Hitler's Niece (32 page)

She noted that “there were no more happy picnics” after Geli died, and no one felt free to mention her name. Hitler never again played the piano, he was more slovenly in his grooming, he gave up all forms of alcohol, the anarchy of his allocation of time just got worse, and on September 18th and Christmas Eve each year until 1939, he would keep a self-pitying all-night vigil in his niece’s room.

In a face-to-face confrontation with Hitler at the Berghof in 1943, Henny von Schirach criticized the harsh treatment of the Jews in Austria, and she fell foul of the führer. A few months before the end of the war, she and her husband were divorced. She’d had four children with Baldur von Schirach, and had named the first one Angela.

In 1933 Chancellor Hitler made Baldur von Schirach, then twenty-six, his Reich youth leader and offered him to the public as an Adonis who embodied all that was fine and glorious in the young. Soon his picture was nearly as widely displayed throughout Germany as Adolf Hitler’s. Jealousy led to vilification from other Nazis and jokes about his effeminacy, and in 1941 he was ousted from the hierarchy and sent to Wien as
Gauleiter
and Reich governor. Schirach defended the eastward deportation of nearly two hundred thousand Austrian Jews as “a contribution to European culture,” but later, in the Nürnberg trials, he denied he knew of their extermination and called the annihilation of European Jewry “the greatest and most satanic murder in world history.” Sentenced to twenty years in prison for crimes against humanity, he was released in 1966 and died twelve years later.

Julius Schaub became an SS
Obersturmführer
, or first lieutenant, and Hitler’s aide-de-camp throughout the war, and as the führer’s health faded, his crutch. While in prison he wrote his unpublishable memoirs, then fell into the obscurity that his character warranted.

In 1935 Emil Maurice was condemned by the Gestapo for having Jewish ancestry, but the führer intervened for the Old Combatant, and in 1937 even made Emil the head of the Landeshandwerksmeis-ter, a society of professional handicrafts workers, a job for which he was particularly unsuited. In the war he became an SS
Oberführer
, or brigadier general, and he survived it. Eva Braun’s biographer interviewed him in 1968, and found that thirty-seven years after her death, he was still in love with Geli Raubal.

As
minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels once cynically admitted that the way to attract new members to the party was to excite the most primitive instincts of “the stupid, the lazy, and the cowardly,” that hatred was his primary trade; but by 1945 it was he who was hated and ridiculed throughout Germany as “the malicious dwarf” and “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.” A friendless man all his life, he still venerated Adolf Hitler as a Teutonic god, and held him in such unfathomable awe that he felt priv-iliged to have his wife and six young children invited to suffer the grim final days in the bunker below the Reich’s chancellery in Berlin.

Magda Goebbels had long been so strangely in love with Hitler that she’d agreed to marry the faithless Doktor Goebbels just to be closer to him, and frequently thought of herself as “First Lady of the Reich.” She, like her husband, could not conceive of life without the führer. Within hours of Hitler’s suicide, Magda had her one son and five daughters injected with morphine to calm them, then fed them poisoned chocolate and watched them die. Then Doktor and Frau Goebbels walked up the four flights of stairs to the night of the chancellery garden where Magda bit into an ampule of potassium cyanide as her husband stood behind her and fired a bullet into her brain. Doktor Goebbels then chewed an ampule as he fired his Walther P-38 pistol into his right temple. An SS guard fired twice into the fallen bodies to make sure they were dead. Imitating Hitler in all things, Doktor Goebbels had left instructions for SS orderlies to douse their bodies in four jerry cans of gasoline before setting them aflame, but the job was incomplete and their faces were skinless but still recognizable when the invading Russians found and photographed them.

On May 21, 1945, British soliders at a checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremerhaven halted a car in which was cowering a man who seemed familiar. Crazed with failure and in ill health, his gray mustache shaved off, his pince-nez forsaken for a fake eye patch, his clothing that of a janitor, he was still unmistakably Heinrich Himmler, minister of the interior; Reich commissar for the consolidation of German nationhood;
Reichsführer
of the SS, the security service, three million policemen, the prisoners of war camps and the extermination camps at Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobibór, Maidanek, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. In jail a doctor examined him and saw in his mouth what seemed to be a black and carious molar. It was, in fact, a vial of cyanide. Immediately Himmler bit down on it, swallowed the poison, and writhed on the floor in agony for twelve minutes—many would say not long enough—until he was finally dead.

Collecting offices and titles just as he collected looted masterpieces, Hermann Wilhelm Göring was, before he fell out of favor with Hitler, Prussian minister of the interior, president of the Reichstag, chief of the Luftwaffe, head of the Gestapo, and
Reichsmarschall
of greater Germany, the fat Falstaff in many malicious jokes. Combining flamboyance, greed, hedonism, joviality, cruelty, and misanthropy with a love of deer hunting and the shrewd eye for art and jewelry of a connoisseur, Göring was thought of, in Nazi circles, as a Renaissance man; but with no education, no ethics, no second thoughts, no skill in administration, no understanding of technology, no perseverance, and with frequent miscalculations of Allied strength, his many organizations faltered and failed in the war, and on May 9, 1945, he was taken prisoner by soldiers of the United States Seventh Army. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international military tribunal in Nürnberg, he was sentenced to death by hanging in 1946, but instead, as the scaffold was readied in the jail yard at Spandau, he managed to commit suicide with the help of a hidden poison. In his death photograph he is winking.

Alfred Rosenberg, who was called “the intellectual high priest of the master race,” continued to publish widely in the thirties on racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic themes, and was rewarded with the title of “Deputy for the Entire Spiritual Development and Ideology of the NSDAP,” and then Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories, jobs that allowed him to liquidate the Jewish ghettos, to plunder fine art from Jewish collections, and to write memoranda that no one read. At the Nürnberg trials he claimed his writings had been shamefully misused, that he’d wanted a “chivalrous solution” to the Jewish question, that concentration camps and gas chambers were inconceivable to him and to Hitler, who’d only intended to give the Jews “harsh warnings.” Rosenberg was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed by hanging in 1946.

Rudolf Hess was deputy führer and Reich minister without portfolio when, in 1941, he crazily flew a Messerschmitt over the North Sea and parachuted into Scotland in order to independently negotiate peace with Great Britain and demand that Winston Churchill resign. Jailed in the Tower of London until 1945, he feigned insanity, amnesia, and sheer disinterest at the Nürnberg trials, whined continually about his health, and was shunned by the other prisoners, who called him “Fräulein Anni.” Claiming he’d worked “under the greatest son Germany had brought forth in its thousand-year history,” he once wrote that, “Even if I could, I would not want to erase this Nazi period of time from my existence. I do not regret anything.” When eleven of his codefendants were executed, Hess was amused. Even after the war he was still insisting that the Jews in Germany should be imprisoned “for their own protection.” Only when he was seventy-five years old did he allow his wife Ilse to visit him. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Hesserl, his Rudi, was the sole prisoner in Spandau jail when he died in 1987 at the age of ninety-three, and after that the jail was destroyed.

On
April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in a confining and unfinished concrete bunker of thirty rooms far below the garden of the Reichs chancellery in Berlin. Walls sweated, old food littered the hallways, floors were tangled with electric cables, the Red Army’s shelling of the city was a worrying noise overhead, and with seventy people crowded underground and too few lavatories, the smell was so foul that a staff member later said “it was like working in a public urinal.”

A flighty and lovesick Eva Braun joined Adolf down there and found a screeching, hysterical, stooped, and prematurely senile old man whose once stunning eyes were now teary and shot with red veins, whose skin was sallow, whose hair had turned suddenly gray, whose hands trembled, who stank, who shuddered, who could no longer even hold a rifle, who lost his balance when he walked, whose feet had to be lifted onto his bed by his valet. The front of his brown uniform jacket was stained with soup and mustard. Spittle was often on his lips and he drooled or whistled through his false teeth when he talked. Imaginary armies ignored his commands; treachery was everywhere; his dearest friends had failed and undermined him.

Eva Braun had been his secret mistress for thirteen years; she was his “girl at my disposal in München.” Even as late as April 1st he’d confessed to his secretary, “Eva is very nice, but only Geli could have inspired in me genuine passion. Marrying Eva is out of the question. The only woman I would ever have tied myself to for life was my niece.”

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.”