by Ron Hansen
The Föhn winds continued, and just after breakfast on September 18th, Geli strolled along the Isar river to Karl Müller’s Public Baths. She was wearing a pearl necklace and a taupe, short-sleeved afternoon dress with saddle shoes. She swam a kilometer and lolled in the pool with Elfi Samthaber, who was astonished to find her friend still in München. She told Elfi there’d been a hitch in her plans, but she expected to be in Austria soon.
The heat was wilting, the gray morning air felt as moist as steam, and the avenues were jammed with cars and tour buses filled with watchful people from elsewhere who were there for the first days of Oktoberfest. She walked to the Hoffmann house in Bogenhausen, but she was not invited inside even when the upstairs maid roused Henny from sleep and she appeared on the porch in a red kimono, with sleep-welted eyes and hair as wild as bramble. Camera cases were behind her in the foyer, and as Henny shut the front door and roosted with Geli on the porch steps, she yawned and said she’d decided not to go along and watch her father photograph the führer in Hamburg.
“Would you like to do something tonight?” Geli asked.
She was told that Henny was going to an Oktoberfest party with Baldur von Schirach.
“And Saturday?” She saw the traffic of fear and pity in her friend’s stare, and she got up. “So, your father’s given you instructions.”
“Others, too,” Henny said. “Weren’t you going to Wien?”
“I still am.”
“You should. I hear they’re all uneasy about you now.”
“Why?”
“I have learned not to ask questions.”
“Maybe I’ll stay in Germany just to be an annoyance.”
“Don’t defy them,” Henny said, and then she noticed a Brownshirt slowly coast past on a bicycle, frankly watching them both, and she disappeared inside the house.
At one o’clock Geli ate a lunch of spaghetti and Chianti in the flat’s dining room and was just finishing when she was joined there by Hitler, who’d returned from the Brown House in his Brownshirt uniform to have Anni Winter gather his things for the weekend. Schaub and Hoffmann, he said, would be coming for him at six.
She asked, “Will you go all the way to Hamburg tonight?”
“Well, at least as far as Leipzig. I hate being rushed before a speech. I make oratory look easy, but it’s not.”
She agreed that it must be difficult.
Scoffing at her sympathy, Hitler turned to the kitchen and shouted, “Frau Reichert! Shall I be here all afternoon?” Then he settled in his chair and sighed as he folded his hands atop his crossed thighs. “I have had such nasty feelings today.”
She told him it was the Föhn. The hot winds unsettled people.
Snidely smiling, he asked, “Where would you be now? Well past Linz? A few hours from Wien?”
She didn’t say.
Maria Reichert hurried in with a tray holding a silver tea service and a full plate of spaghetti and meatless tomato sauce. She reminded Herr Hitler that she was off duty from five that afternoon until Monday morning, but she’d hired a friend, Anna Kirmair, for the Saturday housecleaning. And the Winters would be in for half a day tomorrow to polish the silver and handle the laundry chores.
She was boring him, he told her, and she reddened with embarrassment and went out.
“And what about me?” Geli asked.
Quietly rolling strings of pasta with his fork and spoon, Hitler prematurely smiled at his wit and said, “Oh, you are anything but boring.”
“Will you let me go to Wien?”
“I haven’t decided.”
She stupidly asked how he knew she wouldn’t go while he was gone, and he laughed hugely for a while.
She felt tears of frustration filming her eyes, and hated the fact that it so manifestly gave him satisfaction. She stood in silence and walked to her bedroom. She didn’t slam the door.
And then she found that he’d followed her. Worms of rage were there in his forehead and flames seemed to churn in his stare. “You have made me helpless and pitiful,” he said. “You see that, don’t you? I have fallen in love with you, and you have loathed and rejected me. And yet I am seized by you. I am lost and in ruins. Even now my throat tightens. My heart cracks in two. You cannot destroy Germany in this way.”
“You hate! You destroy! You’ll do to Germany just what you’re doing to me! And I won’t have it anymore!”
He screamed, “My will is your will! Your will is not mine!” And then he slammed her door and the foyer door and thundered down the stairs.
She was solemnly watching at the high window as Hitler’s jackboots strode to his waiting car.
Maria Reichert later reported that she’d heard Geli weeping behind a locked door all afternoon, but Anni Winter said she went to the Drogerie for Zuchooh Creme and Carmol Katarrh-Pastillen. And when she gave it to Anni to add to Hitler’s toiletries kit, she said, “I have no idea why he won’t let me go; I really have nothing at all in common with him.”
Anni later protected the führer by telling an interviewer she’d miserably said, “I have no idea why I can’t let him go; I’m really getting nothing at all from my uncle.” Anni further suggested that Geli was in a funk because of Hitler’s heightened affection for Fräulein Braun, saying she’d found the note from Eva in his jacket as she’d helped Anni pack. She also said she’d gone past Geli’s room just before leaving that evening and had found it locked from the inside. She had been listening to American jazz. Duke Ellington.
Widow Reichert got into a green Bavarian headdress and full-skirted dirndl that choked her waist but plumped up her breasts, and, after shouting the night’s instructions to her deaf old mother, she went off at five to work in one of the giant beer tents of Oktoberfest.
At five-thirty the führer returned again to his flat to bathe and change into a fashionable navy blue suit and a homburg. And when Anni and Georg Winter left the building at six, Julius Schaub and Heinrich Hoffmann were loitering under the gray stone frieze of Wotan at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The fine-boned Haushofmeister was tilting to the right with Hitler’s suitcase, and Schaub took it from him to put it in the trunk of the Mercedes.
Upstairs in her room, Geli was paging through the fashion magazine Die Dame when she heard her uncle hesitate outside her bedroom door and softly knuckle it to offer his farewell. Without shifting on the sofa, she called out, “Will you let me go to Wien?” And she heard Hitler’s heavy stride down the hallway.
She got up to raise the venetian blinds and watch Prinzregentenplatz, and she pushed up the sash on her window farther when she saw her uncle shake Heinrich Hoffmann’s hand and mince his way toward the front-right passenger door that Schaub was holding open. She leaned out on the sill and shouted down, “Will you let me go to Wien?”
Childishly stamping his shoe, he shouted up, “For the last time, no!”
She withdrew from the window and heard him explain, “We have been quarreling.”
She heard Heinrich Hoffmann coolly say, “She’ll get over it.”
Seeking to pacify his niece, Hitler said, “One minute,” and headed inside the building again. And his official photographer followed just in case he needed to intercede.
She greeted the führer at the flat’s door, and softly asked again, “Will you please let me go to Wien?” She chilled as she felt him fondly stroke her cheek, and then she heard him relent and say, “All right, Little Princess. You can go just as soon as I get back.” She smiled. “Au revoir, Uncle Adolf. Au revoir, Herr Hoffmann.”
And then the men left for Hamburg. She shut the foyer door and saw old Frau Dachs in the hallway, haltingly holding out a luncheon tray with a spoon and a bowl of potato soup on it. “Would you like?” she asked.
“I’ll make my own dinner.”
“What?”
With exaggeration, Geli shook her head.
“Well, I’m going to my quarters,” the old woman said. “Don’t stay up too late.”
She strolled on Prinzregentenstrasse in t
he lukewarm zephyrs of the Föhn, buying a chilled brown bottle of Liebfraumilch, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and a waxed-paper funnel of fragrant yellow freesias that she carefully arranged in a Dresden vase and situated on her white dresser next to the framed photograph of her favorite Alsatian, Muck. She took a glass of wine to the foyer and sat on the herringboned oak as she telephoned Elfi Samthaber and genially chatted about the fall fashions she’d seen in Die Dame, promising to call Elfi again on Saturday. Maybe they’d go to the theater. She ate cheese and crackers and listened to Radio Berlin as she painted on nail polish. She leafed through magazines. She went to her desk and got out a sheet of Wedgwood-blue writing paper with “Angelika Raubal” printed on it in English script in the upper-left corner. She began a friendly letter to Ingrid von Launitz. And she was head-down and writing when she heard the shush of the front door opening, then heard it softly chunk closed. She looked at the Longines clock beside her bed. Half-past eleven. She called, “Maria?”
She heard no answer. She got scared.
Whoever it was seemed to be holding himself motionless, as if he were sensing if others were still up. And then he was walking down the hallway. She stared at her door but heard his shoes stride past it on the runner and go into the office. She heard the give of a drawer as he tugged on it, then the harsh grind and thump as his thigh bumped it shut.
“Uncle?” she called.
Stillness. Was he hesitating? Was he checking himself in the mirror? She was still holding her pen. She let it go. She fastened the free buttons of her dress and groomed a wing of hair from her face. And then she saw the brass door handle gently lower and the tall oak door fall open like a page of an old book.
Hitler was stolidly there, still in his fashionable blue suit, hunched forward a little and frowning, his hands behind his back. He looked like a banker who’d sought a theater exit and found himself onstage. His face was white. His forelock had fallen. He seemed full of sentences and huddled emotions. Embers of their argument still flared in the ash.
She asked, “Aren’t you going to Hamburg?”
“We only got as far as Nürnberg,” he said. “We registered in the Deutscher Hof Hotel, and Schaub took me to the railway station.”
“Why?”
Wincing a false smile, he just stared at her for a moment. Knives in his eyes. And then he glanced away and asked, “What are you writing?”
“Just a letter.” And though Geli knew she’d only attract further interest in it, she found herself folding her forearms over the page.
Hitler strolled forward like a skeptical teacher on the hunt for insurrection in his class. “To whom? You have a friend to write to far from here?”
“Ingrid. In Wien.”
She shied from him as he sidled around the desk. His flank familiarly leaned against her, and she gave way. “‘Dear Ingrid,’” Hitler read. He tilted away to try to make out her handwriting without his glasses. And he quoted, “‘When I come to Wien—I hope very soon—we’ll drive together to Semmering an—’”
“‘And’ is where you came in.”
“And what?”
“Have fun,” she said.
“Semmering. The health resort?”
“Yes.”
“I was too poor to visit health resorts when I was twenty-three. Where will you get the money?”
She was not stunned that he’d no longer fund her. She was stunned that she’d failed to consider it.
Eyes shining with tears, he asked, “And what will you tell your friends in Austria about me? Will you also tell Professor Otto Ro that your uncle has been molesting you?”
Of course he’d find out, she thought. She was frightened he’d hit her, but his hands were still behind his back. She quickly said, “I’ll say nothing about you. I promise.”
Saying nothing more, he shifted his right hand from behind his back and laid a gun on the letter, his Walther 6.35, as ugly as sin, her mother would say. Collecting attention. Everything else in the room seemed diminished by it.
“Hold it in your hands,” he said.
She fabricated an offhand tone, full of innocence and what he’d think of as feminine wile as she told him, “I’d rather not.” And then she got up and fitted the chair within the kneehole of the desk. She withdrew from her uncle before sitting on the sofa as she’d seen his favorite movie stars do, her left arm angled high on the sofa back and a hand in her hair, as blithe as a girl on a picnic, her face serene in the sunshine. She nonchalantly asked, “Why the gun?”
Without smiling, he said, “It’s a sex toy.”
She giggled out of sheer nervousness. She felt a change in him, a cold, machinelike subtraction of emotion, as if he himself were the gun. “Will you kiss me good-bye?” he asked.
She was amazed. Had she finally won the argument? Was she going? She grinned. Anything now seemed easy. “Of course.”
She walked toward him and tilted her face as his soft belly jellied against her, and he quickly stabbed his pursed lips against her full, pliant mouth before finding formality again. “And now for this one last time,” he said, “I would like you to excite me.”
She tried not to show her dismay. “How?”
Shifting the weight of the Walther in his right hand, he touched the gun’s cold barrel to the neck of her dress. “Undo it,” he said.
Tentatively she undid the collar and then the two buttons below that.
But he said in his soothing, dog-calming voice, “A little further, Princess. Show me your titties.”
She felt insulted but did as he said, widening the front of her dress around her filled brassiere. His face was cold-blooded as he stared, and she flinched when she felt the chill steel of the Walther handgun drawl over the roundness of each breast as if he were sketching a cartoon, even touching the barrel to the fabric over her right nipple while saying “Bip,” and then her left, saying “Bip” again. He seemed to want her to smile, so she did.
And then his free fist flashed out and hit her face hard. She reeled against the sofa and heard a jangle of bells in her brain, and then a fainter ringing. When she felt her nose, hot blood twined through her fingers, and she knew at once that her nose was broken. She was so shocked she did not scream.
“Look what you made me do,” Hitler said. “Talking about me.” He was shaking the sting from his hand.
She was on her knees and thinking irrationally that she could stanch the blood from soaking her dress if she just found a handkerchief. She wondered if it were possible that her beauty was gone forever. And then she realized that it would not end with this.
His free hand forced her chin up and he frowned with dissatisfaction. “You needn’t worry,” he said. “I won’t remember you like this.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“The Japanese who have betrayed their leaders commit a suicide of honor,” he said. “And now I would like you to kill yourself.”
Wide-eyed, she scrutinized his face in the hope of finding out that he was kidding. But she knew he was not. She cried, “No, Uncle Adolf! No, no! Please!”
Calmly he said, “Aren’t you pathetic. Suicide is just a flash of pain, a fraction of a second, and then there’s nothingness. All problems vanish into the void.”
In fury, she yelled, “Then you do it! Shithead!” Holding her hurting nose she flailed a fist at him, but she felt him catch her hair in one hand and yank her still as he held the Walther pistol just above her heart, then fired down.
She jolted with the force of the bullet slamming through her and saw his hands fly up to his ears to quell the gunshot noise. She fleetingly thought, The canaries, and fell unconscious to the floor.
Worriedly, Hitler looked to the hallway, then reminded himself that only Frau Dachs was still there with them in the flat, and she was deaf. Locking the bedroom door from the inside, he squatted above his niece as if she were horticulture he couldn’t quite name, his hands loose but for the gun, his forearms on his knees, his face fascinated. She was still breathing, but wi
th great effort, a watery sigh as she exhaled, then a faint screaking noise in inhalation, as of an old, unoiled hinge. Leaning farther over, he saw that blood bubbled up from her lung wound as she breathed, staining maroon the front of her taupe afternoon dress. A frail tear formed in Geli’s right eye and trickled down her cheek. Hitler wiped it away with his thumb, then stood, his back aching, and sat heavily on the sofa with the gun still hot between his thighs. She was strong. She was hanging on to life, like his mother. Watching her faint twitching movements, he was sure she was dying. And then he was sure Angelika Raubal was dead, and there was nothing further to do but cry with self-pity for his loss and love and misfortune.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AFTERWARD
Waking at sunrise on September 19th, he realized it was time to act, so he put the gun on a sofa cushion, gingerly stepped around the wide pool of blood, walked out to the hallway telephone, and called Rudolf Hess at home. “I shot my Princess,” Hitler told him.
Shocked out of sleep, Hess was silent for a few seconds, assessing what had been said, and then he asked, “Where are you?”
“In the flat.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
“Am I the first to know?”
“Yes.”
“Wait for me,” Hess said. And he added, “You have done the right thing, my leader.”
Hess got to the flat within twenty minutes, and found that the führer had already awakened Maria Reichert in order to have her make tea. Questioning her in the kitchen, Hess heard that she’d returned from Oktoberfest around two. She’d been beschwipst with drink and had gone straight to bed.