Hitler's Niece (28 page)

“Four times now. Almost monthly.” She saw that he wanted to question her further, but would not. Willfully, he stood and walked a few meters away, sifting what she’d confessed. After a while he seemed as stilled as a motor so long shut off that it would have felt cold to the touch.

Without facing her, Hoffmann said, “We all have secrets, Geli. I, for one, have not heard any of this. I shall never admit I have. And as a father I beg of you to say none of this to Henny.”

She watched him seem to watch the moon, and she realized she was as alone as she’d ever been. She asked, “Are you crossing to the other side, Herr Hoffmann?”

“All my belongings are there,” he said.

All
through April and May she and Anni Winter screamed at each other; she scorned Maria Reichert as she cleaned; she claimed she’d seen Frau Dachs sleepwalking in the hallway with an ice pick in her hand; she sang so poorly that Adolf Vogl telephoned Hitler to report that he was wasting his money; she was felled by headaches or menstrual cramps whenever her uncle was free for the night. She was becoming so contrary that he began introducing her to cronies not as
meine Nichte
(my niece), but
mein nicht
(my not); she finally got what she wanted when Hitler shouted, “We have no peace in this apartment!” And it was he who suggested they go to Obersalzberg three weeks early.

With Angela, in Obersalzberg, she figured she’d be safe, and she was right. Angela shunted Hitler out of the kitchen, was there in the Winter Garden each night, was even pleased to be invited by her daughter on their picnics and hikes and afternoon outings in the Mercedes. Wholly absorbed in his niece, his hands flying onto her whenever he found an occasion, his hot eyes frequently communicating grievance and forsakenness and a hunger he thought was heartache, Adolf Hitler was nevertheless too pompous and self-conscious to be fully vulnerable to the foolishness of the lovelorn, and by the time Henny joined the family in Haus Wachenfeld for Geli’s twenty-third birthday on June 4th, he’d sublimated his desire and seemed to Henny merely preoccupied, finicky, and avuncular, just a cross politician shouting into the telephone, shaking out a newspaper on the terrace, scouring medical journals to find out the names of his maladies and to discover which new chronic disease would next be poisoning him.

Angela was steeping orange pekoe tea for him when she heard her half-brother shyly hint at his interest in joining Geli and Henny for an afternoon at the movie palace in Berchtesgaden. And Geli oh so sweetly said, “Well, I really doubt you’d like it, Uncle Adolf.
Girls in Uniform
? An all-female cast? About a tyrannical headmistress in a Prussian boarding school?” And she added in the slang she’d gotten from Willie Hitler, “Not your cup of tea.”

She saw his face reef with the hurts of isolation and dismissal that he must have felt as a child, and then he turned from her as quick as an affront, and loudly trudged up the stairs.

When they returned that night, Angela was standing in the kitchen with folded arms. “Your
fiancé
is on his way to Berlin,” she said.

“We’re not engaged. We’re just related.”

“Well, he’s in a fury.”

Rolling her eyes, Geli said, “What a rarity.”

“I have no idea what you’re doing, but I don’t like it.”

“We went to see a
movie
,” Geli said.

Angela bent over and opened the oven where she was heating blinis for them, food as always her comfort and way out of a storm. She said, “The girls in your Gymnasium class are married now. Many already have more than one child. Are you trying to destroy your future?”

“I’m trying to determine it.”

Angela shut the oven door and straightened up. “Don’t toy with him, Geli,” she said. “We’ll find ourselves out on the street.”

“We’re already selling ourselves. Maybe we belong there.”

Angela theatrically lifted a hand as if, were she any other mother, she’d have long since slapped her. And then she ordered, “Up to your room!”

“Oh please,” Geli said, but she did as she was told, hearing her mother shout, as she found the upstairs landing, “He is the
patriarch
!”

She smirked at Henny. Who was solemn.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Henny said.

She
still walked the Alsatians to the Hotel zum Türken each morning to buy her uncle’s newspapers, but now she’d linger there long enough to scan the front section of the leftist
Münchener Post
, or “The Poison Kitchen” as her uncle called it because of its frequent satiric attacks on National Socialism. She found in it weekly reports of cold-blooded political murders by factions within “the Hitler Party,” whose crimes generally went unpunished or received insufficient jail sentences because of a justice system that favored the Nationalist right. She also read in the
Münchener Post
her uncle’s self-praise that, “Nothing happens in the movement without my knowledge, without my approval. Even more, nothing happens without my wish.”

And she was cleaning his upstairs room in late July when she found hidden under his bed an illustrated book by Dr. Joachim Welzl called
Woman as Slave: The Sexual-Psychology of the Masochist
.

She couldn’t say precisely what the connection was between the book and the newspaper articles she’d read, but she was confident there was one, and she was sick.

In
June the failing economy had forced Chancellor Heinrich Brün-ing to issue an emergency finance decree that further slashed unemployment and welfare payments to millions who were already hard-pressed by the worldwide depression. Workers were soon calling him “Chancellor Hunger” and Hitler was finding many reasons to travel north and stir up further protests.

Probably at Hitler’s behest, Doktor Goebbels mailed a friendly letter to Geli describing their frantic political tour of Germany. “
Endless traveling
,” he wrote her. “
Work is accomplished while standing, driving, and flying. Important conversations are held in doorways or on the way to the railroad station. We turn up in a city a half hour before the speech is scheduled, he climbs to the platform and speaks. By the time he’s done he’s in a state, as if he’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then we get into the car and drive another two hours. We need rest
.”

In August Hitler telephoned Edwin and Helene Bechstein to say he’d holiday at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and he’d be staying at Wahnfried, the home of his old friend Winifred Wagner. And it was Edwin Bechstein who called Haus Wachenfeld and insisted that Geli join them for the festival, saying, “It really is
the
place to be seen.” And then he insinuated that it was her uncle who was inviting her; he’d decided on a conciliation and accord.

On the way to Bayreuth, three hours north of München by car, Direktor Bechstein, as he liked to be called, stiffly sat across from Geli in his limousine, his spectacles on and his attention fixed on a sheaf of accounting papers in his lap. Next to her was Helene Bechstein’s solidifying flesh, trussed in the strong barrel of a corset whose whalebones ribbed her navy blue dress, her softening face the color of lard and her voice just this side of a shriek as she chided Geli for the pain and anguish she’d caused her uncle. “Oh, how your heart would
break
if you’d heard him wailing as I did! Threatening to shoot himself! The indecency of putting our Wolf through all that! And you! Who are you? A girl who scoffs at her own good fortune, is who. A Slavic girl whose charm wears thin and whose beauty won’t last. Who’ll soon be back in Wien near the west railway station if she doesn’t watch out.”

Sighing, Geli asked, “Are you going to go on berating me like this?”

“We
can
,” Direktor Bechstein said. “We’re your hosts.”

She laughed at the incongruousness of the statement, but Helene Bechstein forged ahead with, “Who is this Jewish boyfriend?”

“We’ve heard,” her husband added.

Geli was shocked. “There’s no one.”

“Are you pregnant?” Helene Bechstein asked.

“Isn’t it obligatory to have a male contribution?”

The old woman turned away. “Don’t be vulgar.”

“Wasn’t he a pianist?” Direktor Bechstein asked his wife.

With certainty, she said, “An art teacher in Linz.”

“I do hope he was good-looking,” Geli said. “I hate being linked with toads.”

Helene Bechstein stared. “Wolf urged us to bring you. To heal the wounds. Don’t you see that he desperately wants a détente?”

But the Wagner Festival filled Bayreuth with Germany’s rich and famous, and under those circumstances Hitler seemed to have qualms about associating himself with the scandal of his niece. She was avoided that afternoon as he waded through crowds, shaking hands and soliciting contributions. And so she visited Wahnfried just before the opera in a stunning red evening gown and red shoes and was told he was changing into his tails until finally she was told he was leaving. She was forced to share a box with the Bechsteins in the Festspielhaus for a flamboyant version of
Die Götterdämmerung
while she watched Winifred’s faraway opera box as Hitler swooned with the music and flattered Richard Wagner’s thirty-four-year-old daughter-in-law with affectionate hand pats, juvenile whispering, and the self-congratulatory talk that, for him, was flirtation. And then a message was sent to Geli’s room in the Goldener Anker Hotel that she was to go back to Obersalzberg by railway car in the morning.

She
was in the flat at Prinzregentenplatz in September when she finally saw her uncle again. Three weeks had passed. She was just leaving the breakfast room as he came down the hallway in his jackboots and Brownshirt uniform, and he bowed forward from the waist as he asked, “And how was your summer?”

“Quite calm,” she said.

“Fully rested?”

“I slept well. And you?”

“Anni!” he called, and walked by her.

Anni Winter brought out his tea and biscuit tray from the kitchen.

There was a formality to their chance meetings in the flat, as if they were acquaintances who found they shared a floor in a grand luxe hotel. She still overheard him interrogating the Winters about what she’d done that day, and she noticed men she took to be SS who’d loiter for hours outside the
Drogerie
on Grillparzerstrasse, or walk a hundred meters behind her as she strolled along the River Isar to Müller’s Public Baths.

A friend from the university named Elfi Samthaber telephoned her one noontime and Geli told Frau Reichert she’d take the call in Hitler’s office. She sat in his chair as she chatted, and then she found in his wastebasket a handwritten note on orchid-scented Wedgwood blue paper that was just like the stationery she’d been given for her birthday. She read:

Dear Herr Hitler
,

Thank you again for the wonderful invitation to the theater. It was a memorable evening. I am most grateful to you for your kindness. I am counting the hours until I may have the joy of another meeting
.

Yours
,
Eva

She tore the note into four pieces and in spite left it on the ink blotter. She continued her conversation.

She
felt a flow of cold air river over her as she fitfully slept that night, and she reached for a fallen blanket until frustration woke her. And she saw that her uncle was kneeling on the floor beside her, fully dressed, and that it was he who’d folded the covers back, who’d softly worked the nightgown up to her waist. His hand found her mouth and held it shut as he bristled the skin of her buttock with smacking kisses.

“She means nothing to me,” he whispered. “You do.” His free hand forced itself between her clenched thighs and she felt chilled as he fluttered her sex. Worming his face into her flesh, he asked in the hushed voice of a lover, “Tell me what you want, Geli.” And he lifted the hand that was quieting her.

She felt the hot slide of tears on her cheeks. She told him, “To get away from you.”

Hitler halted for a second, and she was afraid he’d hit her, but then he continued as if she’d encouraged him. “Would you like to go to Wien?”

She felt like a child given a choice of presents. She said yes.

“Will you let me do what I want?”

She had no choice. She nodded.

On
September 11th she went to the Brown House with Hitler for a short visit before the afternoon showing of a mountaineering film,
The White Hell of Mount Palü
, costarring Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl. But the führer was in his office so infrequently that Rudolf Hess and Franz Xaver Schwarz hurried to take advantage of his being there to finally get his signature and have him review a calendar of forthcoming events.

Waiting in the hallway, she looked at an unskilled watercolor of Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, featuring a fearless and far taller Hitler, his fist raised defiantly as he faced a fusillade from green-uniformed police and as his fellow putschists fell at his feet. Other faces were hard to make out, though the furtive, smallish man behind him seemed to be Erich Ludendorff. The quartermaster general and her uncle were not now on speaking terms, she knew, and she supposed the picture had been hung in the hallway to alter the memory of the putsch, when Ludendorff was the heroic one and some foreign correspondents had dismissed her uncle as “Ludendorff’s noisy lieutenant.” The facts, for her uncle, were instruments that merely needed management.

Carrying his leather portfolio, a jovial Heinrich Hoffmann walked down from the upstairs offices with the seemingly giant Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose hand was on the far shorter man’s shoulder, but their faces fell when they saw Geli, they failed to offer greetings, and she thought she heard Putzi whisper, “Empty-headed slut,” as they exited the building.

An officious Rudolf Hess found her in the hallway. “We have many transactions and deliberations that require the indispensable wisdom of the leader. With profound regrets he suggests you go on to the cinema without him.”