Hitler's Niece

“Continue, Gustl!” Hitler exclaimed.

“It’s too hot to concentrate,” Kubizek said.

The monsignor was still interested in genealogies. “And your grandmother went by what name, Angela?”

“On my father’s side? Maria Schicklgruber.”

“A good Austrian name. And your grandfather?”

And then Hitler was there, his hands folded in front of his fly, his forehead wormed with a vein of fury as he asked, “Confession, is it? In public?”

“Watch your tone,” Raubal said.

Angela told the priest, “We don’t know.”

The monsignor thought for an instant and put it together. “Your father, Alois, was illegitimate?”

Raubal said, “We heard their grandmother was a maid in the house of a man—”

Hitler shouted, “You don’t know! It’s gossip! Reckless speculation!”

Raubal asked him, “Why are you always so noisy?” And he continued, “Of a man named Frankenberger and got pregnant. Whether by him or his son, we aren’t sure.”

“You aren’t sure of anything,” Hitler said. “It is not a true story!”

“It happens so often,” the old priest said. “A girl without money. And the tedium, the proximity to a boy her age, the promise of wealth.”

“We’re going, Gustl,” Hitler said, and he went to get his jacket, his silk top hat, his ivory-handled cane.

“We’ll change the subject!” the monsignor called.

Angela got up. “Don’t be like this, Adolf!”

“What shall I be?” he asked. “Without shame?”

Leo Junior waved his hand and said, “Bye-bye, Uncle Adolf.”

Hitler firmly fixed his top hat on his head and tilted onto his cane as he asked with a false smile, “And what kind of name, Monsignor, is Frankenberger? Why have you failed to ask that? I wonder, is it Jewish?”

“Could be.”

Hitler withdrew to the front door and halted to say, “I have seldom had so unpleasant an afternoon. And I won’t again. I shall have nothing further to do with my family.”

And then he fled the house as Leo Raubal whistled and clapped his hands.

CHAPTER TWO

SCHLEISSHEIMERSTRASSE 34, 1913

Worried that Adolf was dead or dying, Angela Raubal left Leo Junior with Paula and took her five-year-old daughter to München in the fall of 1913 in hopes of finding her lost half-brother, who was wanted by federal authorities in Austria for failing to register for military duty.

Angela was then, at thirty, a widow of three years’ standing. Leo Raubal had died unexpectedly from a simple bronchial catarrh in 1910, and his wife had only inherited three children to take care of and a civil official’s monthly pension that hardly paid the rent.

August Kubizek had attended Leo Raubal’s funeral Mass in Linz and, afterward, the reception for friends and family at the house on Bürgergasse, frankly expecting to find Adolf there, and forlorn when he didn’t. While sitting with Angela on the sofa, Kubizek told her that in the fall of 1908 he’d gone away for eight weeks of training with the Second Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment, and when he’d gotten back to the flat on Stumpergasse in November, he’d found that Hitler had abruptly moved out and had left no forwarding address. And still no letters or postcards had arrived from his friend.

“Of course there’d been differences of opinion and horrible rows,” Kubizek told her, “but with Adolf that was quite normal. I’ve been pondering the situation for a long time now and I haven’t discovered the slightest reason for his hurt feelings or his silence. He’d never so much as hinted at our parting, even in moments of anger. I feel so despised and alone.”

“I, too,” Angela said.