Hitler's Niece (12 page)

Ill at ease, her face hot with embarrassment, Geli kicked off her shoes and walked through a door she’d made in her mind, strolling a hundred meters from their afternoon picnic in shaded grass that was plush and cool under her feet. Sunshine whitened the denim blue of the sky and flashed off the green water as if it were a jeweler’s case holding tumbled rows of gold bracelets. She joined the lukewarm slosh of the lake, lifting up the hem of her dress to wade farther out and holding still enough that she could watch with childish amusement as sudden minnows schooled by her ankles and softly tickled her skin with nibbles.

“Aren’t you gorgeous!” Heinrich Hoffmann said.

She turned and saw the short, blond, wide-shouldered photographer waist high in the gray reeds of the bank, winding forward the film in his Stirnschen camera. “You took my picture?”

“Of course. Don’t move.” Hoffmann hunkered forward a little and took another. Winding the film, he said, “I’m getting my shoes wet.” Squinting through the viewfinder, he urged Geli, “Look into the water as you were doing, but then you hear a noise and you
just
turn your face with surprise.” Hoffmann performed it in a feminine way. “Like so.”

“Like this?”

“Exactly. Twinkling eyes. Try to flip your hair.”

She did so, and he took the picture.

“Excellent,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”

“Well, I’m not a model.”

He took another. “But you are! You’re an enchantress! With that height, that figure, those Slavic features, that perfect white smile.” Hoffmann hunched forward and she heard the shutter shear closed like a scissors. “And yet I wonder,” he said, mulling it over. “Could you show the camera some more, please?”

“More?”

Hoffmann held the Stirnschen in his right hand as his left instructed her by fiddling his fingers near his thigh. “Hike up your dress just a little higher, my darling.”

“Are you sure about this, Herr Hoffmann?”

“Quite sure.” She complied, but he said, “Higher still. You have panties on?”

She crossed her eyes at him.

“Then please raise the dress just to your panties, Geli. High as a bathing suit would be, so we can see the beauty in that sturdy young thigh, that womanly rump.”

“Womanly’ meaning fat?” She inched the hem of her dress up until she could feel it touching the joint of her thighbone.

“Alluring,” he said. “Enticing to hands. Will you bend over for me a little?”

She did. “I feel like I should be beating loincloths on rocks.”

Hoffmann adjusted his shutter speed and stalked his pictures, walking sideways, crouching, getting up on his toes, even surging ankle high through the Hintersee in his white tennis flannels.

“Are you taking these photos for yourself?” she asked.

“For whom do you think?”

“Uncle Alf.”

She heard his silence, and the shutter again. And he said, “Worse than that. It’s for Röhm’s storm troopers. We’ll put one in every locker.”

She laughed at him then, and he got it on film.

That
evening, when Hitler and the houseguests were waiting for dinner outside, Geli’s jackdaw flew down to the terrace and Hitler shouted for his niece to halt food preparations and show Henny and Heinrich one of the jackdaw’s tricks.

She hurried out to the terrace in a white apron and said, “We have flank steaks cooking.” She then got an inch-square piece of red fabric and affixed it to a chink in the wall. She cawed a few times and the jackdaw flew to the fabric and tugged it from the chink.

“Remarkable,” Hoffmann said.

“Shh,” Hitler hissed. “There’s more.”

She cawed again and the jackdaw flew over to the café table where Geli was sitting, hopped within a few inches of her face, and let the fabric fall from its beak. “And now our good-bye, Schatzi,” she said. The jackdaw held up his beak to be kissed, then took half a biscuit from her hand and flew off the terrace.

“Marvelous!” Hitler exclaimed. “Geli, that was fantastic!” And he wildly and thoroughly applauded her as she bowed first to him, then to the hoots and congratulations of Henny and her father, and then again to her uncle, whose hands were striking together long after the others had quit, his overjoyed eyes filling with tears as he raved, “She’s a miracle, isn’t she? She’s so beautiful, so gifted! Even birds have to obey her!”

“I have flank steaks in the oven,” she said, and went inside.

Within a few minutes Heinrich Hoffmann was in the kitchen, filling his wineglass beside her. They both could still hear her uncle praising her. “You’re quite a hit with Herr Hitler,” Hoffmann said.

She got butter from the icebox.

“You gave that jackdaw a name?” he asked.

“Schatzi.”

He swallowed some Riesling, then winked as he walked outside, saying, “You ought to have named him Adolf.”

The
first night she’d stayed in Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler had given his niece a framed photograph of himself—his favorite gift to friends—and the first volume of
Mein Kampf
. She had happily put the photograph on her night table and had taken the book with her to bed, but had fallen asleep within a few minutes. She’d tried it again the next afternoon but found the prose so atrocious, the thought so vitriolic and contradictory, the tone so whining—when it wasn’t pompous—that she couldn’t get farther than the first chapter about his childhood in Linz. Each night for two weeks after that her uncle asked her how she liked his memoir, presumably trying to humiliate her into finally finishing it. She told him she was still reading, but so far it seemed quite good.

They celebrated Geli’s last night in Haus Wachenfeld on September 27th, but Angela got so sleepy from Riesling that she went to bed at nine. Hitler just watched Geli reading a serialized romance as he finished his coffee, then he went upstairs, and when he walked back into the Winter Garden he had his glasses on and the first volume of
Mein Kampf
in his hand. Dragging a chair until it was facing his niece, he sat in it heavily and began questioning her. “Where was I born, Geli?”

“Braunau am Inn,” she said. “1889.”

“Why did I not attend a Gymnasium?”

“They didn’t teach drawing there.”

“And how old was I when my father died?”

“Thirteen, I think.”

“What do I say in this of my mother’s death?”

She couldn’t recall. “Hardly anything,” she said.

“My one regret,” her uncle said. “But I was dictating the book to Hess, and it seemed too private and important under those circumstances.”

“Naturally.”

“‘Chapter Two,’” he read. “‘Years of Learning and Suffering in Wien.’ A quotation, Fräulein Raubal: ‘X was my faithful attendant, the only one that almost never left me, dividing with me share and share alike. Every book I bought roused his interest; one trip to the opera would give me his company for days; it was a never-ending battle with my unsympathetic friend.’ To whom am I referring?”

She shook her head.

“Well, it’s not a whom but a what. Hunger. Making hunger seem a human being was for me a fascinating literary conceit. I find it odd that you wouldn’t remember that passage.” Hitler hunted further through his pages and inquired, “Who produces nine tenths of all the literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical nonsense in the world?”

She hesitated.

He held up his book and pointed to a block of print. “I say it on page sixty-eight.”

“America?” she guessed.

“The Jews,” he said. “And the finest things in art, science, or technology are produced by…?”

She thought of galling him by saying, “The Jews,” but he was in a tricky mood. “I have no idea,” she said.

“Oh? Why is that, I wonder?” And then he told her, “The Aryan.” Considering other pages, he halted and focused on one paragraph, asking, “The highest purpose of a man’s existence is not the maintenance of a state or government, but…what?”

“I only have the answer from religion class.”

“We’re talking about
my
ideas.
My Struggle
. A book that will one day be the Bible of the German people. The highest purpose of a man’s existence is
the preservation of his own kind
. Chapter Three.” Hitler offered one of his false smiles. “But we both know you didn’t read that far.”

She icily stared at him. “Shall I tell you precisely how far I got?”

With the suddenness of a gunshot he was white with rage, and he shouted, “You
dare
to talk to me in that tone? You
dare?
”

At once she was near tears, while he was giant and ancient and uncontrolled, a hurricane of wrath. She felt her stomach growing wobbly with an onset of terror and uncertainty as she folded her arms and humbled her head. She felt he’d turned her bones into wax. She told him, “I’m sorry, Uncle Adolf. You were embarrassing me.”

“And you have offended
me
! You have had the temerity to challenge
me
? Adolf Hitler!”

She knew that so much was now so out of proportion that anything was possible. She’d be sent back to Austria. She’d be locked away. She’d be denied. In a faint, thin voice she offered, “I can only say I’m sorry.”

“Walk over here to me,” he said.

She obediently got up from the floral-patterned chair and nearly tipped with wooziness as she went to him. Would he strike her? Would he make her kneel? She felt he could slay her with a look. She saw his trousered knees lock together and heard him tell her to bend over them. She shocked herself by giggling with scorn as she asked, “You’re going to
spank
me?”

Then his left hand flashed up and he hauled her down so hurtfully by the hair that she did what he wanted, squinting her watering eyes tightly shut and locking her knees as she tilted forward, letting his left hand firmly grip her left wrist as his right flipped her pleated skirt up to her waist and struck her hard enough on the left buttock that she jolted forward. She was wearing pink satin panties and his hand seemed to scald through them with his second blow. And his third was like fire. But then he seemed to hesitate, and his fourth strike was far softer. She felt Hitler altering further as he hesitated again, and for a moment she was afraid he’d caress her. She felt sure his hand was floating over her panties, fondling a curve in the air, and then he gently tugged her pleated skirt until she was covered, and she knew the shift of power was complete.

She stood and faced him, but he shied away from her stare. “Have I learned my lesson?” she asked.

Hitler was not an unintelligent man. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid you have.” And then it was his turn to be embarrassed. Calling for Prinz, he escaped her watching by roughhousing with the hound, and he pretended not to notice when his niece walked haughtily upstairs.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

T
HE
P
ENSION
K
LEIN
, 1927

In October she
moved into a white, furnished room in the Pension Klein at Königinstrasse 43, in the Schwabing area of München. The house faced the west side of the Englischer Garten so she had a third-floor view of green lawns and horse paths from her desk, and it was just a short walk from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, where Angelika Raubal was registered for premedical courses in biology, chemistry, zoology, and English.

Geli began each morning with a buffet breakfast of hard rolls, fruit, and hot chocolate in the pension’s dining room, then got her textbooks and, with a friend named Elfi Samthaber, walked up Veter-inärinstrasse to the first-floor lecture hall of the university for an eight o’clock biology class. She went upstairs for a far smaller class in English, and afterward was free for an hour, generally going to the Café Europa on Schellingstrasse, near Heinrich Hoffmann’s photography studio and the editorial offices of the
Völkischer Beobachter
. She did not try to find her uncle there, for it was not yet noon.

She was an affectionate, fun-loving woman with a gift for female friendship and an affability with men, so she would not have been without company for long anyway, but the fact that many of the university students were fanatically pro-Hitler meant she was often the focus of attention. She’d be offered Italian coffee, and handsome young men with fresh dueling scars would huddle around and tire her with questions about her Uncle Adolf—whom the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
was calling “the uncrowned king of Bavaria”—while her female classmates looked on with jealousy and Gauloise cigarettes held near their faces.

She freed herself from observation only by heading to the first-floor laboratory of the science wing for chemistry. She finished her English homework just before zoology class, and after that strolled to the south end of the Englischer Garten where her famous uncle would be in the fashionable Café Heck on Galerienstrasse, holding forth to a group of six or seven passive, reverential men at his
Stammtisch
, his reserved and increasingly popular table in the farthermost corner on the right.

She would see him agitatedly glancing around the café even as he talked, hunting for some sign of his niece, and as soon as he saw her, Hitler’s face would shine with glee and he would promptly stand up, as would the others. “And here is my Princess at last,” he’d say, and kiss her on both hands. All talk of politics would cease—“We do not mix business and family,” Hitler had objected once—and he would order a late lunch for them both while courteously inquiring about her classes. She’d practice English with Herr Hanfstaengl, she’d say nothing to Herr Rosenberg, who fiddled with his fork or wristwatch whenever she was around, she’d ask Herr Hess about Ilse, whom he’d just married; she’d hear from Herr Hoffmann about Henny’s high school functions, and she’d perhaps be introduced to a visiting
Gauleiter
(a party regional governor) from Essen or Mecklenburg. She’d try to be charming and Hitler’s men would try to seem enchanted and after she’d eaten she’d find a reason to exit so they could all get back to their worries and scheming.

She’d study from four until eight if her uncle was free for the evening, or until ten if he was giving a speech, and then she’d put on a fine dress and talk with the other boarders in the parlor until Emil Maurice was impatiently there at the front door, Hitler’s Mercedes idling behind him on Königinstrasse and Hitler either in it, drumming his fingers, or still in his shabby bachelor’s flat on Thierschstrasse getting changed for their night on the town. After the cinema or opera, they’d dine at the Café Weichard, next to the Volkstheater, or the Osteria Bavaria, the garden restaurant in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, or the Nürnberger Bratwurstglöckl am Dom, and then, well past midnight, Emil would return Geli to the pension and take his employer to the Café Neumaier near the Victuals Market where he’d talk with worshipful old friends until three or four in the morning.

Weekends she was Hitler’s from noon until night. Often Henny Hoffmann would join them and they’d lunch at the Carlton Tearoom on Briennerstrasse, and Hitler would flatter them with fulsome praise for their beauty, and charm them with funny imitations of his pompous subordinates. Then they’d stroll through the galleries and the jewelry, shoe, and millinery shops off the Odeonsplatz, or the high-fashion stores on Prinzregentenstrasse. Geli was new to luxuries and having money, and with a flirtatious tyranny forced her uncle to wait like a forbearing husband as she tried on twenty hats then settled on a beret, or dotted her wrists with French perfumes and held them to his fussy and defenseless nose.

With his niece Adolf Hitler was often affectionate, softhearted, and helpless. Emil Maurice would lean against a fender of the Mercedes-Benz with a cigarette and watch his otherwise fearsome boss bashfully follow the tittering girls as they went from one shop to the next, and in the late afternoon he’d be fascinated to find the führer tilting toward him under a high stack of parcels, chagrined but grinning—fatherly, flushed, and perfectly content.

Emil himself was enthralled by Geli, but at first he tried to give the impression that being with her was his duty when Hitler was away. But one Saturday morning in late October Emil simply showed up at the Pension Klein and told Geli her uncle was on party business in Berlin. And then he hesitantly asked if she’d like to visit the famous Auer Dult flea market at Mariahilfplatz, across the Isar river.

She wanted to further furnish her white room, so she went, and they found a
Halali
hat for Emil, and for Geli a fairly good Köhler sewing machine, a faintly worn Axminster rug, and a fine, gold-plated Tellus clock that wasn’t working, but that Emil, a former watchmaker, said he would fix, and did.

Emil drove her to the Haidhausen district and a pub called Löwen-Schänke where they shared a late lunch of hard rolls and salami and tall steins of Spatenbräu. He took off his white
Halali
hat and told Geli he’d been born in Westmoor in 1897, so he was eleven years older than she was, and a former
Unterfeldwebel
, or sergeant, on the western front, where he had been put in charge of a reconnaissance patrol because his family were originally French Hugenots and his father had forced his children to learn the language. Without a high school
Abitur
or even a lesser
Matura
, Emil had had few work prospects after the armistice; he was just one of the injured millions and had found and lost a dozen jobs—as a horse dealer, a butcher’s apprentice, a watchmaker, a nightclub bouncer. Anything. And whenever he was out of work, he was a street fighter for the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade, paid to heckle Communist speakers and disrupt rallies during Spartakus week. “What we wanted, we didn’t know,” he said. “But what we knew, we didn’t want.” And then that changed in 1920 when he’d first heard Adolf Hitler speak. Immediately he’d joined the party as number 19, and had been given the job of
Ordnertruppe
, whose duty it was to protect her uncle at mass meetings. “I was the first SA man,” he said. “The very first storm trooper. And I still would gladly die for him. A former soldier like I was, with no education, no money, no family, really, and he knew what I was feeling, the furies inside me, the fears and longings, the things that were ugly, and he made them seem right. Even glorious. It’s never intellectual or head-to-head when Hitler talks. Always heart-to-heart. And so I could
feel
how much he hated the same things I did: the Weimar Republic, Bolshevism, the Reichstag, unemployment, inflation, crime and disorder—”

“The Jews?” Geli asked.

Emil reddened with irritation. “Are you thinking I’m Jewish?”

She was stunned. “I just thought that was part of his program.”

“Are you an Anti-Semite?”

She shrugged. “No.”

Emil smiled as her uncle did, with falseness and condescension. “In time,” he said.

“Are you Aryan?” she asked.

“Naturally. But I hear party members talking. ‘Look at Emil Maurice,’ they say. ‘Look at that Alfred Rosenberg.’ And others, too. ‘They’re trying to hide that they’re Jews by hating them.’” Emil drank from his stein with his hot stare held on her. “Even about the leader they say that.”

She was fearless in the face of contention, but was fundamentally a conciliator. She slid off to friendlier terrain. “I remember when I first saw you at Landsberg am Lech,” she said. “Your skin was so dark. I thought you looked Corsican, or Greek.”

Emil grinned. “Yes? Is that good?”

“Excellent,” she said.

He hunched forward on the pub’s table, his chin on his hands, conquered by flattery. “Was it love at first sight?”

“Well, I was sixteen.”

“And easy to please? Tell me, Fräulein Raubal: What did you admire most about me?”

“Your eyes,” she said. “They seemed so big and gentle and chocolate brown.”

“Your eyes, too,” he said. “They’re like a poem.”

She laughed. “They rhyme? They’re a couplet?”

Emil flopped back in his chair and held up his hands in surrender. “I have no education; I told you.”

She reached over to him. “No, no. I’m sorry. I was embarrassed. You’re so sweet to put it that way.” She hesitated a little, then smiled demurely. “What else? You have to say more.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m the girl.”

Emil studied her from her head to her waist, frankly but tenderly. Without amusement. She’d never felt so caressed. Geli found herself thinking how her uncle’s stare could be a persecution, a mystery, a contest he always won.

“We’ll start with your hair. Wild and free, like a lion’s mane.”

She involuntarily put her hand to it. “And you like that?”

“Certainly.”

“Just checking.”

Emil squinted. “And your eyes. You’re right. They
do
rhyme.”

“They used to roll around like marbles, but then I got my diploma.”

“I have bad teeth. No money for dentists. But yours are beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“White. Even. Everything fits together so nice. And that smile! Radiant! We could turn out all the lights and still read.”

“Well, maybe not you.”

“It’s true. Reading I don’t like much.”

“You’re lucky you’re a man,” she said. “You can just sit there and look pretty.”

“I haven’t finished worshiping you.”

“Sorry.”

Emil touched his own mouth as he looked at hers. “I’m thinking of those lips, so soft and pink and feminine—”

She smiled. “But this is too much, Herr Maurice!” She felt her flushed cheeks with her palms. “My face is getting so hot!”

“Eyes follow you when you walk by. Men
and
women. Have you seen that? The admiration?”

She shook her head.

“Shall I quit?”

“Yes. Enough. I’m dizzy.”

Emil’s stare fell to her chest, and he smiled. “But there’s so much more to describe!”

She blushed and crossed her forearms over her sweater. “And now we really can stop with the compliments, Herr Maurice.”

Emil was quiet for a minute. “Would he mind it if we saw each other?”

She tried not to seem as thrilled and breathless as she was. “Uncle Adolf? Why?”

“Haven’t you seen how he looks at you?”

“But he’s my uncle. And nineteen years older.”
Ask
, she thought.

“Would you like to go out with me tonight?”

She hesitated, then sighed, “Oh, I suppose so.”

Emil
took her to the cinema and a government-financed
Kulturfilm
called
Ways to Health and Beauty
, a feature-length documentary urging the “regeneration of the human race” through calisthenics, dancing, “hygienic gymnastics,” and wrestling—a subject that might not have filled the theater had it not been for the fact that for much of the film the oiled actors and actresses were stark naked. Emil smirked at Geli’s shock, and she hit his shoulder. “You knew, didn’t you,” she said, but Emil just smiled and watched, pressing his forearm and knee against hers.

Walking to the Hofbräuhaus afterward, Emil said, “Don’t tell Uncle Adolf.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Has he talked to you about the flame of life and the sin of iniquity yet?”

“No.”

Emil smiled. “He will.”

At the Hofbräuhaus a waitress in a Tyrolean dirndl put gray porcelain steins of foaming Hofbräu in front of them, and Emil told Geli what it had been like chasing around Berlin in the old days. “We were all poor, but Hitler found party financing in Switzerland; just a few hundred francs, but a fortune with the exchange rate then, and we took it with us. We were in a cabaret and I was scouting for girls to join us at our table—that was my job as his driver—when a fellow introduced himself as a judge and told me he knew of a far more interesting nightspot. We took the underground with him and found ourselves in his home: fine furniture, family photographs of officers on the walls, and his wife serving us a champagne she’d made with spirits and lemonade. And then the judge brings out his two daughters, maybe fifteen and sixteen years old, and Hitler about faints because they’re naked. No clothes on at all, and they’re squirming around in front of us in some kind of Egyptian dance, and the judge is waiting for us to make him an offer. Well, Hitler jumps up and starts shouting that this was what he was going to change, this was how Germany was being destroyed by the Communists and the Weimar Republic and so on, a twenty-minute version of his speech. And pretty soon the whole family is weeping and wanting to join the party, and when we go out the judge insists we take his gift of Havana cigars. But this was Berlin in 1922 and the cigars turned out to be cabbage leaves soaked in nicotine.”