by Ron Hansen
And yet he did marry Eva Braun in the map room of the bunker just before midnight on April 28th. She was wearing a black silk taffeta gown. A city official heard them swear they were of pure Aryan descent and free of any hereditary disease, and as quickly as that it was done. Afterward Hitler drank Tokay and joked with Joseph and Magda Goebbels about happier times while Eva sent for the phonograph and “Red Roses,” the only record down there. Officers danced with the cooks and the secretaries. Eva and the others dared, for once, to smoke. At four in the morning Hitler signed his last will and political testament, in which he distributed his holdings and property, denounced Reichsführer Himmler and Reichsmarschall Göring because of their rumored overtures of surrender, claimed the Luftwaffe, the army, and the SS had all betrayed him, and congratulated himself for his part in the annihilation of international Jewry while counseling other nations to ruthlessly do likewise.
“And now,” he said, after he’d signed, “there is nothing left to do but die.”
Eva wrote a letter to her sister, announcing the wedding but admitting that all was lost, and saying, “I can’t understand how all this can have happened; it’s enough to make one lose one’s faith in God!” She wrote other letters to friends that were so adolescent and cloyingly sentimental that the aviatrix who’d said she’d deliver them instead tore them up in disgust.
When he was made chancellor in 1933, Hitler acquired an Alsatian he’d named Blondi and it was she who was featured in the Heinrich Hoffmann photographs that sought to portray the führer informally as a friendly, affable human being. And now in order to test the effectiveness of the poison, Hitler studiously watched as a doctor crushed a glass ampule of potassium cyanide into Blondi’s mouth and held her muzzle closed. She shocked Hitler with wild, whining convulsions before she fell over, dead. Immediately he offered the Hitler salute and SS soldiers hauled Blondi away.
On the afternoon of April 30th, Hitler and Eva shook hands with their friends in farewell, and Eva followed as her frail husband tottered into his private suite and sat on a wide settee upholstered in a fabric of leaping antelopes and medieval warriors in Russian boots. She was thirty-three, and still pretty, wearing a blue dress, a raspberry-colored silk scarf, and buckskin pumps; he wore a fresh brown uniform from Wilhelm Holters’ tailor shop in Berlin, a red swastika armband, a fine gold wristwatch, a medallion given him by his mother when he was nine, his Iron Cross for bravery, and his Medal for the Wounded from 1916. A framed photograph of Klara Hitler was near him. Hitler handed his new wife the 6.35 Walther pistol that he’d killed Geli with, that he holstered under the waist of his trousers whenever out, and Eva laid it next to her on the settee. She listened to his instructions. They did not kiss. Eva was, others later said, in a controlled state of terror. She put a Zyankali ampule containing potassium cyanide into her mouth and hesitated a moment before breaking the glass with her molars. She cried out when the shards cut her cheek. She then was supposed to shoot herself with the pistol, but the poison acted too quickly and she collapsed to her right. The scent of bitter almonds floated on the air. Hitler put a Zyankali ampule in his mouth, fastened it between his upper bridgework and lower false teeth, and held just beneath his chin a Walther 7.25 pistol that he immediately fired upward into his head, the shot jolting his jaw shut so that the glass ampule shattered. When he fell to the side, he knocked over a flower vase that sloshed water onto the front of Eva’s dress so that she seemed to be bleeding.
An adjutant hurried in after hearing the gunshot, then other SS soldiers, and the führer and his wife were laid in gray woolen blankets and with difficulty hauled up four flights of stairs and outside into the chancellery garden. There four jerry cans of gasoline were used to thoroughly soak them and they were ignited with a flung rag. A foul black cloud bloomed overhead as flames ate skin, hair, and clothing, and then the fire slowly subsided. Occasionally soldiers would hurry back out under the Russian shelling to douse the suicides with more gasoline, but the heat wasn’t great enough to fully cremate the teeth and bones, and after six hours the charred and smoldering remains were hastily buried in a shell hole where the Russians later found them, just as Hitler had feared.
If only he’d done it fourteen years earlier. On September 20, 1931, Hitler passed a sleepless night at Prinzregentenplatz 16, nearly surrendering to notions of joining his niece in death. But he strangely flew into a rage when he found out that party members were talking of his Angelika Raubal as a suicide, and he fell into Hermann Göring’s huge hug, weeping with gratitude and relief when Göring suggested that it was just as likely to have been an accident. Sniveling and sighing, Hitler said, “Now I know who is my real friend.”
The gentlemen from the Brown House decided that their leader should be closely watched, and called for Julius Schaub and Heinrich Hoffmann to accompany him to Adolf Müller’s villa at St. Quirin, near the heaths and blue waters of the Tegernsee. Worrying aloud about his health on the ride there—night sweats, nervous tension, queasiness, a peptic stomach, twitching muscles, difficulty in swallowing—Hitler concluded that they were the first signs of stomach cancer and that he had only a few years left in which to fulfill his agenda. “But the task is too gigantic,” he said. “And the goal is too far off. Why don’t I just die now?”
The photographer feared the führer was not far from a nervous breakdown, and when he found out he’d brought his Walther pistol with him, he was afraid Hitler would kill himself, and so Hoffmann hid the pistol in a Nettel camera case. Hitler would not talk, he would not eat. Alone, for hour after hour he paced in his upstairs room.
Writing of the night in his postwar memoirs, Hoffmann stated, “Geli’s death had shaken my friend to the depths of his soul. Had he a feeling of guilt? Was he torturing himself with remorseful self-reproach? What would he do? All these questions went hammering through my head, but to none of them could I find an answer.”
The following morning, he took milk, ham, and biscuits to the führer. “Won’t you try to eat something?” he asked.
In silence, Hitler shook his head and continued to stride back and forth across the room.
“Something you must eat or you’ll collapse,” Hoffmann said, and held out the ham.
Hitler glanced at the pink meat and objected, “Eating that would be like eating a corpse!,” and said that nothing on earth would ever entice him to eat meat again, a promise he henceforth kept but for the occasional liver dumplings.
At dinnertime, Hoffmann recalled how the führer loved spaghetti, and he telephoned Henny to obtusely ask how it was made. Trying his hand for the first time in his life at the art of cooking, he felt his effort praiseworthy, but still Hitler would not eat, and again he filled the night with his footfalls.
At last, on Tuesday afternoon, Adolf Müller, the printer of the Völkischer Beobachter, arrived at his St. Quirin villa and informed the führer that the funeral of his niece had been held that morning. Although he’d hardly slept for three days, Hitler determined that the Austrian authorities would no longer be waiting for him, and a party that included Emil Maurice, Julius Schaub, and Rudolf Hess immediately headed off for an all-night journey to Wien.
At sunrise on Wednesday the party was met at the Central Cemetery by the Nazi Gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld but, humming the funeral march from Die Götterdämmerung, Hitler strolled through the tall iron gates alone, and laid on Geli’s grave twenty-three red chrysanthemums, her age and her favorite flower. And then, since he would not pray, he was soon outside the cemetery again. “She’s the only woman I’ll ever love,” Hitler said. “Germany shall now be my only bride.”
The men just looked at each other for a while until Heinrich Hoffmann suggested they all go out for breakfast, and Frauenfeld invited them to his flat. The führer agreed as long as he could first be driven by the Belvedere Hotel, inside the Ring, where there was a frieze of a sphinx whose face reminded him of Geli, and then past the magnificent Opera, where he sighed theatrically and talked about hearing Wagner there w
ith August Kubizek just before Geli was born.
Schaub, Hoffmann, Hitler, Hess, Maurice, and Frauenfeld gloomily trudged up the stairs to the flat and took seats at a wide, round table as the Gauleiter shook his wife awake in order to have her cook. There was no conversation for a while, only the sounds from the kitchen. She was cracking eggshells, she was grinding coffee beans. And then, to soften the führer’s mood, Heinrich Hoffmann reminisced about the first time he’d met Geli. “She was singing in München with a high school group called Seraphim and she’d been invited to hear you speak.”
Hitler smiled. “I remember.”
“And then Emil brought her to my birthday party for you. She was so lovely. My flabbergasting daughter was blue with champagne and told Geli she had beautiful breasts. She just said, ‘Thank you.’ I wanted to take her picture right away.”
Seeing the führer’s appreciation of that, Julius Schaub said he’d given Geli a tour of München that day; he’d helped her buy fine clothes. “She wasn’t inhibited with men like some girls are. She was open, and full of high spirits, and always ready for a joke.”
Rudolf Hess said he’d first seen her in 1924. “We were in Landsberg Fortress, and she’d come to visit with Angela. She was fifteen. And so fetching. We talked about astrology. I’d just begun typing out My Struggle on that old Remington.”
Emil said, “She had eyes like a poem.”
The heavy wife of the Gauleiter poured tea and a shot of vodka into Hitler’s cup, and coffee for the others. She went away.
And finally Hitler said, “I first saw Geli at her christening in Linz in 1908. She was just a baby, of course. She gripped my finger in her little hand and I introduced myself as Adolfus. That’s my name in the baptismal registry. August Kubizek and I shared a flat here then. We lived in poverty and squalor. My life is a miracle.”
Others concurred.
Then Hitler began talking not of his niece, but of the possiblity of campaigning against the old general Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency. And he hesitated, and held his stare on the wall beside Hess’s head as if on a doorway with a loved one behind it and just about to enter, or as if he were imagining a history still to be written, imagining six million Jews. With a firm and confident voice he said, “And now let the struggle begin.”
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction based on fact. I have stayed faithful to the history of the period as often as possible and, especially in Hitler’s case, freely incorporate actual quotations from him into the novel’s dialogue. But of course many of the most consequential moments of any person’s life go unglimpsed by either historians or journalists, and those intimate moments are where fiction finds its force and interest. I have felt free to invent in those instances, but always in the spirit of likelihood and fidelity to the record.
To spare the reader the confusion of tracking the crowds of people who habitually surround politicians, I have either failed to mention a personality—there is no mention of the Strasser brothers, for example—or in a few instances I have combined two characters into one—as in the case of Hitler’s chauffeurs Julius Schreck and Julius Schaub, who are here, for convenience, only Schaub. Missing for similar reasons is Hitler’s other niece, Elfriede Raubal, Geli’s younger sister. Quite little is known about that sister, and she did not figure in the major events on which this story concentrates, so I thought it best to be silent about her. Ingrid von Launitz and Christof Fritsch are fictional stand-ins for those female friends in Vienna and male friends in Munich who are often associated with Geli but are never named. I have no idea whether Geli ever met Rupert Mayer but it did not seem far-fetched, and as he was known as an early opponent of the Nazis and the conscience of Catholic Munich, having them meet was hard to resist. The letters written to Adolf by admiring women are adaptations of actual letters sent to him, but later, during the war; and I have slightly altered the chronology in other ways that I hope historians and those acquainted with the facts will agree is minor.
I first became interested in the subject of Adolf Hitler’s love affair with his niece when I read Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock and found in it the mention that Geli Raubal, who was a mystery to me at the time, was the only woman Hitler had ever really loved or wanted to marry—Eva Braun was no more than his secret mistress. Curiosity sent me to other biographies of Adolf Hitler, including a major one by John Toland in which he indicated that “there were innuendoes that the Führer himself had done away with his niece, and allegations that Minister of Justice Gürtner had destroyed the evidence.” In a footnote, Mr. Toland stated “Hitler could not have killed Geli since he was in Nuremberg,” and I wondered how Mr. Toland and his fellow biographers could be so sure. Whose testimony corroborated that alibi? Hitler’s and his friends’? Why believe them?
Two primary sources that were important for me early on were Adolf Hitler: The Missing Years by Ernst Hanfstaengl and Hitler Was My Friend by Heinrich Hoffmann, both of which hint at an odd, if not perverse, relationship between Hitler and his niece, and heightened my suspicions about a possible murder and cover-up. In fact, the further I investigated the accounts of the purported suicide, the more I found contradictions, discrepancies, evasions, and lies, and homicide seemed increasingly likely.
I was perhaps eighty pages into the writing of this novel in the spring of 1997 when my editor sent me the at first unwelcome news that there was a nonfiction book being published in England on the same subject: Hitler & Geli by Ronald Hayman. Quickly getting hold of a copy, I was fascinated, and gratified, to find out that Mr. Hayman shared my suspicions of murder and, as he had done far more research into the matter than I’d been able to do up to that point, his fine book became a significant resource as I forged ahead with this novel. Mr. Hayman’s bibliography also alerted me to “Hitler’s Doomed Angel,” a ground-breaking Vanity Fair magazine article on Geli by Ron Rosenbaum that I’d managed to miss until then. And as I was finishing the first draft of the novel, Mr. Rosenbaum’s superb Explaining Hitler appeared. It, too, was tremendously helpful in shaping my opinions of the personae, the historical period, and the persistent gossip about what really happened in Hitler’s apartment at Prinzregentenplatz 16. I also found great profit in the holdings of the stunning United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as well as in the first biography of Hitler, Der Fuehrer by Konrad Heiden, The Making of Adolf Hitler: The Birth and Rise of Nazism by Eugene Davidson, Hitler by Joachim Fest, Young Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship by August Kubizek, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler by Robert G. L. Waite, and The Death of Hitler by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson. While in some ways my conclusions may differ from theirs, I could not have arrived at those conclusions without them, and so to all of these authors, and many more, I am profoundly grateful.
My thanks to the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation for financial assistance in the research and writing; to my editor, Terry Karten, for her tender discernment and advocacy; to my agents, Peter Matson and Jody Hotchkiss, for their unfailing enthusiasm and support; to Dr. Dan Caldwell of Pepperdine University for his generous help with research; to Reverend Paul Locatelli, S.J. and Santa Clara University for the gracious gift of time in which to write; to Dick and Elizabeth Moley for their friendship to my work; and to John Irving who, when I told him about my idea for a short story based on my initial findings, instead suggested, “You may have a novel there.” My thanks especially to Jim Shepard. This book had its origins in many years of our late-night conversations about the films and history of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich, and is the better for the learning, insight, correction, and humor he benevolently brought to the criticism of each chapter as I finished it. And finally my gratitude to the first reader of these pages, my wife, Bo Caldwell, whose faith in the project and whose praise, questions, and optimism were just what I so often needed.
PRAISE FOR HITLER�
�S NIECE BY RON HANSEN
“Ambitious, provocative…the confluence of historical event and personal destiny becomes mesmerizing.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Scrupulously researched. Hansen’s informed interpretation of events makes convincing, if melancholy, reading.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“A novel that reads like history.”
—Austin American–Statesman
“A carefully crafted and distinctly macabre work of fiction.”
—Village Voice
“Hansen has written a convincing novel that is provocative, disturbing, and illuminating.”
—Raleigh News & Observer
“Hansen is a fearless storyteller…. [He] creates a savagely human portrait of Hitler…. [Hitler’s Niece] reads, like all good books, as a vehicle for the writer’s obsession—an intelligent, haunting, and oddly devotional exploration of the unimaginable—Hitler in love.”
—BookForum
“A brilliant, chilling account.”
—Entertainment Weekly
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EDITOR
You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (with Jim Shepard)
You Don’t Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Short Stories
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.