Hitler's Niece

Raubal hit him on the head with the flat of his hand.

“Ow!” Hitler said, and worried his hair.

“Monsignor is trying to save your soul.”

The old priest turned to Raubal. “At the confirmation party he ran outside to play Red Indians with nine-year-olds. And him fifteen.”

“It’s of a piece,” Raubal said.

“Leo,” Angela cautioned, “manners.” She turned to Adolf. She was six years older than her half-brother and fondly remembered the sunny days when she’d put him in a stroller and parade with him, pretending he was her child. Ever since then she’d been able to forgive him anything. She touched his wrist. “Are you hungry, Adolf?”

Her half-brother unhappily examined the potatoes in jackets, the cold kielbasa, the Russian eggs, the gherkins, the herring rolls, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and, complaining that it was Jewish food, asked Angela to please make him Mehlspeise, a flour-based, meatless dish.

She was heading to the pantry when Raubal shouted, “Don’t cook for him! Eat what we eat, Adolf!”

Kubizek finished his beer and stood. “You have a piano. Why don’t I play us something?”

Excitedly, Hitler said, “We’ll do a duet!”

The party moved to the front room where there was a magnificent Heitzmann grand piano that Hitler’s mother had given him when it seemed to her that Adolf was full of fabulous talents that needed only to be stirred. Kubizek sat on the right side of the bench and deftly handled the primo parts, while Hitler hunched over the left half of the keyboard and hammered the secondo score of Antonio Diabelli’s “The Pleasures of Youth.” Enthusiastic applause at its conclusion encouraged them to try a minuet by Franz Joseph Haydn, but Hitler struggled enough that when they finished, his sister Paula frankly said, “We want to hear August alone now.”

Hitler got up from the bench, but not without saying, “It’s my piano, you know.”

Raubal suggested that Kubizek honor the monsignor by playing something by Anton Bruckner, the former organist at the Alter Dom in Linz.

“Anton Bruckner,” the old priest sighed. “He could turn any church into a cathedral.” And then he sat heavily on the sofa with Aunt Johanna as Kubizek interpreted Symphony No. 7.

Angela tipped the wing chair on its hind legs and pulled it to the sofa, then sat with little Leo on her knee.

The party listened in silence to the piano for a few minutes. And then Aunt Johanna tilted toward Angela and in a hushed voice said, “Adolf asked me for his inheritance.”

“What inheritance?”

“Whatever I intend to give him when I’m gone—he wants it now. Yours, too. Says he’ll pay it all back when it’s time.”

Angela let her fidgety son get on the floor. “And what did you say?”

“That I didn’t know what was worse, his greed or his effrontery.”

“Are you talking about me?” Hitler asked. His hands were folded behind his back as he listened to his friend, but his head was turned to them.

“Have you no ethics?” Angela asked.

Hitler faced his Heitzmann grand piano again.

Too beschwipst with beer to pay attention to the music, the monsignor asked Aunt Johanna, “What nationality is Pölzl?”

“Moravian,” she said. “Czech.”

Angela said, “So is Hitler, we think. From Hidlar, or Hidlarcek. Meaning ‘small holder.’ Aunt Johanna’s sister and my father were both from the Waldviertel region of Austria.”

“The village of Spital,” Aunt Johanna said.

“Close to the Czechoslovakian border,” Angela said.

The monsignor folded his hands on his stomach. “I see.”

Kubizek heard their talking and halted after the first few pages of the score. Without irritation, he said, “Well, you get the idea.”