by Ron Hansen
Quickening his tempo, Hitler heatedly pounded out the final paragraphs of his speech in a rhapsody of words, offering the people food, order, full employment, European supremacy, and a complete end to the confusions and upheavals of democracy. (“I feel the heat of the audience,” he later told Geli, “and when the right time has come, I hurl a flaming javelin that sets the crowd on fire.”) And so he heightened his outrage, forging ahead with rhythmic, pounding sentences, his face as red as blood, his fists clenched, his neck straining, until, in a final orgasm of words, he grandly offered them himself as the messiah of the Germanic people. “I shall be your leader,” he screamed. “And ours shall be the kingdom, and the power, and the glory! Amen!”
With that the four thousand affirmed him in such a giant voice that the hall’s rafters shook. Quickly Hitler saluted his Sturmabteilung, signaling his Brownshirts to link arms and roar out the national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles.” While the exultation was still at its highest pitch, Hitler weakly escaped from the stage, but the hurrahs and singing and banging of tankards continued. And though Geli felt that the priest in his faraway seat was watching her with disappointment and scorn, she joined the others in wildly applauding her uncle. She couldn’t help it. She was enthralled.
Emil Maurice got hold of her hand and hurried Geli down hidden stairs to the outside, where the Mercedes was thrumming, its running lights off, and Julius Schaub was behind the wheel. Waiting in front of it was a taxi. While Emil gave Schaub instructions, Geli opened the passenger door to congratulate Hitler, but was stunned to find he’d fallen asleep, his mouth hanging open as if he’d been slain. His gray suit coat was off and his white shirt was so wet with sweat that she could see through it. And the odor was hideous, like a hellish whiff of skunk and offal. Geli held a hand over her nose and mouth as she shut the door.
Emil smiled. “We’ll go in the taxi.”
She heard the thousands still singing as she got in the backseat with Emil and he leaned forward to give the taxi driver an address in the fashionable district of Bogenhausen. When Emil sat back, his right knee widened against hers and did not withdraw. “Were you amazed by the talk?” he asked.
She was. “Mesmerized.”
“Exactly. Max Amann was his first sergeant, and he says Hitler was quite an oddity in the trenches. ‘The White Crow,’ they called him. Constantly serious. Didn’t drink or smoke. Wasn’t interested in women. Took duty at Christmas so he wouldn’t have to join in the festivities. Even then, though, he could talk politics for hours. ‘Spinning,’ Amann called it. You look at his writing and it’s not very good. Dull; hard to read. Ugly grammar and misspelled words…”
Exiting traffic from the Hofbräuhaus was tying up the street. Emil hunched forward to give the taxi driver instructions before familiarly sitting back against her thigh and finding his train of thought. “But when Hitler speaks, it’s hypnotic,” he said. “You have no will of your own. Only his. You forget to think. You give up your liberty. You submit. And you find the faith you lost. Hear him once and you become a friend of the party. Hear him twice and you become a fanatic.” Emil grinned like a boy as he said, “Won’t Germany be glorious when Hitler’s in charge?”
She only felt his thigh firmly against hers. She agreed by nodding. Emil watched as the taxi got onto Maximilianstrasse and headed east toward the Isar.
“We’re going to the house of Herr Heinrich Hoffmann,” Emil said. “We’re having a birthday party for Hitler now because he’ll be in Hamburg on April twentieth.”
“I ought to know this, but how old will he be?”
“Thirty-six. And you?”
Geli thought about trying twenty, but admitted, “I’ll be seventeen in June.”
Emil took that in like a factor that he hadn’t considered, then focused on Geli so intently she lost the rhythm of her breathing. “I often go out with girls that age.” And then he turned away, saying, “Your uncle, too. Old ladies and girls.”
She was aching with questions about Emil’s girlfriends, about Hitler’s, but figured they were all too invasive, and she knew men were often chary with their thoughts. She silently watched the city streets until the taxi turned left onto Ismaningerstrasse. She then asked, “Whose house is it?”
“Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler’s official photographer. And his wife, of course. Also there’s a little boy named Heinrich, and a sassy daughter, Henrietta. She’s thirteen.”
Wryly she asked, “And you often go out with girls that age?”
“Even I have limits.”
She smiled. “At least it’s a beginning.”
Within a few minutes they were on a leafy street lined with cars, and halting in front of a magnificent house that seemed to have forty windows filled with light.
Enormous numbers of cakes, candies, and birthday presents were on an intricately carved table in the grand entrance hall. Many inside the side parlors wore dinner jackets and the finest dresses and jewels. All the Brownshirts were absent. Waiters in old Bavarian livery were offering trays of canapés and champagne. Emil felt out of his element, so he took Geli to Herr Hanfstaengl, who was finally in his. Putzi got her a tulip glass of champagne and then she was overwhelmed with names and titles as he gaily introduced her as “Hitler’s niece” to his beautiful blond wife, Helene; and to a socialite named Gertrud von Seydlitz; the former wife of Olaf Gul-bransson, a cartoonist; Frau Hoffmann, the harried and heavily jeweled hostess, who had a little boy on her hip; and Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, a stern man with a gray mustache and a pince-nez. She met a factory owner’s widow, Frau Wachenfeld-Winter, from whom her uncle was going to rent an Alpine house near Berchtesgaden, and her wealthy neighbors there: Edwin Bechstein, of the Berlin piano company, and his wife, Helene, who, though she was little more than ten years older than Adolf, gladly called herself “Hitler’s mommy.”
Putzi then took Geli to a red parlor where she met Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, editor of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, who was talking to William Bayard Hale, an American classmate of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton and a retired European correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. Emil Gansser of the firm Siemens & Halske in Berlin gave Geli his card; Joseph Fuess and his wife invited Geli to their jewelry shop in the Corneliusstrasse; and Jakob Werlin, the München representative of the Daimler Works in Stuttgart-Untertürckheim, who told Geli that her uncle’s custom-made Mercedes must have cost twenty thousand marks. And then there were Frau von Kaulbach, the stout widow of the acclaimed Bavarian painter; a sitting and quietly inebriated Prince Henckel-Donners-marck; a flirtatious railway official at the east station named Lauböck; Quirin Diestl and his wife, who owned a stationery shop near the Regina Hotel; Frau Elsa Bruckmann, who was the former Princess Cantacuzène of Rumania and the wife of the foremost publisher in München; and Erich Ludendorff’s far younger second wife, Frau Doktor Mathilde Spiess Ludendorff, who magisterially proclaimed her hatred for Jewry and Christianity, and was going on and on about a new German religion that she and her husband were founding, and that had its origins in the old pagan Nordic gods.
Walking away from them, Putzi slyly told Geli, “The Frau Doktor’s specialty is mental diseases.”
Geli smiled. “It probably helps to have had so many herself.”
“Hah!” he said. “Precisely what I was thinking.”
Another voice said, “And now I shall quiz you on all the names.”
She turned and found a jovial, blond man of forty in a tuxedo, a few inches shorter than she was, his face flushed with alcohol, his wide shoulders slanting left off a twisted spine. “You are Herr Hoffmann,” she said.
“You knew!”
“The host always has an air about him.”
Ebulliently he said, “So sorry. I shall have all the windows opened at once.”
Hanfstaengl begged Geli’s forgiveness for leaving, kissed her right hand, and was gone.
She told Hoffmann, “My girlfriend and I saw you yesterday on Schellingstrasse, inside your photography s
hop.”
“Was that you with Herr Hitler!”
A pretty and fairly tipsy girl of thirteen slinked up in a quite adult fitted evening gown and linked her arm inside her father’s as she kissed him on the cheek. She wore pink lipstick on her pouting mouth; her chestnut-brown hair was in a chignon. She looked like the high school girls of Paris, flat-chested but soigné and athletic, willfully alluring, with the fretful expression of the frequently disappointed. Hoffmann introduced the girl as “My daughter, Henrietta,” but she put out her hand and said, “I’m Henny.”
“Geli Raubal,” she said as she shook the offered hand, and when she saw the girl’s puzzlement, Geli added, “Hitler’s niece.”
“Interesting,” Henny said, as if that indeed was. She took in Geli from shoes to hair and tilted into her father as she said, “You have beautiful breasts.”
Geli just blushed and said, “Thank you.”
Hoffmann hastened to say, “My dear frank child did not mean to embarrass you, Fräulein Raubal. She was raised among models and actresses.”
“Don’t you think?” Henny asked him.
“It’s true, of course,” Hoffmann said. And then he steered their conversation toward Geli’s views of München.
“I haven’t seen much, just what I could on a short tour today.”
“Who took you?” Hoffman asked.
“Herr Julius Schaub.”
Henny said, “Not much of a talker, is he.”
“Herr Schaub’s idea of good communication is to stare at feet other than his own.”
Henny and her father laughed so loudly that others at the party quizzically turned. “Aren’t you delightful,” he said. “We must get to know each other.” With that he got another glass of champagne for himself and guided Geli into his library as Henny tagged along behind them. And then he did all the talking, first showing Geli his book of photos, A Year of Revolution in Bavaria, then the King Gustav of Sweden gold medal he’d won at the Malmö exhibit, the Great Silver Medal of Bulgaria, and other awards he’d been given for progress in the art of photography. While doing so he told her that his father had been court photographer to King Ludwig III, and so he’d naturally fallen into the job and become a war photographer on the western front. Afterward, with the troubles in the Weimar Republic, he’d sold his photography studio for what he’d thought was a fantastic price, “but the nation’s purchasing power so declined that when the first half of the debt was paid, all I could buy with it was a reflex camera. And by the time I got the second half, it was not sufficient for even six eggs.” Two friends and he had formed a company to make a silent film comedy about a hairdresser whose homemade potion put great manes on bald heads until the hairdresser’s assistant—unfortunately played by no Charlie Chaplin—caused much to go awry. “Germany did not find it funny.” While living a hand-to-mouth existence, he had joined the Nazi Party, with membership card number 427, and soon thereafter was sent a telegram from an American agency offering one hundred dollars for a photo of Adolf Hitler, a fortune then. And he’d found out that there were hundreds of others seeking photos of the famous man, of which there were none at the time.
Henny was slumped on a sofa, her forearms folded, her shoeless feet up on a coffee table. Wearily, she said, “To make a long story short—”
Hoffmann sighed. “Children have no patience. In hasty conclusion, I obtained the leader’s trust and got a photograph of Adolf Hitler on my big thirteen-by-eighteen Nettel camera. And would you believe I sold the negative internationally for twenty thousand dollars?”
“You can buy all the eggs you want now,” Geli said, and the girl on the sofa giggled.
“And that is why I am celebrating your uncle’s birthday. I owe all I have to him. Everything. I have been his only photographer since 1923. All others who try have their plates smashed by the SA. And it is my monopoly—to say nothing of Herr Hitler’s kindness—that has furnished my family with this house, our servants, my Daimler and Opel, my Berlin pied-à-terre at the Kaiserhof Hotel.”
Emil stood in the doorway of the library and said, “He’s here.”
Henny shot up and scurried out with her father. Emil waited for Geli to join him. All the partygoers were happily crushed around the grand entrance hall and cheering as Hitler trudged up the stairway, rings of tiredness under his eyes, in a formal black tailcoat, starched shirt, bow tie, and patent leather shoes.
Emil pointed out to Geli a glowing film actress from Berlin who was flaunting her body in the sheerest of gowns. Willingly a gift. “We’ve put together a surprise for him,” Emil whispered.
When Hitler entered the hall, the partygoers wildly yelled, “Happy birthday,” and he smiled, oh so briefly showing his square brown teeth, but then the film actress rushed forward and kissed him full on the mouth as people hooted and whistled and called out jokes. Hitler only stiffened at the laughter and frightened the actress with his glare, and when she shyly retreated from him, his face was white with rage. A cold stillness fell over the house as he sternly evaluated his well-wishers, then turned around and stormed out.
Without him, the party ended.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HAUS WACHENFELD, 1927
Adolf Hitler first became acquainted with the Obersalzberg region of Germany when he vacationed at the Pension Moritz in August 1922, registering as Herr Wolf. Doktor Sigmund Freud and the Austrian playwright Doktor Arthur Schnitzler were also staying there, but he knew them to be Jews and failed to introduce himself. Even in summer the Alpine air was as pure as fresh snow and he would pace the balcony late at night inhaling it until his chest ached. Salt that was mined in nearby Berchtesgaden was generally thought to be so health-giving that he gave himself long, hot footbaths in it just before bed at night and again in the morning when he hungrily scanned the papers for news of himself. Hiking up the northern slope of the Hoher Goll for a solitary noon picnic, he could see green farmlands and white stone villages far below, the sandstone tints of Salzburg twenty kilometers to the north, the jagged slate-gray peaks of the massive Untersberg and Watzmann mountains, the Wittelsbach palace where Crown Prince Rupprecht lived in Berchtesgaden, and, farther west and south, the azure waters of the great Königssee.
The village of Obersalzberg held a post office and fire department, horse stables, a ski lift, a Dresden pensioners’ club, a naval officers’ club, the Seitz Children’s Sanatorium, six inns, twenty private homes, and eleven luxurious villas, including two owned by Hitler’s wealthy patrons, Edwin and Helene Bechstein. Often dining with them when they were skiing in the winter or hiking in the summer, he talked about renting a home for himself there, and it was they who had found him the so-called Kampfhäusl, a one-room plank-sided cabin where he’d finished the first volume of Mein Kampf after his release from Landsberg fortress in 1924. The Bechsteins had recommended Sonnen-Köpfl to him when they’d heard that Frau Maria Cornelius was willing to sell, but Hitler hated sunshine on his face and the villa had been built to invite it. And they themselves were not yet willing to part with Weissenlehen, their home just across the road.
At last Hitler heard that Margarethe Wachenfeld-Winter, the industrialist’s widow, would be renting out Haus Wachenfeld for one hundred reichsmarks a month. High up Kelstein Mountain, at an elevation of nine hundred meters, the chalet had been built in 1916 and had three upstairs bedrooms, one upstairs bathroom, a dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and sunroom on the first floor, and travel poster panoramas from every window. It was only a four-minute hike through woods to the Hotel zum Türken, so friends and aides in the party could stay there, and only a few minutes farther along the winding road that fronted the house was the Gasthaus Steiner, where they served Wiener schnitzel and Hungarian goulash just the way he liked them. Although Frau Winter would not sell it to him until 1931, Hitler fully intended to own the chalet from the instant he first saw it. Within hours of signing the lease, Hitler was moving in.
Doktor Karl Lüger, the former mayor of Wien and the publisher of Das Deut
sche Volksblatt—a prewar newspaper that fascinated Hitler with its erotic pictures and tales of the international Jewish conspiracy—had lived all his life in a household run by his two older sisters, and Hitler sought to imitate Lüger’s sham of respectability by having Angela and Geli handle the chores of Haus Wachenfeld for him. Offering his half-sister full-time pay for far less work, and in a fashionable Alpine resort, Hitler also offered to furnish the funds for Leo to finish his studies at the Universität von Wien, and to rent a flat for his niece in München, less than two hundred kilometers to the north, so she could enroll in the university there.
Angela agreed to the offers and arrived in Obersalzberg in March 1927. Geli arrived in June, after her nineteenth birthday, and after she’d completed her gymnasium studies and received her Abitur.
Angela rushed out to greet her when Julius Schaub drove Geli up from the Salzburg railway station. They hugged and linked arms to walk the grounds, and Geli fell in love with Haus Wachenfeld, just as her uncle had. The first-floor exterior was white stucco, with red-shuttered windows. A balcony railed with white flower boxes was on all four sides of the chalet’s wood-sided second floor, and heavy stones and lath had been laid on the wide, overhanging roof to hold fast the wooden shingles in high winds. East of the chalet there was a fenced-in vegetable garden that tilted on the hill just above the road of crushed pebbles that gave access to the underground garage. West of the chalet was a wide, slate terrace with striped canvas lawn chairs; to the north was another terrace with white-enameled café tables and chairs and with a huge red-and-black Nazi banner hanging from a mast. Clouds would often float like a soft mist while they sat there, but on that first day the weather was so fine that Geli could squint her eyes from the sun and just make out the tall white Cross on the highest peak of the faraway Untersberg.