Hitler's Niece (6 page)

Angela grimly asked, “Why are people always assuring me that my family has no love life?”

Geli sighed loudly, then fluttered her eyes at Putzi in apology.

“Well,” he said. “We’re having such a lovely time I hate to have it end. Shall I try to get us seats at the opera?”

Geli nearly shrieked, she was so thrilled. “Oh,
could
you?”

Putzi stood up from the dining table and said, “The concierge of the Sacher Hotel is famous for finding tickets when none are available.”

Angela watched him lumber through the dining room to the hotel lobby, then she frostily said to her daughter, “You
shock
me, Angelika!”

She smiled. “Only because I have such an electric personality.”

“Carrying on with a married man.”

“We were just talking, Mother!”

“You’re fifteen years old! The thought of you at twenty gives me goose bumps!”

“Well, that’s easy: Don’t think.”

Angela furiously hit the dining table hard with the flat of her hand. Cutlery jangled and Geli jumped with fear. Heads turned in wonder throughout the Café Sacher.

Tears filled Geli’s brown eyes as she thickly asked, “You know how long it’s been since I’ve had any fun at all? Why can’t you just let me
be
this one night?” She sniffed, and got out a handkerchief. “It probably won’t ever happen again.”

She’s right
, Angela thought, and said nothing more. She watched a handsome couple on Kärntnerstrasse get into a horsedrawn carriage. She ate the last of her Sacher torte. And then the last of Geli’s. Then Ernst Hanfstaengl was there again, huffing with breathlessness but holding up three opera tickets in triumph. “
The Merry Widow
,” he said.

Geli felt sure he was making fun of her mother, but she couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

L
ANDSBERG
F
ORTRESS
, 1924

At Christmastide the
Raubals got a card from Ernst and Helene Hanfstaengl featuring a fine reproduction of Raphael Sanzio’s
Madonna of the Chair
and saying in a note how much Putzi had enjoyed meeting them in Wien, and that in a porkpie hat and fake muttonchop whiskers he’d sneaked back into Germany through a dangerous railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden known as the “Hanging Stone.”

Within the card Putzi included a journalist’s newspaper account of a living tableau that a group of artists had created at the Blute Café in Schwabing. Called “Adolf Hitler in Prison,” it featured a jail cell and snowflakes falling behind a barred window as a dark-haired man hunched at a desk with his face buried in his hands. A hidden chorus softly sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” as a female angel gracefully carried in an illuminated Christmas tree and placed it on a table. Looking up in surprise, the prisoner showed his face “and the crowd in the café gasped and sobbed, for many thought it was Hitler himself.” When the lights went up, the journalist had noticed some wet-eyed men and women hastily putting away their handkerchiefs.

After she’d read the account aloud to Angela, Geli was astonished to see that her mother’s face was streaked with tears. “Are you
weeping?
”

Wiping her cheeks with her palm, Angela said, “I just wish you children could have gotten to know your Uncle Adolf better.” She got the Christmas card from Geli and displayed it on the fireplace mantle. “And I suppose I’m crying because I’m ashamed that it was strangers who first pointed out to me what an admirable man my brother is. The family always,
always
underestimated him. No wonder he was so distant.”

In
February 1924, Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, Ernst Röhm, and seven codefendants went on trial for
Hochverrat
(high treason) in a classroom of the old brick infantry school. Hitler was the first to be called to the dock and immediately accepted full responsibility for the putsch, regretting only that he had not been slaughtered along with his fallen comrades, and consigning “the other gentlemen,” including General Ludendorff, who was pompously there in full dress uniform, to the weaker, subordinate roles of those who “have only cooperated with me.” Calculating that the conservative judiciary preserved nationalist sympathies and despised socialism, just as he knew the police and army did, Hitler immediately upset judicial proceedings by becoming the accuser, arguing in a strong, baritone voice that he was not a traitor but a patriot, that he alone was trying to lift Germany up from its oppression and misery, that he alone was forming a bulwark against Communism in whatever form it took.

In front of a huge international press corps, Hitler proclaimed that “the man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills. He is not driven forward; he drives himself forward. There is nothing immodest about this. The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say: ‘If you want me or summon me, I will cooperate.’ No! It is his duty to step forward.”

Employing his mastery of rhetoric and effrontery, he thoroughly dominated the little, goateed presiding judge, the three thunderstruck lay judges, and a chief prosecutor so harried by the hoots and jeers of university students that he began offering platitudes to the principal defendant, congratulating him on his self-sacrifice, his military service, his private life that had always been proper in spite of many carnal temptations, and calling Hitler “a highly gifted man who, coming from a simple background, has, through serious and hard work, won for himself a respected place in public life.”

Hitler held sway throughout the forty days of the trial, inventing himself as a popular hero as he shouted ridicule, interrupted testimony, and orated at one point for four whole hours—about which the presiding judge meekly explained, “It is impossible to keep Hitler from talking.”

The
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
noted in an editorial, “We make no bones about the fact that our human sympathies lie on the side of the defendants and not with the November criminals of 1918.” The jailers were said to be uncertain as to whether to watch him or wait on him. Women were bringing flowers to him. A female follower requested permission to take a bath in his tub. One of the panel of three lay judges was heard to say after a speech, “But he’s a colossal fellow, this man Hitler!”

In accordance with German law, he was given the final word, and he told the court: “It is not you, gentlemen, who pronounce judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down, I know. But that Court will not ask us ‘Did you commit high treason or did you not?’ That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, men who, as Germans, wanted and desired only the good of their people and fatherland; who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state’s attorney and the sentence of this court; for she acquits us.”

The Raubals followed the judicial proceedings in the
Münchener Zeitung
and were shocked that the stuffy and querulous Erich Ludendorff, who’d condemned Adolf during the trial as a foreign agitator, was acquitted of high treason, and Wilhelm Frick, a collaborating police chief, and Ernst Röhm were condemned but released, while Adolf and the other codefendants were found guilty of the charges against them, and Hitler was sentenced to four and a half years in the prison at Landsberg am Lech—precisely the length of time he’d served in the war, and the number of years between his resignation from the Reichswehr and, as it was now called, the “Beer Hall Putsch.”

Within days of the sentencing, Angela got a letter from the presently illegal Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, signed
für den Führer
by Alfred Rosenberg, saying that Herr Hitler would benefit psychologically and in the court of public opinion if the Raubals were to reestablish family ties with him. While party officials thought it would be fitting for Leo and Paula to stay in Austria, they wondered if Angela and Geli would be so good as to visit Adolf soon at Landsberg am Lech. Included with the letter were two round-trip railway tickets and what seemed to Angela a generous amount of money “for miscellaneous expenses.”

“What do you wear to a
prison?
” Geli asked.

They went in funeral dresses and black veiled hats, going to München in a first-class railway car, and then an hour west by taxi through the mists of the forests above the Lech River. The fields were still white with snow and the sky was as gray and close as a kettle lid. On a hill outside the handsome medieval village of Landsberg was a fortress of high stone walls and watchtowers that surrounded the old gray buildings of what was now a penitentiary. There common criminals were jailed in one part and those considered political prisoners in another. Adolf Hitler was being held as a traitor in cell 7.

Walking Angela and Geli inside, a friendly prison guard named Franz Hemmrich took them past the dining hall where forty-five Nazis ate their meals at five linked tables and where Hitler would sit regally at the head in front of the hanging red flag and swastika of the party. And when they were going upstairs to cell 7, Hemmrich confided to them about Herr Hitler’s good manners and magnetism, how firmly he governed the other prisoners so there was never any fuss, how he’d given all his guards boxes of Lindt truffles to take home to their wives, how he was like Saint Paul in chains: You knew that if the jail fell down, you would still find Hitler obediently waiting in his cell. “To be frank, I hated him and his program just a few months ago,” Herr Hemmrich said, “but the warden forced me to listen in as he talked to his friends, to find out what he was plotting, and he made so much sense to me that within a few days I joined the party. Others here are doing the same.”

When they got to cell 7, the guard unlocked the door, hollered “Heil Hitler!” and kissed Angela’s and Geli’s hands in good-bye, just as it was Hitler’s habit to do.

They heard Hitler talking when they walked inside, but he was behind a closed door. Angela was surprised to find that the cell was like a white-walled gentleman’s club and filled with so much food it looked like a fancy delicatessen. Well-wishers from all over Germany had mailed Hitler fruit baskets, homemade strudel and tortes and cakes, Rhein and Mosel wines, Westphalian hams, brown rings of sausage and salami, Andechs and Franziskaner beer. Angela lifted off her veiled hat as she went to a four-paned window of old glass and iron bars and saw a fine but wrinkled view of frosted trees along the Lech River and a garden on the first floor. An old Remington typewriter was on a walnut secretary against one wall, and a ream of white bond paper was beside it, patiently waiting for words; the four chairs were made of cane and rattan, and a bookcase held works by Bismarck, Nietzsche, Ranke, Treitschke, and Marx. A crown formed with sprigs of green laurel leaves was tacked onto one wall, and on the floor was an old front page of the London
Times
, obliterated with Hitler’s offended comments and juvenile caricatures of Jewish faces. One of the Landsberg prisoners knew English, Angela saw, for he’d translated into German a journalist’s opinion that “the Hitler trial has proved that a plot against the Constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria”—about which the prisoner offered a fairly obvious and vulgar joke on the constitution of the queen.
With time on their hands
, Angela thought,
men turn into boys
. She heard her daughter say, “What a lot of loot!” and she turned.

Geli, too, was now hatless. She’d tucked a pink sugarcane in her cheek as she held a mandolin she’d found and strummed a chord with a plectrum. “We have been far too law-abiding, Mother.”

“Are you thinking we ought to trade places?”

“Aren’t you?”

Angela said, “We’d be in a tailor shop here. We’d be doing dishes. Adolf has always had a way of getting extra consideration.”

A tall, fierce, officious man in loden-green hiking clothes looked out from the room where Hitler was talking. “You are the Raubals?”

“Yes.”

Angela briefly saw Adolf holding forth before the man softly shut the door behind him. He held out his hand to her. “Herr Rudolf Hess,” he said. “His personal secretary.” He shook her hand hard once while formally bowing. And then he did the same to Geli.

They felt like Prussian officers just in from the front. They both gave their first names.

“The leader is conferring with Count Rudinski,” Hess said, as if they’d surely know the name. “Won’t you please sit?”

They did, as did he, effeminately crossing his legs at his thighs but holding himself firmly upright with an air of stiff-backed confidence, his square-jawed head tilted high. His hairline was receding, but his black hair flowed back from his forehead in waves that women got by marcelling theirs with hot irons. Angela had never seen eyebrows that were so much like heavy objects, that so darkly shaded his deep eyesockets that his irises were as obscured as brown pebbles dropped in snow. His mouth was a wide, thin line and tightly shut in order to hide the buckteeth and overbite that stole from him the look of high intellect he wanted. Ill at ease with their silence, he offered, “Would you like some food?”

“Shall we hire a truck?” Angela asked.

Geli giggled behind her hand.

Hess faintly smiled, as though he’d missed the humor, and then he lifted and seemed to weigh a Thüringer cervelat in his hand. “We get these gifts, and I know we aren’t finished. The party is forbidden in Germany now, Hitler is forbidden to speak, the hierarchy is in disarray; and yet we find such public sentiment in our favor that we can only look at our prison stay as a mild interruption in our heroic march toward destiny.”

“You sound like Adolf,” Angela said.

“You flatter me,” said Hess. And then, in the Nazi way, he began talking at length about himself, saying he’d been born in Alexandria, Egypt, five years after Hitler, the son of a wholesale importer. He had gone to business school in Switzerland, and had worked in Hamburg for his family. Then the archduke and his wife had been killed in Sarajevo and he’d become a lieutenant and shock-troop leader in the First Bavarian Regiment before joining the air corps. Losing interest in commerce after the armistice, he had enrolled at the university in München and had had the good fortune to have as his mentor Herr Professor Karl Haushofer of the Geo-Political department, the author of the theory of Lebensraum.

She hadn’t heard of it.

“Simply that the future of a culturally dominant but land-starved country like Germany necessitates the annexation of states in eastern Europe.”

“I see.”

To make a long story short, in 1920 a German millionaire who’d fled to Brazil but still had great love for his country had offered a significant cash prize to the most worthy essay on the theme: “How must the Man be constituted who will lead Germany back to her former heights of glory?”

Angela got up and took an orange from a basket. She began peeling it.

“Eat, yes. We have so much,” Hess said. And then he continued, “It was precisely that question that was preoccupying me in my political studies, and so on paper I constructed a messiah who would lead the Aryan race to its rightful place in the world. He would strike one at first as an ordinary man and have his origins among the masses so he could understand them psychologically, but he would be a genius, of course, with superb talents and intellect, and would have nothing in common with them. He would be a fantastic public speaker, all fire and personality. Currents of electricity would flow from him. Worrying about nothing, not even the fate of his friends, he would not shrink from bloodshed but would unhesitatingly march forward with hardness and an iron will, trampling whoever blocked his path in order to achieve his goal in all its purity.”