Hitler's Niece (8 page)

“I find the idea ridiculous,” Hitler said. “We are a party of the common people, not mystics.” And as Hess’s face fell, Hitler turned to an interior page to show the girls a cartoon he thought hilarious, of a handsome Germanic knight on his steed hauling away from his fortress a squalling, fat priest and an ugly Jew whose nose was as large as a gourd. The knight was ruefully thinking, “Must we always have to deal with these two?”

The girls looked at each other:
Why is that funny
? And then Ingrid quietly hinted, “We have to go practice.”

“What was that?” Hitler asked.

Geli smiled. “Sotto voce.”

“But I have so much yet to show you!”

“I have the morning.”

“Excellent!” her uncle said.

Putzi Hanfstaengl grinned and asked, “Are you aware that morning generally comes before noon?”

But Hitler kissed the girls’ hands and insisted, “You have my word of honor that I will be at the Königshof Hotel for you at nine a.m. tomorrow!”

Instead
Geli was met in the hotel lobby by a shy young man in a trench coat who introduced himself as Herr Julius Schaub, Hitler’s adjutant. A former shipping clerk at the Eher Publishing House, Schaub was a tall, sullen, old-seeming man of twenty-six with slicked-back hair, ears like handles, and staring eyes that he kept focused on the floor as he shook her hand and told her, “My job is to do whatever the leader asks. And he has asked me to give you a tour of München.”

“But he promised me he would do it himself.”

Schaub flickered a smile and asked, “Did he swear to God when he said that?”

“He gave me his word of honor.”

Schaub shrugged. “It’s the same thing. It means he strongly wishes he could oblige you. He cannot; I can. Shall we go?”

Hobbling through the lobby and outside, he told her that his feet had been frozen on the Russian front in 1917 and that he’d lost his toes. “You are so young you may not know it, but the German army was undefeated on the field. Yet we lost the war. We were sabotaged by the higher-ups at home.” Schaub considered her jacket. “Are you going to be cold?”

“No.”

“Don’t complain then.” He held open the passenger door to an old green Selve automobile. “Your uncle’s old car,” he said. “Herr Hitler is so generous that he gave it outright to me when he got his Mercedes eight-seater from his friends, the Bechsteins.” She sat inside, and he added, “I hope you aren’t bothered by the smell. The front seat is stuffed with seaweed.”

“In case you get hungry later?”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I was teasing, Herr Schaub.”

“You are glib, Fräulein Raubal,” he said as he got in the car, and then he hunted for what
he
was. “I am—”

“You are prickly, Herr Schaub.”

Concentrating hard, he frowned through the windshield and finally pronounced, “I find life a chancy and tragic affair, worthy of serious attention.”

She smiled. “You can say that while sitting on seaweed?”

Schaub was so offended he hardly looked at Geli again as he headed to the famous sites in München. “We are called ‘the City of Good Nature,’” he said as he drove. “The Capital of German Art,’ ‘the Athens on the Isar,’ ‘the Moscow of our Movement.’ We are nearing eight hundred thousand people, and less than four thousand Jews.”

She gave him a strange glance that he ignored. Schaub took her first to the Feldherrnhalle, where, as he put it, “our Nazi martyrs were killed in 1923” and then through the woods and meadows of Englischer Garten, which was “five kilometers long from north to south,” he said, “and the first public park on the Continent.” Then it was the Glaspalast, which housed industrial exhibits and had been constructed by King Maximilian II in imitation of the Crystal Palace in London. There was little to see now at the fairgrounds of Theresienwiese, he told her, but in mid-September it held Oktoberfest, the largest public festival in the world.

Schaub saw that she wasn’t paying attention, so, just for something to say, he asked if her singing went well, then failed to listen to her reply. At the botanical gardens, he confessed he’d given up cigarettes to please her uncle, but he badly wanted one now, as if she’d brought on that terrible craving. She walked through the huge Cathedral of Our Lady on her own, and when she came out, Schaub had been stewing for too long. Getting up from the cold stone steps, he told her, “You have heard of religious zealots, Fräulein Raubal? Well, Adolf Hitler is
my
religion.” And that was all of his conversation for another hour. Often he simply put on the brakes and with gravity pointed to a building as he named it—the Egyptian Museum, the Pinakothek, the Wittelsbach Residenz—then heavily stepped on the accelerator again. His tour ended northwest of the city at the huge baroque palace and five hundred acres of parkland built by the Wittelsbach royalty at Nymphenburg, where he was as silent as a bodyguard as they strolled through the villa and galleries and around a green lake where children played with sailboats. Taking out his pocket watch, Schaub frowned at the time and said, “I have orders to take you to Maximilianstrasse.”

“Why?”

“We have to buy you finer clothes. My leader says you look like a waif.”

Maximilianstrasse was the high-fashion district and full of the Italian shoes and haute couture dresses she’d seen only in glamour magazines. She was so giddy with the hundreds of choices that she tried on fourteen pairs of shoes while Schaub sighed in the chair beside her, and she later felt him simmering as she finally let a shop-girl decide which of the five elegant gowns she was fretting over she ought to buy as Hitler’s gift. To pay for it, Schaub got money out of a dirty envelope with NSDAP printed on its front, stingily put one bill at a time on the glass countertop, and when he carried the box outside he took off the string and saved it in his trench coat pocket.

“Well, that was fun,” Geli said.

“Was it? We are National
Socialists
, not National
Capitalists
.”

“I have been poor all my life, Herr Schaub. My uncle gave
you
a car.”

Schaub failed to find a reply until she got into the green Selve again. Then he faced her and with half-throttled misery said, “I have no friends.” And then he turned to start the car.

The
girls of Seraphim joined boys from Wilhelmsgymnasium in performing
The Messiah
at the Theatine Church that afternoon and were supposed to stroll through the Altstadt that evening, but when Geli got back to her room, she found a message from the concierge saying her uncle was speaking that night at the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl and was inviting his niece to hear him. And to wear her new clothes. She got the faltering permission of her teacher to go, and she was talking with Ingrid and four other friends in front of the Königshof Hotel when Hitler’s sleek red supercharged Mercedes Compressor arrived beside them as softly as fluid. Envy filled her hushed friends’ faces when they saw handsome Emil Maurice hurry out from behind the wheel to gallantly hold open the right-rear door for her. She got in with false majesty, and fluttered a queenly wave to her friends as the Mercedes headed off, leaving them to wander their high school around the Marienplatz and the shut-up stalls of the Victuals Market.

Her uncle failed to say hello as he tilted into the far-side window of the backseat in order to hold a page up to the fading sunlight of a quarter to eight. Wearing a gray velour fedora and gray wool suit with a soft-collared American white shirt and uninterestng tie, he looked like a financier as he oriented his black-framed glasses higher on his nose and frowned at his notes.

Sitting in the front-right seat was a White Russian with flawless German who turned and grandly introduced himself to Geli as Herr Alfred Rosenberg, editor-in-chief of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, which he unnecessarily told her was the official newspaper of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. He was a finely dressed widower of thirty-two with heavily pomaded dark hair, but he was also sallow, serious, faintly foul-smelling, and vain for no discernible reason, and within a few minutes she could see he was wholly deferential to Hitler, who paid him no heed at all. Rosenberg asked her, “Have you heard your uncle speak, Fräulein Raubal?”

“My mother says he was trying it even in childhood.”

“Humorous,” he flatly said. And then he looked at Hitler lovingly. “Oh, what an orator! Your uncle is better than opera!”

She looked at him. Hitler simply turned a page.

“My own gift is writing,” Rosenberg said.

She felt an ellipsis he wanted filled. “Shall I pry?” she asked.

Her uncle chuckled, but continued scanning his notes.

“Well, only articles and pamphlets up to now,” Rosenberg said.
“The Tracks of Jewry Through the Ages?”

She shook her head.

“Of late I have been laboring on a book about the biological necessity of war. Soon the blood spirit will cry out and world revolution will sweep away all falsifications as the soul of the blond, Nordic race is awakened under the sign of the swastika.”

She hardly heard a word, so stunned was she by his halitosis. “But who of us here is blond?” she asked.

Rosenberg faced the front again. “You probably wouldn’t understand my pamphlets. They’re not for females. Quite scientific.”

Without irony, Hitler said, “Herr Rosenberg is the party’s intellectual.”

Emil Maurice slyly shifted the rearview mirror to find her in it. He smiled, then changed lanes in traffic to pass a fruit vendor’s cart being pulled by a horse, then peered at her again. He smiled. Watching Emil watching her, she faced forward with a stiffened neck and formally folded hands and a look, she hoped, of insouciance.

The Hofbräuhaus was filling up when they got there. Hitler quickly hid his glasses as twenty urgent Sturmabteilung men in their late teens and twenties rushed to the famous car when they saw it. Each was in jackboots and jodhpurs and brown shirts, with the
Hak-enkreuz
, or swastika, insignia on a red armband. Hitler fondly smiled at them, as a father would his children, waiting for them to hold back the surging crowd before he got out and gracefully strode toward the Hofbräuhaus entrance under the Nazi salute, his dog whip in his left hand. Rosenberg followed him, and then Geli and Emil, his hand gently riding her waist as he guided her forward.

She heard the crowd wondering aloud who she was. Ever stilted and serious, Rudolph Hess pompously bowed toward Geli as he conferred with Max Amann at a folding table stacked high with the first volume of Hitler’s memoir
Mein Kampf (My Struggle)
. It had just been brought out by the Eher Publishing House, which the party owned. The price for the book was twelve reichsmarks, whereas the price for the old
Völkischer Beobachter
daily she’d seen had been eight billion
Rentenmarks
. Much had changed.

She saw an unconscious man being hauled out of the Hofbräuhaus by the ankles, his face an affluence of blood. She heard havoc to her right and shouts of “Red scum!” as three storm troopers chased onto a tramway a frail man in his sixties whose misfortune it was to resemble Lenin. She looked away in horror as each took turns hitting him, and when she looked back again he was just a bleeding heap on the tracks, trying to find a tooth.

But she forgot the violence in the festivities. Teenaged girls were handing out pretzels, and singing men were sharing a tankard of beer. Everywhere there were red-and-black political banners and posters: of Nazi hands holding out tools to job seekers under the words “Work and Bread” an illustration of a Nazi fist strangling a frightening black python underneath “Death to Lies” a fierce eagle astride a swastika held up by the masses, and over it “Germany Awake!” and a sketch of three scowling soldiers haloed by a swastika and the phrase “National Socialism—the Organized Will of the Nation.” Above the front doors of the Hofbräuhaus was a freshly painted sign that read NO ENTRY FOR JEWS.

About four thousand people were crammed inside the hall and interior garden, the greater percentage of them forlorn middle-aged men who seemed to be former army officers, civil servants with dueling scars, schoolteachers, waiters, clerks and shopkeepers, factory workers and farmers, some in the lederhosen, jackets, and feathered hats that was the Bavarian national costume; and in the front rows were old ladies in fine dresses and hats, a few of them knitting as they waited. Emil called them “The Incorruptibles.” A greater part of the crowd, though, was comprised of high school students, fraternity brothers from the university, even children—the majority of those wearing Nazi pins were under twenty-five. Collection baskets were being passed from hand to hand, as in church. Everyone seemed to have a tankard of beer and a cigarette or a pipe, and some were stooped over paper plates of bratwurst and sauerkraut. Tobacco smoke hung in the hall like filmy curtains of gray and blue.

Emil told her she would be sitting far away from the main stage because there were generally fights at these rallies, and ferocious arguments over nothing. She was installed, therefore, in an upper loft in the hall. With her there were journalists slouched in their chairs, some wives or mistresses of party members, a harried waitress with tremendous breasts filling orders for food, and, in the farthest corner, a stern priest in a black suit and Roman collar watching Emil leave.

She leaned over the railing of the balustrade to observe Emil as he fought through the crowd to join Julius Schaub as a bodyguard while Rosenberg and Hess huddled with her uncle and other party officials by the stage. Hitler was the only one not talking, a fact he seemed to find irritating. She was fascinated that so many people there seemed excited about hearing him speak, for from this distance he seemed wary, officious, and ordinary, like a concierge in a hotel that had fallen on hard times.

She heard a man say, “You must be important.” And she turned to find the priest leaning on a cane held in his left hand, his black fedora in the other. He was a fit, broad-shouldered man of fifty, a few inches over six feet in height, with steel-blue eyes, a wild shock of graying brown hair, and the hard, weathered face of a frontline infantry soldier. He further explained himself by saying, “Wasn’t that one of Hitler’s friends?”