Hitler's Niece (30 page)

She was boring him, he told her, and she reddened with embarrassment and went out.

“And what about me?” Geli asked.

Quietly rolling strings of pasta with his fork and spoon, Hitler prematurely smiled at his wit and said, “Oh, you are anything but boring.”

“Will you let me go to Wien?”

“I haven’t decided.”

She stupidly asked how he knew she wouldn’t go while he was gone, and he laughed hugely for a while.

She felt tears of frustration filming her eyes, and hated the fact that it so manifestly gave him satisfaction. She stood in silence and walked to her bedroom. She didn’t slam the door.

And then she found that he’d followed her. Worms of rage were there in his forehead and flames seemed to churn in his stare. “You have made me helpless and pitiful,” he said. “You see that, don’t you? I have fallen in love with you, and you have loathed and rejected me. And yet I am seized by you. I am lost and in ruins. Even now my throat tightens. My heart cracks in two. You cannot destroy Germany in this way.”

“
You
hate!
You
destroy! You’ll do to Germany just what you’re doing to me! And I won’t have it anymore!”

He screamed, “
My
will is your will!
Your
will is
not
mine!” And then he slammed her door and the foyer door and thundered down the stairs.

She was solemnly watching at the high window as Hitler’s jackboots strode to his waiting car.

Maria
Reichert later reported that she’d heard Geli weeping behind a locked door all afternoon, but Anni Winter said she went to the
Drogerie
for Zuchooh Creme and Carmol Katarrh-Pastillen. And when she gave it to Anni to add to Hitler’s toiletries kit, she said, “I have no idea why he won’t let me go; I really have nothing at all in common with him.”

Anni later protected the führer by telling an interviewer she’d miserably said, “I have no idea why I can’t let him go; I’m really getting nothing at all from my uncle.” Anni further suggested that Geli was in a funk because of Hitler’s heightened affection for Fräulein Braun, saying she’d found the note from Eva in his jacket as she’d helped Anni pack. She also said she’d gone past Geli’s room just before leaving that evening and had found it locked from the inside. She had been listening to American jazz. Duke Ellington.

Widow Reichert got into a green Bavarian headdress and full-skirted dirndl that choked her waist but plumped up her breasts, and, after shouting the night’s instructions to her deaf old mother, she went off at five to work in one of the giant beer tents of Oktoberfest.

At five-thirty the führer returned again to his flat to bathe and change into a fashionable navy blue suit and a homburg. And when Anni and Georg Winter left the building at six, Julius Schaub and Heinrich Hoffmann were loitering under the gray stone frieze of Wotan at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The fine-boned
Haushofmeister
was tilting to the right with Hitler’s suitcase, and Schaub took it from him to put it in the trunk of the Mercedes.

Upstairs in her room, Geli was paging through the fashion magazine
Die Dame
when she heard her uncle hesitate outside her bedroom door and softly knuckle it to offer his farewell. Without shifting on the sofa, she called out, “Will you let me go to Wien?” And she heard Hitler’s heavy stride down the hallway.

She got up to raise the venetian blinds and watch Prinzregentenplatz, and she pushed up the sash on her window farther when she saw her uncle shake Heinrich Hoffmann’s hand and mince his way toward the front-right passenger door that Schaub was holding open. She leaned out on the sill and shouted down, “
Will
you let me go to Wien?”

Childishly stamping his shoe, he shouted up, “For the last time, no!”

She withdrew from the window and heard him explain, “We have been quarreling.”

She heard Heinrich Hoffmann coolly say, “She’ll get over it.”

Seeking to pacify his niece, Hitler said, “One minute,” and headed inside the building again. And his official photographer followed just in case he needed to intercede.

She greeted the führer at the flat’s door, and softly asked again, “Will you please let me go to Wien?” She chilled as she felt him fondly stroke her cheek, and then she heard him relent and say, “All right, Little Princess. You can go just as soon as I get back.” She smiled. “Au revoir, Uncle Adolf. Au revoir, Herr Hoffmann.”

And then the men left for Hamburg. She shut the foyer door and saw old Frau Dachs in the hallway, haltingly holding out a luncheon tray with a spoon and a bowl of potato soup on it. “Would you like?” she asked.

“I’ll make my own dinner.”

“What?”

With exaggeration, Geli shook her head.

“Well, I’m going to my quarters,” the old woman said. “Don’t stay up too late.”

She
strolled on Prinzregentenstrasse in the lukewarm zephyrs of the
Föhn
, buying a chilled brown bottle of Liebfraumilch, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and a waxed-paper funnel of fragrant yellow freesias that she carefully arranged in a Dresden vase and situated on her white dresser next to the framed photograph of her favorite Alsatian, Muck. She took a glass of wine to the foyer and sat on the herringboned oak as she telephoned Elfi Samthaber and genially chatted about the fall fashions she’d seen in
Die Dame
, promising to call Elfi again on Saturday. Maybe they’d go to the theater. She ate cheese and crackers and listened to Radio Berlin as she painted on nail polish. She leafed through magazines. She went to her desk and got out a sheet of Wedgwood-blue writing paper with “Angelika Raubal” printed on it in English script in the upper-left corner. She began a friendly letter to Ingrid von Launitz. And she was head-down and writing when she heard the shush of the front door opening, then heard it softly chunk closed. She looked at the Longines clock beside her bed. Half-past eleven. She called, “Maria?”

She heard no answer. She got scared.

Whoever it was seemed to be holding himself motionless, as if he were sensing if others were still up. And then he was walking down the hallway. She stared at her door but heard his shoes stride past it on the runner and go into the office. She heard the give of a drawer as he tugged on it, then the harsh grind and thump as his thigh bumped it shut.

“Uncle?” she called.

Stillness. Was he hesitating? Was he checking himself in the mirror? She was still holding her pen. She let it go. She fastened the free buttons of her dress and groomed a wing of hair from her face. And then she saw the brass door handle gently lower and the tall oak door fall open like a page of an old book.

Hitler was stolidly there, still in his fashionable blue suit, hunched forward a little and frowning, his hands behind his back. He looked like a banker who’d sought a theater exit and found himself onstage. His face was white. His forelock had fallen. He seemed full of sentences and huddled emotions. Embers of their argument still flared in the ash.

She asked, “Aren’t you going to Hamburg?”

“We only got as far as Nürnberg,” he said. “We registered in the Deutscher Hof Hotel, and Schaub took me to the railway station.”

“Why?”

Wincing a false smile, he just stared at her for a moment. Knives in his eyes. And then he glanced away and asked, “What are you writing?”

“Just a letter.” And though Geli knew she’d only attract further interest in it, she found herself folding her forearms over the page.

Hitler strolled forward like a skeptical teacher on the hunt for insurrection in his class. “To whom? You have a friend to write to far from here?”

“Ingrid. In Wien.”

She shied from him as he sidled around the desk. His flank familiarly leaned against her, and she gave way. “‘
Dear Ingrid
,’” Hitler read. He tilted away to try to make out her handwriting without his glasses. And he quoted, “‘
When I come to Wien—I hope very soon—we’ll drive together to Semmering an
—’”

“‘And’ is where you came in.”

“And what?”

“Have fun,” she said.

“Semmering. The health resort?”

“Yes.”

“I was too poor to visit health resorts when I was twenty-three. Where will you get the money?”

She was not stunned that he’d no longer fund her. She was stunned that she’d failed to consider it.

Eyes shining with tears, he asked, “And what will you tell your friends in Austria about me? Will you also tell Professor Otto Ro that your uncle has been molesting you?”

Of course he’d find out
, she thought. She was frightened he’d hit her, but his hands were still behind his back. She quickly said, “I’ll say nothing about you. I promise.”

Saying nothing more, he shifted his right hand from behind his back and laid a gun on the letter, his Walther 6.35, as ugly as sin, her mother would say. Collecting attention. Everything else in the room seemed diminished by it.

“Hold it in your hands,” he said.

She fabricated an offhand tone, full of innocence and what he’d think of as feminine wile as she told him, “I’d rather not.” And then she got up and fitted the chair within the kneehole of the desk. She withdrew from her uncle before sitting on the sofa as she’d seen his favorite movie stars do, her left arm angled high on the sofa back and a hand in her hair, as blithe as a girl on a picnic, her face serene in the sunshine. She nonchalantly asked, “Why the gun?”

Without smiling, he said, “It’s a sex toy.”

She giggled out of sheer nervousness. She felt a change in him, a cold, machinelike subtraction of emotion, as if he himself were the gun. “Will you kiss me good-bye?” he asked.

She was amazed. Had she finally won the argument? Was she going? She grinned. Anything now seemed easy. “Of course.”

She walked toward him and tilted her face as his soft belly jellied against her, and he quickly stabbed his pursed lips against her full, pliant mouth before finding formality again. “And now for this one last time,” he said, “I would like you to excite me.”

She tried not to show her dismay. “How?”

Shifting the weight of the Walther in his right hand, he touched the gun’s cold barrel to the neck of her dress. “Undo it,” he said.

Tentatively she undid the collar and then the two buttons below that.

But he said in his soothing, dog-calming voice, “A little further, Princess. Show me your titties.”

She felt insulted but did as he said, widening the front of her dress around her filled brassiere. His face was cold-blooded as he stared, and she flinched when she felt the chill steel of the Walther handgun drawl over the roundness of each breast as if he were sketching a cartoon, even touching the barrel to the fabric over her right nipple while saying “Bip,” and then her left, saying “Bip” again. He seemed to want her to smile, so she did.

And then his free fist flashed out and hit her face hard. She reeled against the sofa and heard a jangle of bells in her brain, and then a fainter ringing. When she felt her nose, hot blood twined through her fingers, and she knew at once that her nose was broken. She was so shocked she did not scream.

“Look what you made me do,” Hitler said. “Talking about me.” He was shaking the sting from his hand.

She was on her knees and thinking irrationally that she could stanch the blood from soaking her dress if she just found a handkerchief. She wondered if it were possible that her beauty was gone forever. And then she realized that it would not end with this.

His free hand forced her chin up and he frowned with dissatisfaction. “You needn’t worry,” he said. “I won’t remember you like this.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“The Japanese who have betrayed their leaders commit a suicide of honor,” he said. “And now I would like
you
to kill yourself.”

Wide-eyed, she scrutinized his face in the hope of finding out that he was kidding. But she knew he was not. She cried, “No, Uncle Adolf! No, no! Please!”

Calmly he said, “Aren’t you pathetic. Suicide is just a flash of pain, a fraction of a second, and then there’s nothingness. All problems vanish into the void.”

In fury, she yelled, “Then you do it! Shithead!” Holding her hurting nose she flailed a fist at him, but she felt him catch her hair in one hand and yank her still as he held the Walther pistol just above her heart, then fired down.

She jolted with the force of the bullet slamming through her and saw his hands fly up to his ears to quell the gunshot noise. She fleetingly thought,
The canaries
, and fell unconscious to the floor.

Worriedly, Hitler looked to the hallway, then reminded himself that only Frau Dachs was still there with them in the flat, and she was deaf. Locking the bedroom door from the inside, he squatted above his niece as if she were horticulture he couldn’t quite name, his hands loose but for the gun, his forearms on his knees, his face fascinated. She was still breathing, but with great effort, a watery sigh as she exhaled, then a faint screaking noise in inhalation, as of an old, unoiled hinge. Leaning farther over, he saw that blood bubbled up from her lung wound as she breathed, staining maroon the front of her taupe afternoon dress. A frail tear formed in Geli’s right eye and trickled down her cheek. Hitler wiped it away with his thumb, then stood, his back aching, and sat heavily on the sofa with the gun still hot between his thighs. She was strong. She was hanging on to life, like his mother. Watching her faint twitching movements, he was sure she was dying. And then he was sure Angelika Raubal was dead, and there was nothing further to do but cry with self-pity for his loss and love and misfortune.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

A
FTERWARD

Waking at sunrise
on September 19th, he realized it was time to act, so he put the gun on a sofa cushion, gingerly stepped around the wide pool of blood, walked out to the hallway telephone, and called Rudolf Hess at home. “I shot my Princess,” Hitler told him.

Shocked out of sleep, Hess was silent for a few seconds, assessing what had been said, and then he asked, “Where are you?”

“In the flat.”

“Is she dead?”

“Yes.”

“Am I the first to know?”

“Yes.”

“Wait for me,” Hess said. And he added, “You have done the right thing, my leader.”

Hess got to the flat within twenty minutes, and found that the führer had already awakened Maria Reichert in order to have her make tea. Questioning her in the kitchen, Hess heard that she’d returned from Oktoberfest around two. She’d been
beschwipst
with drink and had gone straight to bed.

Was she aware of what had happened to Fräulein Raubal?

She said she’d been told she’d committed suicide.

“It’s sad, isn’t it,” Hess said. And then he saw old Frau Dachs standing at the kitchen door in a hairnet and quilted robe.

“I’m deaf but I felt it,” she said. “Around midnight. Windows shivering, and the whole flat shaking when she hit the floor.”

Hess turned to the old woman’s daughter. “Will you please see that she gets dressed and goes to a friend’s? We don’t want to further upset her.”

“
Mutti
,” Maria said. “Out.”

Hess hurried to Geli’s bedroom. She was lying facedown, with her legs folded off to the right as if she’d fallen from a kneel. She seemed to be fingering the confusion of her brown hair with her right hand, while her left arm was flat on the floor, as if straining for the Walther on the sofa. She was stiff with rigor mortis and the front of her dress was flooded in the darkening blood that widened out from the sofa to the four-poster bed. There were no shoe prints. A skeleton key was still inside the door, which was good. Walking down to Hitler’s bedroom, Hess got the skeleton key from his door, found out that it fitted Geli’s, and locked her door from the hallway.

Watching the Saturday traffic on Prinzregentenstrasse and sipping orange peel tea, the führer seemed fairly placid, but there was a shocking, crazed look to his eyes when Hess handed him the skeleton key. “Where are Schaub and Hoffmann?” Hess asked.

“Nürnberg,” the führer said. “The Deutscher Hof Hotel.”

“We’ll take you away,” Hess told him, “just as soon as the others arrive.”

One by one they were joined in the flat by Heinrich Himmler, Max Amann, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Baldur von Schirach. The führer was still not himself, so Himmler took him to his office in the party headquarters as the other gentlemen from the Brown House got together in the library to figure out a story.

Anni and Georg Winter and Anna Kirmair, the day maid, walked into the flat about fifteen minutes later, at nine, and found the four high-ranking Nazis in a heated argument. Georg asked Max Amann, “What’s happened?”

And he was told, “We haven’t decided yet.”

Within a few minutes they had decided, and Baldur von Schirach telephoned Adolf Dresler in the Brown House and extemporized a press release stating that Adolf Hitler had canceled his speech in Hamburg and was in deep mourning over the suicide of Angelika Raubal, his niece, who had been living in a furnished room in a building in Bogenhausen where Hitler owned a flat.

Meanwhile, Rudolf Hess was instructing the staff that a scandal would wreck the party, and if they had faith in Hitler, and hated Communists and Jews like he did, and hoped for a glorious Germany, free of want, they ought to put aside their niggling qualms and give the police analogous statements. Each agreed to do that, but they were schooled at some speed and their stories either did not match or matched so well they seemed memorized.

And then Amann handed Hess the telephone and he heard Himmler screaming that Göring, Goebbels, and he were in agreement that calling the unfortunate occurrence that befell Hitler’s niece a suicide might wreak nearly as much havoc for the party as calling it a murder. Would she, who knew her uncle so well, prefer to end it all? Wouldn’t the proximity of the führer make her happy and optimistic?

Schirach called Adolf Dresler again to change the press release to say that it was “a lamentable accident” and that she’d killed herself while handling the gun; but he was too late, the first press release had been issued. With regret Schirach told Hess that the story could not be changed and they discussed a suicide motive that would not involve the führer. She’d discovered, they decided, that she wasn’t a good enough singer. She was humiliated and ashamed.

Max Amann called the Deutscher Hof Hotel and was informed that the Hitler group had just checked out. A pageboy was sent in a taxi to flag them down.

Rudolf Hess handed Anni Winter the führer’s teacup and saucer for washing, then rushed down the hallway and rammed into Geli’s locked bedroom door, but it held fast. According to Ilse Hess, Georg Winter got a screwdriver and wedged it between the doorjamb and the lock as Hess flung himself at the door again. And this time it gave way, though he injured his right shoulder.

Franz Xaver Schwarz was a city councilor as well as the party treasurer, so it was he who was chosen to telephone the police and be in the flat when they came. Maria Reichert walked her mother down to the flat of friends on the first floor, so she was never questioned about September 18th though she’d been there the whole night.

And finally Heinrich Hoffmann called Rudolf Hess from the hotel in Nürnberg, about two hours to the north by car. Told of the murder, he was ordered to say Hitler had stayed with them in the hotel that night, and he and Schaub were to race back to München as if the führer were with them.

“And how is he?” Hoffmann asked.

“Stricken with grief, of course.”

“I mean really.”

“We’ll be fine,” Hess said, and hung up. He handed the telephone to Schwarz as he, Amann, and Schirach went to the Brown House for a conference with the führer.

Schwarz called Franz Gürtner, the Bavarian minister of justice who’d called the Nazis “flesh of our flesh,” and he also called Ernst Pöhner, a former police commissioner and a patriotic nationalist who’d persistently excused the violence of the SA so long as it was directed against Communists. Many things went unspoken.

Doktor Müller, the coroner, and two criminal police inspectors from the Polizeidirektion München arrived at the flat shortly after eleven that morning and were politely escorted to the crime scene by Schwarz, who claimed he’d been called to the flat by Maria Reichert just as soon as she’d seen the body.

There were no photographs taken. There was no autopsy. Kriminal Kommissar Forster wandered around the room, pursuing evidence, but only collected the Walther 6.35, the brass bullet casing, and Geli’s unfinished letter. Doktor Müller unfolded an oilcloth over the blood and crouched on it to examine the body, indicating to the police inspectors that the fatal shot had entered the female victim’s chest just above the heart, which it had missed, and had penetrated vertically through the left lung and kidney before halting, wide left of the spine, just above the pelvic girdle, where the bullet could be felt beneath the skin. There was some tattooing near the entrance wound, meaning the Walther had been fired from a few inches away. The signs of rigidity in her face, trunk, and extremities would seem to indicate that she’d died between four and forty hours earlier. Rigor mortis, he said, was too variable to provide greater accuracy about the time of death. While he found some purplish bruising on her neck and thighs, he felt that was just postmortem lividity. Doktor Müller thought the grayish discoloration of the skin was probably due to the fact that death was primarily consequent to suffocation following the shot in the lung. A few days later, when there was a further investigation, he seemed to recall an injury to the nose, but insisted it was flattened by lying face downward for many hours. On Saturday, Doktor Müller got up from beside Geli and snagged off his rubber gloves as he told the policemen, “Suicide or homicide. Who knows?”

Kriminal Kommissar Sauer asked his partner to hold the Walther in a way that would produce such a bullet trajectory, and he finally did by facing the ridge of the barrel and inserting his thumbs in the trigger guard while gripping the gun butt with his fingers. Sauer asked, “And how does that feel?”

“Clumsy,” Forster said.

“But it’s possible?”

“If she wanted to kill herself, why would she want to do it that way?”

Sauer and Forster went out to interview the household staff as Franz Xaver Schwarz silently watched. Georg Winter offered little, only saying that he’d forced open the door with a screwdriver “and found Raubal lying on the floor as a corpse. She’d shot herself. I can’t give any reason why she should have shot herself.”

Maria Reichert would later assert that she’d been in the flat when the shot was fired around eight in the evening, but she’d thought the noise had come from partygoers in the street. She’d also maintain that in the morning she’d called Schwarz and he in turn had called a locksmith named Hatzk to open the locked door. With Sauer, on Saturday, however, she got Hess’s instructions right, saying that soon after the spaghetti lunch, when the führer was gone, she’d heard a noise like a gunshot from Geli’s room, but thought the fräulein had taken a perfume bottle from the dresser and furiously smashed it to the floor. “She was a wild one,” she said. She hadn’t seen Geli after that. At nine on Saturday morning, she’d knocked on the door to wake Geli and, hearing no answer, had called for Anni Winter, who in turn had called her husband. Georg Winter had broken the door down, and she’d screamed when she’d seen the corpse. “I can’t explain why Raubal killed herself,” she said, adding, “She was very agitated recently.”

According to the police summary, Anni Winter testified that, “Raubal did not want to spend the weekend in Obersalzberg, as had been arranged, because she had no suitable dress to wear. She told me that her Uncle Adolf had refused to buy her a new dress, which also meant paying her fare to Wien, for she only bought her fancy clothes in Wien or Salzburg. But she did not seem unduly disappointed. Her moods changed so quickly. About three in the afternoon yesterday, I saw Raubal, very flustered, go into Hitler’s office and then hurry back into her own room. This seemed to me rather extraordinary. I now presume that she was fetching his pistol. At about nine this morning I was trying to take the newspaper into her room as I usually did, but I couldn’t get in, and no one answered when I knocked. I started to suspect that Raubal had been out overnight, but then realized the door was locked from the inside with the key stuck in it. I was present when my husband forced the door open. I don’t know why Raubal shot herself.”

Anna Kirmair only confirmed that the skeleton key was still in the door, which had been locked from the inside. “Why Raubal took her life, I don’t know.”

There would also be many and varying accounts of a savage argument between Hitler and his niece on the afternoon of September 18th—because she was pregnant with Adolf’s child, with the child of a pianist, she was jealous of Eva Braun, she had a Jewish lover in Linz, a Jewish lover in Wien, she wanted desperately to see her Aunt Paula—but those were fictions and phantoms calculated to create the impression of a dispirited and disintegrating young woman, and the sheer variety of the stories illustrated how little anyone believed them.

At two in the afternoon Maria Fischbauer, a paid preparer of corpses, got to the flat with a tin pail, hard bar soap, and a hand mitt. She washed Geli’s body without stripping off her clothes, and with the help of Anna Kirmair laid the body into a wooden coffin that three men from the East Cemetery had hauled up the stairs. And then they were permitted to quietly bear her away. Questioned later, Frau Fischbauer said, “Apart from the entry wound on the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I did not notice that the bridge of the nose was broken or that the nose was injured in any other way.”

Rosina Zweckl worked in the East Cemetery where she shifted Geli’s body to a finer zinc coffin furnished by the party. She said she’d carefully scrutinized the body because she’d heard the woman was Hitler’s niece. She’d been told she was a virgin—possibly to quell the gossip of a pregnancy. “She was very blue in the face,” Zweckl told investigators, but she could say little more. Then, as if prompted, she oddly paraphrased Maria Fischbauer, saying, “Apart from the entry wound in the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I saw nothing suspicious about the nose.”

Sauer went back to the flat on Prinzregentenplatz at half-past three, and found Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Hoffman there, as their friends had promised.

The photographer lit a cigarette in what he called the “coffee and cakes room,” off the foyer, and fell right into his
Stammtisch
role of garrulous storyteller, saying they’d left München around dinnertime on Friday, but that they were all tired and uneasy because of the
Föhn
, and so they’d journeyed only as far as Nürnberg before deciding to stay the night at the Deutscher Hof, the party’s hotel.

Sauer wrote that down. “All three of you registered there?”

“Well, just me. We shared the Hitler suite.”

“And what time was this?”

“About eight.”

Sauer asked him to please continue.

Well, they’d been heading north from Nürnberg this morning when Hitler had noticed the pageboy from the hotel waving for them to pull over. Hearing that Rudolf Hess urgently sought him, Hitler rushed back to the hotel, threw his dog whip and homburg on a lobby chair, and squeezed into a telephone booth. Hoffmann heard him say, “Hitler here. Has something happened?” And then in a hoarse voice he’d replied, “Oh God! How awful!” Hoffmann had been trying to put it together in his head, but had heard only, “Hess! Answer me—yes or no—is she alive or dead?”