Hitler's Niece

Angela held up a penciled sketch of the Hauptbahnhof for her daughter and asked, “Have you seen this building, Angelika?”

She shook her head.

“But you did! Where did we get off the train?”

“Oh.”

Angela frowned at a watercolor of the Sendlinger Tower. “Why are the people so tiny?”

“I have trouble with proportions,” he said, flushing with petulance and embarrassment. “Why are you here?”

“Are you aware that Austria has a compulsory service law?”

“Angela! You surprise me. You’re working for the Austrian government now?”

“Look at what I have been getting in the mail!” She got an official document from her purse and handed it to him. It indicated that Herr Hitler was to present himself for Austrian military service in Linz within a fortnight. If he failed to comply, he would be prosecuted, and if he was found guilty of having left Austria with the object of evading military service, he would be fined heavily and imprisoned.

Adolf folded the official document and handed it back to her. “I have no fear of prison.”

“Oh good,” Angela said, “because the police tell me you’ll be arrested at the border.”

“And why would I go back to Austria?”

“Us!”

“Who’s that?”

“Your family!” she shouted, and watched him chew his fingernails as she urged him to find a real job in Linz or Wien, to register for his Austrian military duty, and to help in taking care of his childlike, seventeen-year-old sister.

And then it was Adolf’s turn to argue, and she found she was no equal to his flame as he wildly paced all around the flat, his hands flying, his voice a screech as he harangued his half-sister about a hopeless Austro-Hungarian army composed of gypsies and mongrel people, about Wien, the home of the despicable Habsburgs and their Babylon of mixed races, and about his own Wagnerian genius as a thinker and artist that she wanted quelled with grinding labor and drudgery.

It was the tyranny of anger she’d grown used to with him. Angela begged him to see things her way, but she hated her own whining tone as much as she hated his nastiness and scorn, which reminded her so much of their father’s, and so she finally did what his mother would do. “Dear Adolf,” she said, “you’re so worked up. Are you hungry?”

Obviously he was, but he wouldn’t say so.

“Shall I get us some groceries? We can talk later, when we’ve eaten. We’ll all feel better then.”

With anxiety he again noticed his niece on the sofa. “Don’t stay away long.”

“Shall I take her, then?”

Hitler shrugged. “I have no company here usually. I’m a hermit. She won’t be a nuisance?”

“You’ll be good, won’t you, Geli?”

“And quiet?” he asked.

The little girl looked at her mother in fright.

“She’ll be fine,” Angela said.

Hitler shoved his forelock left with his right hand. “Kindergarten isn’t man’s work, you know.”

Angela sighed, got her hat and purse, and went out.

A sheet of paper with handwriting on it was weighted down by an inkwell on the sill beside his bed. The little girl pointed to it. “What’s that?”

“A poem,” he said. “About my mother. She’s passed away.”