Hitler's Niece (27 page)

“Did Adolf tell you?” Angela asked.

She raked hair back from her face. “What?”

“He’s going to buy me a car! A Wanderer! I just can’t believe it! I’m so happy!”

She grimly faced his photograph. “Then I’m happy, too,” Geli said.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

C
ONFESSIONS
, 1931

She flattered him
with imitation: fuming, ranting, weeping, falling to the floor in tantrums, soaring giddily when things went well, sinking into full-day pouts over imagined snubs or neglect. She loathed him. She did not. She feared she was too prudish and timid. She felt sullied and odious. She screamed at waiters in restaurants. She would not pay a shopkeeper without complaining of piracy. She was becoming, she knew, a bitch, and she hated it, hated him saying, “We are so alike,” hated his infatuation, his sticky enthrallment, his cruelty and unnaturalness, his unoriginality in choosing such a vulgar, bland face to offer the world.

In March, Hitler and Geli attended a Bavarian play by Ludwig Thoma at the Kammerspiele Theater, where he fancied his niece in a cloying way, finding reasons to confer with her, to fondle her, to angle his head childishly into hers, to just watch. Tiring of his scrutiny, she put a finger to her lips to shush him, and he folded his arms and sulked for a while before mooning over Geli again. And then he noticed Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl observing him from a side gallery, and his face took on the slaughter-of-the-innocents look of his publicity photographs.

Afterward they all dined together at the Schwarzwälder Café, where a continually yapping schnauzer so annoyed Hitler that he walked to the far table and truculently stared until the schnauzer cowered and was silent. And then he returned to the table, demeaned his niece by feeding pinches of cake to her, and flourished in front of Putzi his latest royalty statement from Eher Verlag.
Mein Kampf
was then nearly six years old and had averaged sales of just six thousand copies per year, but suddenly in 1930 fifty-four thousand books were sold, and with foreign rights, he boasted, he’d soon be a wealthy man.

“Well, that calls for some glasses of the finest fizz!” Putzi said.

Instead the führer fell into an hour-long monologue on the next elections in 1932, on the “clownish elements of salon bolshevism” who’d drifted into the party and would have to be weeded out, about his forbearance when being tested by the persistent conflicts between the hooligan SA and Heinrich Himmler’s disciplined and increasingly formidable SS force, organizations faithful to him who were vying to be his favorites. “When a mother has many children, and one of them goes astray,” Hitler told his foreign press secretary, “it is the wise mother who grips the child by the hand and won’t let go.”

Even then Putzi Hanfstaengl was aware that Geli was that child, for she was plainly bored by Hitler’s monologue and was flagrant in yawning and tinking her forks and yearningly gazing over her fox stole at all the jolly couples around them.

At closing time at the Schwarzwälder Café, their still far-from-sleep führer persuaded Herr and Frau Hanfstaengl to join him and his niece in the Prinzregentenplatz flat for cordials. And when there he further persuaded Putzi to favor them with his famous piano playing, for he had the ability to flawlessly perform short pieces in any style or key, and he first entertained them that night by interpreting the trifle “Hänschen Klein” in five different ways, as if it had been scored by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner.

Wildly applauding and gleeful, Hitler announced, “And now my niece will perform with you,” and she dutifully got up from a floral sofa to join Putzi on the white piano bench.

“Sweet and short,” she whispered, and Putzi told her to play the left-hand chords of the “Horst Wessel Lied” while he quickened the right-hand notes into a minuet. And then they both turned and bowed.

Eyes wet with pleasure, Hitler hurried to wake up Frau Reichert before they started another song.

Geli called, “It’s two in the morning!,” but Hitler ignored her.

Putzi said, “No one told me you were also a pianist.”

She smiled. “Who can plumb the depths of my talents?”

“Do you and the leader often do duets?”

Geli’s smile faded. She seemed to him to be communicating a secret in her stare. “We try,” she said, “but it’s hard. My uncle only plays the black keys.”

She
was invited to a grand costume ball at the Deutsches Theater, and she prevailed upon Baldur von Schirach, whose office was just above Hitler’s in the Brown House, to wear down the führer until he finally agreed to let Geli go. If Heinrich Hoffmann took her, he said. And if she was home by eleven. And a day later he decided that Max Amann ought to go with them, too.

The theatrical designer Ingo Schröder costumed Henny as a white-buckskinned Indian princess as featured in the Westerns of Karl May, but four of his designs for Geli were rejected by Hitler for varying reasons, and Schröder would not try others.

Geli sketched a costume she’d sew for herself on her Köhler machine, and she took it to Hitler for his approval as he shared coffee and strudel with Ilse and Rudolf Hess in the parlor. On the wide, round mahogany table was a sheet of red poster board on which Hess had pasted famous faces and the lettering “
Wer ist der wichtigste Mann der Welt?
”—Who is the most important man in the world?

“We’ll merely ask the question,” Hess told her. “The conclusion will be inevitable. We wonder, though, if the faces aren’t too hard for the man in the street.”

“She’s very smart,” Hitler said. “She’ll get them all.”

She leaned over the poster. “Herr Gerhart Hauptmann, the playwright,” she said. “Uncle Adolf. Leon Trotsky. Albert Einstein. And him I don’t know.”

“Our new friend Hjalmar Schacht,” Hitler said. “The former president of the Reichsbank.”

Geli shrugged a
you-could-have-fooled-me
. “Herr General Paul von Hindenburg,” she said. “Max Schmeling.”

Hitler asked, “What does
he
do?”

“Isn’t he the heavyweight boxing champion of the world?”

“No,” Hitler said. “He demonstrates the superiority of the Aryan race.” And he laughed hard at his own joke as Ilse took Geli’s sketch of her costume.

“Oh, I like it,” Ilse said. “Who is it?”

“Diana.”

“Diana who?” Hitler asked.

Ilse handed the sketch to her husband as Geli said, “The Roman goddess of the moon. The protectress of women.”

Ilse asked, “What fabric?”

“A yellow chiffon.”

“Won’t that be lovely.”

Rudolf silently handed the sketch to his führer.

Examining it, Hitler asked, “What’s chiffon?”

“Oh, you see it in lots of dresses,” Ilse said. “A sheer fabric.”

“Meaning see-through,” Hitler said. He tossed the sketch onto the poster and said, “If you want to wear something like that, you might as well go naked.”

Geli stared at him in fury, flushing red. “I forgot,” she hotly said. “We have the highest standards of decency to uphold.” And then she took the sketch and ran to her room, volcanically slamming the door.

In silence Hitler dithered with his strudel, his gaze flying about in distraction until he formally excused himself and carried his whining contrition down the hallway.

She
finally settled on a white ciré satin dinner dress by Mainbocher with a silver headband adorned with a white feather, though she thought it all wasted as she sat in a theater box with Hoffmann and Amann in their tuxedos, watching the fun others were having on the floor below them. Max Amann’s hair seemed no more than a fallen leaf on his head, and he’d shaved off his Hitler mustache on Hitler’s orders, so she was suddenly aware that his nude upper lip was as long as his foreshortened nose. She coldly asked, “How old are you, Max?”

“I’ll be forty in November.”

“Are you sure you’re not older?”

“War changes you,” Amann said.

“And you, Heinrich?”

Hoffmann finished popping a magnum of champagne, and reported that he was forty-five. “We’re both short, too,” he said. “We’re both unattractive to you. And we already know we’re spoiling your evening.”

She said, “I’m hard to read, aren’t I? I have subtle ways.”

“I have a daughter,” Hoffmann said.

She saw a pretty woman who was wearing only an eye mask and a man’s striped tie around her waist. She saw a naked man painted in gold. A fan dancer was entertaining fraternity boys in their booth. She heard Hoffmann shout, “Ernst!”

Ambling to their theater box was Captain Ernst Röhm, who’d just returned from Bolivia where he’d been schooling mercenaries in the art of war. Röhm smiled at her like they were old friends, and she presumed he felt that way because he’d been a friend and mentor to Hitler since 1919, one of the few men with whom her uncle ever used the familiar “
Du
” for “you.” She disliked him at once. Röhm was wearing the SA uniform at a fancy dress ball, for one thing, and he was a squat, fat, fanatical soldier with short brown hair, tiny eyes, and a flushed, round, piggish face made even uglier by the fact that the bridge of his nose had been shot off on the eastern front, and his left cheek had been cruelly torn by a Russian bullet. His shirt collar seemed to be choking him, and his handshake was moist as he told her, “So you are the famous niece. I have wondered if we would ever meet.”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve been hiding.”

“Oh no?”

“Won’t you join us for some champagne?” Amann asked.

Röhm did so, stiffly, as if he still carried a sword, and the former sergeant, Max Amann, who was all accounting and ambition, switched chairs to confer with him.

She couldn’t fathom the men’s fondness for Röhm, for she’d heard from Putzi Hanfstaengl, who hated him, that Röhm was an occultist who flaunted his predatory interest in boys, loved bloodshed and the heat of battle, and had many hatreds: Jews, Communism, Christianity, democracy, anyone in the officer corps above the rank of major, civilians in general, and females of any age. With the financial support of the Reichswehr and rich industrialists, she’d been told that Röhm had formed, just before the putsch, a civilian defense force of one hundred thousand former soldiers to crush any opposition and assassinate politicians, and a few years later he’d fled to Bolivia—she’d heard there was a threat of blackmail—and had only agreed to return to Germany when Hitler offered him the post of chief of staff of the Sturmabteilung.

Röhm finally turned to Geli. “And how is Leo?”

She was perplexed that they’d met, but then recalled her brother’s visit for Reich Party Day in January 1923. She said, “Leo’s fine. He’s a schoolteacher in Linz now.”

Röhm smiled with insinuation. “Of boys? What a pleasurable job
that
must be.

“Ernst!” Hoffmann said. “Manners.”

“And Emil Maurice?” Röhm asked.

“I haven’t seen him in months.”

Röhm seemed to sink into his flesh with satisfaction. “
I
have. Driving for the leader.”

“Really?”

“Really. A forgive-and-forget situation.”

With sarcasm she said, “Uncle Adolf is famous for those.”

Amann frowned at her until Röhm offered, “Emil told me you’re a model now.” And then Amann smiled.

Who else had seen her uncle’s sketches? Was she lewdly talked about at his
Stammtisch?
Her face hot with embarrassment and betrayal, she found that Hoffmann was finishing his flute of champagne, and she fervently asked him, “Shall we dance?”

“Why not?” he said.

Walking her downstairs, his hand held her waist in a fatherly way, and he confided, “I have seen that expression of yours in Adolf. We call it ‘seething rage.’”

With intensity she asked, “Will you please take me away from here?”

They
were heading east, from Schwanthalerstrasse toward the flat, when Geli said, “Please, not home yet,” and he obligingly turned north into the Englischer Garten. There they got out of his car and he escorted her to a food stall where he got them Paulaner beers and the food seller flattered Geli for her feathered headband and her fine dress. And then they strolled under the soft loom of night to sit beneath the timbers and yellow lanterns of the five-level Chinese Tower. Hoffmann swallowed half his first beer and pounded on a firm joist with his fist as he peered up inside. “They tell me this is modeled on the Pagoda in London’s Kew Gardens.”

She was quiet. She drank her Paulaner.

Sitting next to her, he said, “We try to get Adolf to England, but he won’t travel outside Germany. Wants the world to visit him.”

She sighed.

“An American laid out these gardens,” Hoffmann said. “Benjamin something. Otherwise known as Count Rumford. My mother used to feed us Rumford soup when we were hard up. Mostly potatoes, just a hint of diced bacon, and barley, water, vinegar, salt.”

She was silently crying, her tears shining under the lanterns.

“Oh now, what’s this about? Röhm’s just a fat pighound.”

“I’m so confined,” she said. “I have to make so many concessions. And they all hate me anyway.”

“Who?”

“All his cold, pitiless, stupid friends in the Brown House. Am I not hated?”

“Cordially disliked,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“There are those who think you confuse him,” he said. “Who think he’s distracted. Weak. And frankly there are hints of scandal. An uncle and his niece sharing a flat. We could be ruined.”

“Sharing a flat?”

Hoffmann was flummoxed. “Aren’t you?”

“My uncle’s a monster!”

“Well, that’s just the Communists—”

“Oh, you have
no
idea!”

She felt his discomfort and ambivalence, his wanting to flee with her accusations unheard, but the father in him said, “Tell me.”

She stanched her tears. She jaggedly inhaled. “The things he makes me do are disgusting.”

“Such as?”

“Whipping him and calling him names while he plays with himself. Wanting me to urinate on him. And worse. Unspeakable things.”

“And he forces you?”

She nodded.

“Often this happens?”