by Chris Petit
When she learned how frank she could be with him, this sunny picture was revised. He took what she said to mean that Herr Wolf was controlling, blissed out on the girl but emotionally immature and insecure, with much talk of the loneliness of his vocation.
Geli laughed and said, ‘It’s Herr Wolf’s way of saying he is afraid of women. Now do you see what my problem is?’
‘I expect if he can’t have you he doesn’t want anyone else to either.’
‘But I like boys. Can a good little Catholic girl say that? I like fucking boys.’
‘So do I,’ said Anton Schlegel.
A look of complicity passed between them.
‘I knew we had lots in common. Only boys? No girls?’
‘Most of the time boys. Not always.’
Anton Schlegel saw that Geli, for all her dissatisfaction, remained in thrall to her uncle’s generosity and fame. She had understood early on how much it pleased him to please her. Given his laziness, she could easily talk him out of work and going on an outing instead.
Geli had a bright way with words, describing hot sunny days spent by the lakes in summers gone. The Führer had just acquired a new car, his first big tourer, open-topped, too, a treat in itself, into which Geli and her many girlfriends were ‘squashed like sardines’, while her uncle sat in the front, dishing out mints, and Emil drove.
‘Emil?’ asked Anton.
‘Emil Maurice. The chauffeur at the time.’
Anton detected a wistful look. ‘One of your boys?’
Geli punched him playfully on the arm. ‘There’s no hiding from you.’
Her descriptions of those early picnics consisted of uninhibited frolics under the indulgent eye of an inhibited presence. Geli and her girlfriends skinny-dipped and sunbathed naked, working on all-over tans; nothing remarkable about that. They were easy and unselfconscious. Maurice bathed wearing trunks.
‘Sometimes we could see his thingy was hard. Maurice always had his pick of the girls.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Moved on. Somewhere around. He played the guitar and he brought it along to the picnics and we sat around making up silly songs.’
Her uncle relaxed, up to a point, being cheerful and appreciative of the sight of so much tanned, firm flesh, but he never bathed or undressed, removing only socks and shoes and rolling his trouser bottoms so he could paddle and skim flat stones along the surface of the lake, pointing out how good he was. No singalong for him, only the fixed smile of a man too shy to open his mouth.
Emil and Geli decided to get engaged after one thing led to another in terms of practice with Emil’s thingy.
‘How naive can a girl be!’
The engagement was Emil’s idea, she said. He was one of Herr Wolf’s oldest friends. Once officially engaged, they could spend more time together.
The trouble was, Herr Wolf caught them nearly at it.
‘I was playing lollipop with Emil’s thingy. I tucked it away before Onk saw but he went crazy and thrashed Emil until I had to throw myself between them.’
His excuse afterwards was he thought Maurice had been threatening her.
Geli did a perfect imitation of the man smoothing his hair and recomposing himself.
‘I have never seen anything like it, even when he beat his dogs.’
‘When was this?’
‘Christmas, nearly four years ago. Onk said I was underage and fired Emil.’
Yet, extraordinarily, Herr Wolf continued to entertain the idea of the engagement, as long as it was postponed for two years until Geli reached her majority.
Geli anyway decided to end it with Emil, telling Anton she had been foolish to let herself get talked into an engagement when Emil had completely misread the situation. She sensed how complicated her life was about to become. Her uncle saw part of his role towards her as matchmaker, finding what he called a suitable mate.
She saw how much the process tormented him. He would vet young men in public, asking, ‘Is that one good looking?’ or ‘What do you think of him?’ He told her he needed to know her taste.
Anton suspected the gossip was right and the man had made his own sexual demands.
A year or so before, Herr Wolf had acquired his first proper apartment. The ostensible reason for the move was to reflect his growing power, but Geli suspected a secret motive.
‘He said we should live together and for a moment I thought he was proposing! He meant as a lodger. He said, “It makes no sense me rattling around on my own in a place this size.’’’
He claimed he had been forced into taking the apartment by the Party and he would have been much more at home in his usual modest surroundings.
He told her, ‘But if it means we can be together more then I am happy.’
This she took to mean greater supervision and less freedom.
She became used to his brooding presence, waiting for her return after a night out and saying, with the eyes of a jealous lover, ‘Tell me about your evening.’
She entered a world of chaperones and chauffeur-driven cars. When she protested she was perfectly capable of taking public transport she was told it was for her safety. There were rumours of a plot to kidnap her.
‘What nonsense!’ she told Anton Schlegel and looked sad. ‘I went from being his little princess, for whom nothing was good enough, to being a prisoner whose every move was watched over.’
Even during their walks in the park a couple of bodyguards followed at a distance.
‘What do you do about boys?’ Anton asked.
‘Tricky but not impossible if I know Onk is away. The ski instructor was skiing lessons!’
She rewarded Anton Schlegel with her most delightful laugh before turning thoughtful. ‘If only he could say he loves me when it is obvious that he does, and let me be with him. What does the job matter if he’s with someone or not? Now they just look at him like he’s odd or a fairy.’
Anton asked what she wanted.
‘Not being wrapped in cotton wool. Lots of normal healthy fucking and not being asked to do weird stuff.’
He looked at her and she turned away saying, ‘Another time; I don’t want to say anything about it now. Anyway, it’s the talk of the town. Ask anyone.’
32
Geli Raubal, August 1931
Geli Raubal considered herself an adventurous, somewhat headstrong young woman, aware of how much she could manipulate and be manipulated in return. To her it was a game, until she saw how her uncle was buying her piece by piece. Everyone gossiped, sometimes with her, with lots of swearing to secrecy, stories about his dark desires and the stupid shopgirl who tried to kill herself over him, and the besotted photographer’s assistant, and the gigantic widow Wagner who wanted to marry him. When she asked about the prospect of a Wagner engagement, he had lost all the devoted chivalry with which he usually treated her and cursed like a sailor and locked her in the house.
*
In the long, empty hours when time hung heaviest, she studied herself in the mirror, his blackness infecting her as she dared to imagine tempting him into revealing himself. Perhaps through submission she could free him, by showing him the impossibility of his desires within the greater reckoning.
The reflection in the mirror told her the risk she ran: if he refused to release her, she would be destroyed, or destroy herself, fulfilling a tragic destiny that would allow him to progress.
Too late did she understand the deadly game of brinksmanship that had been embarked on. She made the mistake of sharing her secret with others, in the mistaken belief that the situation was somehow negotiable. Her uncle in turn confessed that she drove him to despair. He implied that she had defiled herself by succumbing to his wishes and was unworthy of his love. The psychological mechanisms became a series of hair-triggers.
Until she talked to Anton Schlegel, in the dog days of high summer, unaware that she had only a few weeks to live.
33
Martin Bormann, 19 September 1931
&nb
sp; ‘We need to be seen to be on the same page,’ said Bormann to Müller, who then was still just a Munich cop, years away from acquiring the soubriquet ‘Gestapo’.
‘Your version?’ asked Bormann.
‘Girl shoots herself while mentally unbalanced using the Führer’s pistol.’
Bormann nodded. ‘She was a complicated creature. She must have known that the relationship was coming to an end. She ran out of time, as simple as that.’
Müller was known for short cuts and messing with the system. Bormann had the man on a retainer to keep him informed about hostile reporters, who treated the station as a second home, bribing cops to feed them leads.
The two men were in a private room in an out-of-the-way bar, drinking convivially, a late afternoon break in a hectic Saturday that was far from over.
It had been Müller’s idea to have the Führer’s returning Mercedes issued with a speeding ticket, which was when Bormann realised he had met a man after his own heart. Both knew their careers would depend on how they handled the affair.
*
Soon after eleven o’clock that morning, before any police were called, three senior Party officials had gathered for a secret meeting in the Führer’s apartment to decide how best to handle the news of Raubal’s death in terms of damage limitation. When Bormann informed them that the girl was dead by her own hand and as a mark of respect she should be left undisturbed, Treasurer Schwarz was quick to agree that any inspection would be an intrusion on the Führer’s privacy. He looked glum and tactically out of his depth. No one was keen about being there. Bormann saw they expected him to fix it, considering such work beneath them. Deputy Hess was wailing like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. He took Bormann aside to say there was the dreadful symbol of a dead canary.
At the risk of insubordination, Bormann asked, ‘What are you talking about, man?’
Hess appeared on the verge of hysteria.
Frau Winter later told Bormann that the bird was called Hansi and Geli had treated its death as an omen.
The third man later shown as ‘not present’ that morning was Hoffmann’s future son-in-law, von Schirach. What a quorum!
On two facts Bormann got them to agree. The door was locked from the inside and Raubal was the only one in the room.
How they resented Bormann, however desperate they were for him to do the tidying: an unparalleled opportunity in terms of a young man’s ambition. If Bormann succeeded, the years of derision would be thrown back in their faces.
Bormann let them get on with it. Any public aspect of the case was not his business. After that it was a clowns’ convention, going round in decreasing circles until they were in danger of vanishing up themselves. Von Shirach demanded a press-office release saying the Führer had gone into deep mourning after the suicide of his niece.
Bormann spoke up, only to be shouted down, saying shouldn’t the police, let alone the Führer, be informed before the issue of any release. Von Shirach was already on the blower when Bormann left the room.
Straight sorting, he thought as he walked down the corridor to the kitchen. Plug any gaps with the local police, where Müller was the man. An open-and-shut case of suicide. Death certificate. Get body out and away. No autopsy – nothing good would come from revealing a possible bun in the oven. There would be enough crazy speculation as it was. Hacks would have a field day regardless.
The domestic staff sat around the kitchen table, looking blown about, like an audience that had just emerged from an extraordinary event.
Get your stories straight, Bormann thought.
There was the live-in housekeeper, Frau Reichert and Frau Winter, who lived off the premises, and a daily maid. Reichert’s and Winter’s husbands were both there, a couple of makeweight odd-jobbers. Capping it all was the disquieting presence of Reichert’s mother, Frau Drachs, who lived in the apartment with her daughter and was stone deaf; disquieting because Geli had claimed to have woken one night to find Frau Drachs standing at the end of her bed brandishing a knife. After that she had made a point of locking her door.
Bormann saw how petrified Frau Reichert was, as was Frau Winter. Disaster had struck on their watch. Bormann sensed a private resentment towards the niece, for her selfishness in involving them, as well as the enormous repercussions on their master, with possibly unpleasant consequences for everyone.
With their complacency and security threatened, they agreed wholeheartedly when Bormann said, ‘We must do everything possible to protect the Führer.’ He didn’t add, ‘Otherwise it’s out of the door with the lot of you.’
Frau Reichert said, ‘I can’t explain why Fräulein Raubal killed herself.’
‘Then that’s what you tell the police,’ said Bormann.
Frau Reichert recoiled at mention of the police. The thought seemed not to have crossed her mind.
Bormann said, ‘Better no mention is made of the several gentlemen already here or my presence. We don’t wish to complicate.’
Bormann made them learn and recite their rehearsed statements. Like backward schoolchildren, they struggled to remember, as if distraction had undone their minds.
Frau Reichert, at last: ‘Around three o’clock yesterday afternoon, I heard the door of Fräulein Raubal’s room being locked and shortly after I heard a faint noise coming from inside, as if something had been knocked over. I attached no particular significance to this.’
Frau Winter: ‘I did see, around the same time, Fräulein Raubal, very flustered, go into the Führer’s room and hurry back into her own.’
‘Carrying the pistol with which she would shoot herself,’ prompted Bormann.
‘Carrying the pistol,’ Frau Winter repeated obediently. ‘She had informed me none of us was needed as she intended to go out later.’
‘With a friend to the cinema,’ Bormann suggested.
Frau Reichert: ‘That night, at about ten, I went to Fräulein Raubal’s room to turn the bed down, but finding the door locked and getting no answer I assumed she had gone out.’
*
Meanwhile, the idiots in the Party press office had issued a second statement saying Fräulein Raubal had killed herself as a result of exam nerves over a singing test. Rowdy reporters besieged the police station. In such chaos it wasn’t so difficult for Bormann to organise the essentials and sow the seeds of contradiction.
The Führer had returned mid-afternoon and given a short statement to the police, telling them that his niece had always struck him as ill-fated. Bormann took the precaution of informing Hess and Schwarz, who were hanging around uselessly back at the apartment, that the Führer must be taken somewhere safe, away from reporters, and a watch kept at all times, in case he tried to harm himself.
‘He will be distraught beyond belief,’ Bormann told them.
Schwartz and Hess looked incapable of comprehending any of the six words just uttered.
‘It will be touch and go,’ Bormann said. ‘The Führer is far too important to lose.’
When much later the Führer asked whether Bormann had in fact said that, and Bormann saw the Führer’s moisteyed gratitude, he knew the kingdom would be his.
Geli liked to do crosswords, the Führer said. Bormann knew. He had helped her. Nothing too demanding. Fourlegged animal, three letters. Cow or dog? Or pig?
MUNICH
1944
34
Morgen supposed contemporary newspaper reports of the affair must still exist. Schlegel suggested the Party Archive. They telephoned and were told Rehse remained unavailable but when Morgen asked about newspapers the helpful man he spoke to told them that a collection of the Party’s Völkischer Beobachter was held at the Brown House.
It was still there, despite the partial evacuation of the building, looking neglected in a dusty back room. Their impression after ten minutes of reading badly written, sensational copy was of a highly controlled version of events: the niece suffering from exam nerves over a forthcoming music test; an immediate verdict of suicide, precluding the n
eed for a post-mortem; the body returned to its homeland for burial in accordance with the mother’s wishes, taking place in Vienna on the Wednesday after the death.
‘That was quick!’ exclaimed Morgen.
The technical question of cases of suicide being ineligible for Roman Catholic burial was not covered by the newspaper. The tone throughout was tragic, sentimental and not without a tinge of cynicism. It made for depressing reading because it left nothing to question. Every angle had been covered.
Schlegel glumly concluded, ‘Maybe the man just had a fancy for suicidal women. That Braun woman tried and failed.’
Morgen asked, ‘How would you shoot yourself, if you had to?’
‘Temple or mouth, I suppose.’
‘Then not through the heart holding the gun at a downwards angle, which was how it was described.’
‘Unless she was thinking it was her heart that was broken.’
Morgen said, ‘Ah, the sentimental interpretation.’
‘Or it was a cry for help.’
‘She knew the apartment was empty. Frau Winter told us. No one would come.’
They left it at that and went and sat outside, depressed. Morgen smoked and eventually asked, ‘Is there a way of looking at the whole thing from another angle?’
‘You mean, how did the canary die?’
‘Let’s be serious.’
They sat in silence. Finally, Schlegel spoke. ‘The Bratwurst Glöckl.’
‘The Thursday night row? There’s no evidence. No one left to remember.’
‘Say it happened. Reports of an argument . . .’
‘Then what?’
‘He had been drinking – a famous teetotaller – and couldn’t handle it.’
Morgen pondered. ‘Are we saying it turned into a domestic row that got out of hand?’
‘I have no idea, but what if everything happened earlier than anyone is admitting?’
Morgen said, ‘Which means our windbag friend Hoffmann must be lying.’
*
For twenty minutes, Hoffmann, in the same back room of his studio as before, bluffed and blustered. It was like watching a man tiptoe backwards, downplaying his part when previously the roles of the tragedienne and her uncle were seen as incidental to his own blowy passage through life. He dismissed any report of the couple being seen arguing in town on the Thursday night, telling them, ‘My friends, there was so much gossip, all of it unfounded. Of course the Führer’s enemies wanted to make hay of it.’