said as he drove. “The Capital of German Art,’ ‘the Athens on the Isar,’ ‘the Moscow of our Movement.’ We are nearing eight hundred thousand people, and less than four thousand Jews.”

  She gave him a strange glance that he ignored. Schaub took her first to the Feldherrnhalle, where, as he put it, “our Nazi martyrs were killed in 1923” and then through the woods and meadows of Englischer Garten, which was “five kilometers long from north to south,” he said, “and the first public park on the Continent.” Then it was the Glaspalast, which housed industrial exhibits and had been constructed by King Maximilian II in imitation of the Crystal Palace in London. There was little to see now at the fairgrounds of Theresienwiese, he told her, but in mid-September it held Oktoberfest, the largest public festival in the world.

  Schaub saw that she wasn’t paying attention, so, just for something to say, he asked if her singing went well, then failed to listen to her reply. At the botanical gardens, he confessed he’d given up cigarettes to please her uncle, but he badly wanted one now, as if she’d brought on that terrible craving. She walked through the huge Cathedral of Our Lady on her own, and when she came out, Schaub had been stewing f
or too long. Getting up from the cold stone steps, he told her, “You have heard of religious zealots, Fräulein Raubal? Well, Adolf Hitler is my religion.” And that was all of his conversation for another hour. Often he simply put on the brakes and with gravity pointed to a building as he named it—the Egyptian Museum, the Pinakothek, the Wittelsbach Residenz—then heavily stepped on the accelerator again. His tour ended northwest of the city at the huge baroque palace and five hundred acres of parkland built by the Wittelsbach royalty at Nymphenburg, where he was as silent as a bodyguard as they strolled through the villa and galleries and around a green lake where children played with sailboats. Taking out his pocket watch, Schaub frowned at the time and said, “I have orders to take you to Maximilianstrasse.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to buy you finer clothes. My leader says you look like a waif.”

  Maximilianstrasse was the high-fashion district and full of the Italian shoes and haute couture dresses she’d seen only in glamour magazines. She was so giddy with the hundreds of choices that she tried on fourteen pairs of shoes while Schaub sighed in the chair beside her, and she later felt him simmering as she finally let a shop-girl decide which of the five elegant gowns she was fretting over she ought to buy as Hitler’s gift. To pay for it, Schaub got money out of a dirty envelope with NSDAP printed on its front, stingily put one bill at a time on the glass countertop, and when he carried the box outside he took off the string and saved it in his trench coat pocket.

  “Well, that was fun,” Geli said.

  “Was it? We are National Socialists, not National Capitalists.”

  “I have been poor all my life, Herr Schaub. My uncle gave you a car.”

  Schaub failed to find a reply until she got into the green Selve again. Then he faced her and with half-throttled misery said, “I have no friends.” And then he turned to start the car.

 

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