Hitler's Niece (16 page)

“Looks like fun,” Geli said.

Emil just surveyed the room, hunting for Hitler.

Wishing she were back in the car kissing Emil, she hopefully asked, “Are you bored yet?”

“We’ll get away soon,” Emil promised.

The Hohenzollern Princes August-Wilhelm and Prince Eitel-Friedrich were announced at the grand ballroom’s entrance and waved to the partygoers, then gave way to their host. Wearing a white tie and tails and a peculiarly buoyant expression, Hitler strode in behind them and soaked up the roars and applause from all sides before falling into his habit of torrential talk. The partygoers circled around him. Congratulating the newly elected deputies, Hitler predicted that journalists would call them the Reichstag’s twelve black sheep, but in fact they would be wolves, continually hunting for and sorting out Germany’s enemies. Without a financial or political crisis in the country, the party would not find more adherents, he admitted, but in the Weimar Republic such crises were inevitable. They would just need to have patience. And though he felt the gloom they had felt when he’d first heard how the voting had gone, he’d noticed that their losses were not to the centrist parties but were to those on the far left and right. So the people were welcoming extreme solutions. The party would simply have to concentrate on teaching the public that National Socialism was the only extreme that would not ultimately fail, and would persevere and finally triumph over all opposition. And then, with his voice hinting at the strain of overuse, Hitler ceased talking, and to shouts of joy and thunderous applause he waded into the crush of party members to shake hands and hear their praises.

Emil escorted Geli toward a flourishing bar at the far end of the ballroom, but he was called by a joyless, healthless, chinless man in his late twenties who was wearing pince-nez and sitting with his older fiancée at a big round table, and Emil, for some ungodly reason, felt obliged to go to them.

And that was how Geli met Heinrich Himmler. She would later learn from Göring that Himmler had been born to a Catholic family in Landshut, near München, in 1900, the son of a much-esteemed teacher in a Gymnasium that served high society and the Bavarian royal court. An orderly-room clerk and officer cadet in the final year of the war, Himmler had never found his way to the front and would often say he regretted that, though Emil thought it likely he was just trying to fit in with the other former soldiers around him, for he fainted at the sight of blood. In 1922 he had graduated from the Technische Universität in München with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture, and with a prized dueling scar on his cheek. A job selling fertilizer for a firm in Schleissheim had enabled him to buy his own chicken farm and join a Blood and Soil group called the Artamanen, farming men. And that in turn had led him to join the occult society that was called the Thule Gesellschaft, and through it become friends with Dietrich Eckart and Captain Ernst Röhm, whose adjutant he had been in the putsch.

Emil had first met Himmler in 1925 when he’d been named the party’s deputy
Gauleiter
and
Obmann
, or propaganda director, for Upper Bavaria and Swabia. Quietly hardworking and shrewd, highly organized and suspicious, Himmler had found Hitler’s favor over other party officials through his loyalty, his freedom from scandal, and his methodical accumulation of facts about the friends and enemies of the führer. In 1927 Himmler had become deputy
Reichsführer
of the few hundred men in the Schutzstaffeln, the SS, which functioned as the party police; and now he’d invited Emil Maurice to his table in order to recruit him as an officer, and Geli was of no interest to him.

His glazed hazel eyes were vacant, his handshake moist, his face as bland as a thumb as he officiously introduced himself as Deputy Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. His dark brown hair was all but shaved from the sides of his head, but was scruffed on top, like a squirrel’s tail. Geli was a few inches shorter than he but her shoulders were wider; he seemed without muscle, as soft as eiderdown, ineffectual and passive, but beneath the coldness and dullness of his face she felt she detected a fearsome seething and contempt that he was holding under fierce control. “You are from Wien, Fräulein Raubal,” he said.

“I am.”

“Have you visited the Treasury?”

“With my uncle, yes.”

“And how did you feel about the Holy Lance?”

She shrugged. “It was nice. I was just eleven then.”

His face twitched and he turned from her to Emil. She felt she’d flunked his test. “Shall we sit?” he said, and they did. And then he told Emil about the Aryan criteria he was establishing for those who wanted to join the Schutzstaffeln, strictly judging each applicant on the basis of his family origins—including proof of Aryan forebears for a minimum of three generations—and hereditary biology, health, physique, and physiognomy. The deputy
Reichsführer
himself would subject each applicant’s photograph to his famous magnifying glass to ensure conformity to his rigid standards. The SS insignia would be a skull and bones, signifying its sworn loyalty and obedience to the führer, even if that meant death. “We’ll be an elite,” Heinrich Himmler said. “We’ll be like Jesuits without Jesus.”

“Aren’t you flattered, Emil!” Geli falsely gushed. “The high honor of even being considered!”

“Are you being humorous?” Himmler asked.

“Apparently not.” She leaned forward to find Emil’s eyes. “What
day
did we get here?”

Emil smiled. “Soon.”

Geli turned to Himmler’s fiancée. She was Margarete Boden, a shy, desultory, prematurely gray woman seven years older than he was. She talked dully for a while about her faith in herbalism and homeopathy, but then fascinated Geli by saying that her fiancé had foresworn any physical contact with her until their marriage. “Oh, but it’s so hard on him. ‘Don’t you know how I long to hold you and kiss your feet?’ Heinrich says. But he also says that a wife’s perpetual innocence and purity give a real man the strength never to falter in even the worst strife he encounters.”

“And have you been engaged for a long time?”

“Six months now.”

“Whose idea was the marriage?” Geli asked.

“Herr Hitler’s. He insisted.”

Rudolf and Ilse Hess strolled over and joined them. Ilse asked Geli, “Are you aware that you and your uncle have the same tarot archetype?”

“Which is?”

“The hierophant.”

“Really!” Himmler said.

“Oh,
now
you’re impressed.” She looked to Ilse. “I have no idea what that means.”

Doktor Goebbels ambled over to the table and told Heinrich Himmler, “We have further good news. Prince Viktor and Princess Marie-Elisabeth zu Wied have made inquiries about ‘the Hitler movement.’”

Ilse told Geli, “The hierophant was an official interpreter of rites of worship and sacrifice in ancient Greece, and in the tarot represents the principles of learning and teaching. You’re influenced by Isis, the goddess of intuition. You walk the mystical path with practical feet. I haven’t finished your birth chart yet.”

“And mine?” Doktor Goebbels asked as he settled next to Geli.

“I have only Herr Hitler’s,” she said.

Effervescent with victory, Hermann and Carin Göring found their table, but frowned at its barrenness. “We need champagne here,” Captain Göring said, and he shouted to a faraway man with a tray, “Waiter! Three bottles of Mumm’s! And nine glasses!” He held out a chair for his wife, then reversed another and straddled it, hunkering forward with his fleshy, pink cheeks in his palms as he watched Ilse unfold a page of handwritten notes.

She said, “The leader was born on the cusp between Aries and Taurus, just like Mussolini and Stalin, and has his sun in Taurus and Libra, so there’s a fondness for the arts combined with infinite ambition. Which is why he can be tyrannical at times.”

“Oh, what a
child
I become in his presence!” Captain Göring exclaimed. “I can’t explain it. I’ll be full of certainty and valor, but he’ll turn on me and I wither.”

“It’s his eyes,” Doktor Goebbels said. “They’ll scar you for life.”

Captain Göring hurriedly added, “I meant it only in a positive way, Doktor Goebbels.”

“Me too,” said Doktor Goebbels.

“Continue please, Ilse,” said Rudolf Hess. “We’re very interested.”

“Quite willing to sacrifice his own happiness to a higher ideal,” she said, “he is apt to put off his own matrimonial bliss for the good of Germany. And yet this may cause him fits of jealousy and self-recrimination.”

Heinrich Himmler objected, “I haven’t seen that.”

“She used the word ‘may,’” said Rudolf Hess. “A conditional tense. Merely a possibility.”

“Careful, Frau Hess,” Doktor Goebbels said. “There’s plenty of room for you in Himmler’s filing cabinets.”

“I have no importance,” she said, and went on, “Herr Hitler has Pluto in his eighth house, which is what accounts for his stamina and tenaciousness, as well as his wonderful influence over people. And the moon in his third house gives him marvelous powers of verbal expression.”

“We found that particularly interesting,” said Rudolf Hess.

“Also, ‘sun trine Jupiter,’” his wife read.

“Oh good,” said Himmler’s fiancée.

“Sun trine Jupiter?” Geli asked.

Himmler’s fiancée said, “Wealth and success.”

Carin Göring said, “I’d heard that meant religiosity.”

“All those things, as well as a high level of intelligence,” said Himmler. “And Mars?”

“Mars square Saturn,” said Ilse Hess.

“Cruelty. Egotism,” said Carin Göring. She elbowed her husband. Who shrugged.

“Also, Mars trine Jupiter,” said Ilse Hess. “Rudi, how would you put it?”

“We have found such a combination in preachers whose joy it is to offer freedom and truth to those who will hear them.”

“Earlier I so wanted you to do my chart, Ilse,” Carin Göring said. “But how can I bear it now? I’ll be so
banal
.”

With a sidelong glance, her husband said, “Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

“We all suffer in comparison with the leader,” Doktor Goebbels said.

“And here he is,” Emil said.

Like schoolboys the men hurtled up from their chairs as their master walked over, his forelock fallen, his white tie cocked. Ilse Hess surreptitiously folded up her notes. Widening his arms and smiling, Hitler said, “What a joy for your leader to find all his friends sharing the same table! Would you do me the honor of having you as my guests in the dining room?”

And as they collected their things and Emil took her hand and they all strolled across the grand ballroom, Geli looked at Rudolf and Ilse Hess, Doktor Joseph Goebbels, Hermann and Carin Göring, and Heinrich Himmler and his fiancée, and she thought that if she was in fact one of them, Hitler’s friends, she would be mortified.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

P
ICNIC
, 1928

She quit medical
studies after her first year at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität. She’d earned fairly good grades in English and fairly poor grades in the sciences, and after her hectic, high-living nights she too often found herself bored and cold and overtired in the heatless lecture halls and ludicrously ill-equipped labs, while being forced to continually report how she was doing academically to a scoffing, proprietary uncle who hated academics. And so she told him on her twentieth birthday, in June, that she would like to try other things in the fall.

They were in the foyer of the Osteria Bavaria, and his face became as somber as her chemistry professor’s. “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he faintly bowed to the owner, who was frantically helping four waiters set up Hitler’s table on the patio.

“I think it is, Uncle Alf.”

With a forced smile of affection he said, “Women ought to be mothers.
That
is their talent.” And then he stalked ahead of her to his luncheon table.

She felt annoyed enough then to change her mind, but she was fearful of his scolding. She instead told him as she sat next to him, “I haven’t given up on the idea of medicine. This may be temporary.”

“We’ll hope for the best,” he said. His hand fleetingly touched her knee as he unfolded a napkin in his lap, and he immediately rose and jarred his chair farther away. “My apologies,” he told her.

“Accepted.”

And then Max Amann, Alfred Rosenberg, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Rudolf Hess joined them. Each handed Geli a birthday card containing fifty reichsmarks, as if they’d voted on an affordable sum, and then Hitler gave her a flat package in white butcher paper that he’d watercolored and addressed to “My Darling Angelika.” In a silver photography frame inside were four Heinrich Hoffmann snapshots of her uncle in 1926 as he practiced using his hands histrionically in accordance with the instructions of a famous clairvoyant named Erik Jan Hanussen.

“Are you pleased?” Hitler seriously asked.

She was at a loss for words.

And then the five men all fell into laughter and the owner of the Osteria Bavaria walked forward with Hitler’s real birthday gift of a fancy golden birdcage and two bright yellow St. Andreasburg canaries. With joy her uncle told her, “I have decided. You’ll be taking singing lessons.”

She was delighted. She recalled the finch’s proper name from zoology class:
Serinus canaria
. She stuck a finger inside the cage and the canaries shied from it. “With such good teachers, Uncle Alf!”

“Why not? And then in the fall perhaps with Herr Adolf Vogl, a friend in the party.”

“Another Adolf?” she asked.

“There’s only one, really,” he said. “And now are you pleased?”

She teased, “Will I still get to keep the photographs?”

“Naturally.”

She kissed his cheek and said, “I love you, Uncle Alf.”

He flinched at hearing the word “love” and his hooded stare fled to four parts of the room.

“We all love him,” said Rudolf Hess.

Hunting for some distraction, Hitler took the knife from beside his plate and polished it with his napkin. “And after you finish your final exams tomorrow—”

“With flying colors,” said Alfred Rosenberg.

“—you should hurry and get your things together. We’re going to Obersalzberg.”

Heinrich
Hoffmann’s wife had died in the European influenza epidemic of 1928, and he was so worried about his fifteen-year-old daughter being alone and available to boys while high school was out that Hitler graciously invited Henny to stay with Geli in Haus Wachenfeld that summer.

They’d both later remember that July and August as their most glorious time in Obersalzberg. The nights were cool, the fields were green, the skies were azure blue, and the air was filled with the scent of pine and snow and wildflowers. Geli and Henny would finish their housecleaning chores by noon and have the afternoons to stroll through Berchtesgaden with chocolate ice cream in waffle cones, hike up past the treeline on Kehlstein Mountain in their hobnailed boots and feed chunks of snow to Prinz, furiously race at filling in the Sunday crossword puzzles after the Raubals came back from Mass, find hilarity in reading Karl May’s Westerns aloud on the terrace with false male voices, lie flat on the floor of the Winter Garden, their chins on their fists, tuning in a faint London signal on the radio to listen hard and seriously to American music: “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Thou Swell,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “You Took Advantage of Me.”

Angela shifted her things to Geli’s room so the friends could share Angela’s full-sized bed on the first floor and watch the canaries fly around the room, and chatter and fret and giggle until one or two in the morning. With childish excitement, Henny once told the plot of a chilling film Geli had missed, a film in which a fiendish scientist took control of a prostitute and inseminated her with sperm he’d extracted from a just-hanged criminal. She became pregnant, and the girl who was born grew up to be a sleepwalking temptress named Alraune who ruined all the foolish men who fell in love with her. “You were supposed to fear Alraune,” Henny said. “But it was surprising: I found myself wanting to be like her.”

“A femme fatale?”

“Yes. To have that power.”

Geli smiled. “You aren’t a vampire or anything, are you?”

“I promise you’ll be the first to know.” With one hand behind her head, Henny tilted the lone tallow candle that was flaring in the darkness, and the flame deformed as white candlewax spilled onto the windowsill. “Are you still a virgin?”

Geli confessed she wasn’t.

“Who?”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I forget.”

“In Wien?”

“Change the subject.”

“Are you and Emil…?”

“We aren’t married, Fräulein Hoffmann.”

Henny jolted up onto her elbows to fascinatedly peer at Geli. She scoffed, “Emil is suddenly moral now? Emil Maurice?”

With false and defensive prudishness, Geli offered, “With me, yes.”

“Then he’s afraid of your Uncle Adolf,” Henny said, and fell forward onto her pillow. She spidered a few fine brown hairs from her face and seemed prepared to sleep as she said, “Who isn’t.”

“Your father?”

“Heinrich? Hah!”

“My mother.”

“Angela? Oh, please. She’ll do whatever he says. Anytime he says it. Won’t she?”

Nothing was said.

Henny grinned. “What a good game: Who’s not frightened of Adolf Hitler? Try to think. Herr Doktor Goebbels?”

“Definitely frightened.”

“Herr Himmler? Of course, yes.”

“Rudi shamelessly confesses it.”

“Who else?” Henny asked. “Herr Rosenberg?”

“That toady.”

“And Herr Göring’s a child around your uncle.”

“And wears his childishness like a medal.”

“Are you?” Henny asked.

“Still a virgin? I answered that.”

Henny nudged her shoulder.

Geli thought, and finally said, “No. I’m not afraid of him.”

Quiet took even the sounds of their breathing into its stomach. There was only the faint hiss of the candle. And then Henny conceded, “I think that’s probably true.”

“What do I win?”

She was silent for a while, then said, “My amazement.”

On
July 28th, they celebrated Angela Raubal’s forty-fifth birthday by letting her sleep in while Geli and Henny fabricated a breakfast of flambéed crêpe suzettes, orange sections and grapes, and a full pot of Italian espresso. Leo Raubal took a four a.m. train from Wien to get there in time, and was with them when they sneaked into Angela’s room with the food tray and woke her by singing the first verses of a song from Mozart’s
Die Zauberflöte
, Angela’s favorite opera.

She was first astonished by the flooding sunshine and hunted for the alarm clock that her daughter had stolen in the night. “What time is it?”

“Half ten,” Geli said. “We let you sleep.”

With shock Angela then noticed her tall, nearly twenty-two-year-old son, and she started fussing with graying hair, that was as forked and twisted as seaweed. She gruffly said, “Aren’t you cruel children to surprise me like this.”

Leo grinned. “We thought about inviting in the others, too. They didn’t know the song.”

Angela heard Heinrich Hoffmann shouting a joke in the dining room, that Göring was the first man to
ascend
to a higher realm by means of a parachute. Many men heartily laughed. She held a sheet up over the front of her nightgown. “Who’s here?”

“Emil came,” Geli said. “And Putzi Hanfstaengl, all the way from France.”

“Also my father, as you hear,” said Henny. “And what’s-his-name, the man who lost his toes on the front.”

“Julius Schaub,” Geli said.

“To be with their leader,” Angela said. “Otherwise he might forget them. Are they hungry?”

Geli told her mother they’d been fed, and that the Bechstein’s chauffeur would be taking Angela and her friend Ilse Meirer to Salzburg for the day, so she ought to make herself beautiful.

“And what will you do with all those men?”

“We’re going to the Chiemsee for a picnic.”

Aching as she got out of bed, Angela avoided foul language with the slang, “Oh green nine.” And as she hobbled to the bathroom she said, “You ask too much of your old mother on her birthday.”

Geli changed into a fitted navy blue sundress with a white geometric pattern, white ankle-high socks, and brown oxfords. She brushed her hair for the third time that morning and went downstairs to the dining room.

Putzi Hanfstaengl was now a Herr Doktor, having finally gotten his D. Phil. degree in history with a dissertation on the Austrian Netherlands and Bavaria in the eighteenth century; but he was talking with Hoffmann about his family firm’s photography of the art masterpieces of the Louvre, a permission just recently given them by the director, Henri Verne, a nephew of the famous novelist.

“So you’ll be rich!” Hoffmann said.

“If the books sell, possibly.”

“We’ll have to celebrate with champagne.”

Julius Schaub frowned. “Always the drinking.”

Joking with Hoffmann, Putzi referred to Schaub as “Il Penseroso,” but it fell flat because no one else there knew Italian.

“Who’ll want beer?” Geli asked, and four hands flew up.

Emil stood. “I’ll help.”

She shyly smiled and felt Emil watching the feminine tilt of her hips as she went to the kitchen ahead of him. Henny was filling their picnic hamper with Apollinaris mineral water and vacuum flasks of coffee and tea, so Emil hauled a full crate of Spaten out to the trunk of Hitler’s Mercedes.

Then Hitler finally came downstairs and into the dining room, for she heard the other men collectively stand from their chairs and heard Putzi say, “I have the foreign press clippings here.”

And then her uncle gracefully walked into the kitchen in his gray flannel summer suit and yellow tie, a red-and-black swastika pin on the suit jacket’s lapel. His forelock fell as he examined the food wrapped in waxed paper: Swiss cheese and salami and hot, roasted chicken.

“Won’t you make me a peanut butter sandwich?” he whined to his niece. “And put in some Bahlsen biscuits? And chocolate, and an apple tart? Make me lunch like always, Princess; nothing fancy or new.”

She sighed and did as he said.

Emil and Leo wandered in and Hitler told Geli’s brother what a good
Hausfrau
she was becoming. “She cooks, she cleans, she sews!”

“Rare talents,” Geli said.

Leo Raubal hunted for a handmade cigarette in his front shirt pocket, held it to a flame underneath the tea kettle on the stovetop, and was inhaling it before he noticed the shocked silence and his uncle’s scorn.

“We don’t smoke inside the house,” Emil said.

“I’m allowed,” Leo confidently said. “I have rank in the Austrian SA.” And then he felt his family staring at him in silence. “A firing squad offense?” Leo asked.

“We don’t joke about it,” his uncle told him.

Leo jarred the screen door open and flicked his cigarette outside.

And then they got into the cars. Emil and Hitler were up in the front of the red Mercedes convertible, and Henny and Geli joined Putzi Hanfstaengl in the back where the Herr Doktor could hang his long legs over the folded-down middle seat. Hitler found linen caps in the glove compartment and handed them to his niece and the girl he called Sunshine so their hair wouldn’t fly wildly in the wind, and he and Emil strapped on their cold weather leather aviators’ caps. “Prinz!” Hitler called. “Ride!” And the Alsatian galloped down from the house and jumped inside the car, scrabbling his paws on the jump seat before finding a space on the floor next to Geli.

Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Leo Raubal climbed into Hoffmann’s old Daimler where smoking was not just permitted but was assured. And Angela waved good-bye to them from the upstairs balcony in her purple flapper’s dress and cloche hat.

The Chiemsee was a fairly substantial lake with three islands, fifty kilometers northwest of Haus Wachenfeld, but Hitler maintained that the water there was three degrees centigrade warmer than the far closer Königssee, and his enthusiasm for fast automobiles was still so fresh that he considered most highway travel to be a good form of recreation; so they journeyed an hour north. Currying favor, Putzi hulked forward on the fold-down seat to pass on an invitation to visit Adolf Müller, the printer of the
Völkischer Beobachter
, whose luxurious summer home was in St. Quirin on the Tegernsee, just fifty kilometers south of München; but Hitler told him he couldn’t possibly go there, for the many journalists out to destroy him only thought of the Tegernsee as a playground of the very rich.

Putzi Hanfstaengl admitted that this was true. “I have heard it called the ‘Lago di Bonzo.’”

“Which is?”

“Mafia Italian for ‘Lake of the Big Shots.’”