Hitler's Niece

CHAPTER THREE

THE CORPORAL AND THE SCHATZKAMMER, 1919

Late in the first year of the Great War, Angela was pawning an emerald necklace for food money when she happened upon a shop window that displayed a famous press photograph taken in München in August 1914. The photo featured a huge crowd gathered at the Feldherrnhalle, the Hall of the Field Marshals, to register their wild enthusiasm for the alignment of Germany with Austria in a war against Russia and Serbia, a conflict that they thought would be over within a few weeks. And Angela was surprised to find Adolf there in the front of that rally, white-faced and frail, his hair now short, his hat lifted high in a cheer, happier than she’d ever seen him. She found out that Adolf had formally petitioned Ludwig III for permission to enlist in the Bavarian army and, in spite of his general unhealthiness, had been accepted as a volunteer. Even though it meant forfeiting his Austrian citizenship, Hitler was overjoyed, and he later wrote Angela, “I am not ashamed to say that I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time.”

Angela in fact got few letters from her half-brother in the four years of the war, but Hitler was in regular correspondence with his former landlords, Josef and Elisabeth Popp, and they often forwarded news of him to the Raubals in Wien. And so they heard from Elisabeth Popp that Hitler was with the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. She told them that his friends called him “Laced Boots,” called him “Adi.” And now he was a Meldegänger, an orderly and runner between headquarters on the front, “functioning,” as he put it in one letter, “as a field telephone,” the favorite target of snipers. “My highest goal,” he wrote, “is to follow my superior blindly and contradict no one.” In occasional postcards from the Popps, Angela heard that he was in Ypres, Belgium; in Messines; in the battle of the Somme. His favorite food, he’d told them, was zwieback toast and honey. Sergeant Max Amann had gotten him to paint the officers’ dining room. A superior’s report noted that he was “modest and inconspicuous,” which he took as high praise. He’d found a lost white terrier he’d named Little Fox. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea was in his backpack and he was memorizing it.

Even at Christmas, when Angela expected some private summary of his year on the front, she got only one poem:

I often go on bitter nights

To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade

And with dark powers form a union!

The moon offers spells and magic

And all who are defiant in daylight

Are made fearful and insignificant!

Shells and guns and bayonets

No longer have power over me!

I am Wotan and in charge

Of my own destiny!

Enemies waving their shining swords

Are all changed into pillars of stone!

So the false ones part from the real ones

As I consult the ancient nest of words

And find formulas of blessings and prosperity

For the pure, the just, and the good!

Angela heard secondhand that a shell had wounded him, and in the field hospital he’d been awakened by a nurse, the first female he’d seen in two years. And then he was healing in Beelitz, outside Berlin, where he found “only hunger and dire misery.” Children were drinking coffee because there was no milk, and cats were being called “roof rabbits.” And then he was in the Ludendorff offensives on the Somme, on the Aisne, and on the Marne. Just before the Armistice she heard he’d been blinded by a gas attack near the village of Werwick. Another letter forwarded from the Popps reported that he was “fit for field service” again and was living in “the pigsty of the Türkenstrasse barracks” near his old Schwabing neighborhood. Angela heard that Frau Popp had taken a calf’s head vinaigrette to him and that he’d finished it in one sitting. She said Hitler wouldn’t say what he was still doing in the army, but he’d told her he was stunned to hear that the Raubals never got his letters. Liar, Angela thought.

Then, six years after Angela and Geli had last seen him in München, Hitler showed up, on a furlough, at their flat near the Westbahnhof in Wien. Geli was then eleven and her uncle was thirty, and handsome, she thought, in his polished boots and gray, high-necked tunic and a faintly perfumed, gull-winged mustache known as a Kaiserbart. She peered closely at his hero’s medals as he proudly described them to his niece and his admiring thirteen-year-old nephew: the Iron Cross, first class; the Iron Cross, second class; the Military Cross, third class, with swords; the regiment’s diploma for conspicuous bravery; the Medal for the Wounded; and the Service Medal, third class. And then he let Leo feel through his gray woolen trousers the gouge that a shell had torn in his left thigh. Even after four years in the war, Hitler had gone no farther in rank than Gefreiter, a lance corporal, owing to his Austrian background, he told Leo, and to the circumstance that his preferred and dangerous job as a runner could not be held by someone with a higher rank.

His twenty-three-year-old sister Paula hesitantly brought out their finest porcelain tea service and simpered and curtsied to him before going back into the kitchen to help Angela with the Austrian dessert that was called Kaiserschmarren. And then Leo was sent to the bakery for rolls because their only bread was the wretched stuff made of potato peelings and sawdust.

And so the choreography of family allowed his niece to be alone with Hitler in the parlor, watching silently and starstruck as he sat forward in her father’s old chair and held a Dresden teacup and saucer rather daintily in his hands, letting the tea become lukewarm and then cold as he talked and talked about

the endless war of attrition that Germany would have won were it not for the pacifists and slackers and traitors who had signed the armistice.

She imagined this was how it was to have a father or a husband. To be affectionate, first of all, to tell him how gallant he looked, to offer him spice cakes or strudel, to loll in a heated parlor, to hear his voice and be the still pond on which he skimmed his opinions. She tried to seem poised. She found herself adjusting her stockings and her skirt, but he failed to notice. She otherwise kept her ankles crossed and her hands folded and her head tilted in fascination. When she lost track of what he was saying, she’d gently smile and Uncle Adolf would be encouraged to go on with his monologue.

Often in Belgium, he told her, they were forced to hide from heavy artillery fire for days on end. In cold trenches of crumbling mud. With water up to their knees. And so it was a relief to charge forward, hearing the first shrapnel hissing overhead. Watching it explode at the edge of the forest, splintering trees as if they were straws.

“We observe it all with curiosity,” he said. “We have no idea yet of danger. We crawl forward on our stomachs while above us are only howls and hisses. Shattered trees surround us. Shells explode and hurl clouds of stone, earth, and sand into the air. Even the heaviest trees are torn out by their roots. We get to water, a stream, and though it offers some protection, we find it choked in the yellow-green stink of poisons. We cannot lie there forever, and if we have to fall in battle, we choose to be killed as heroes. We attack and retreat four times. And do you know, Geli, from my whole company only one other soldier remains, and finally he also falls? And so I am alone. A shot tears off my right coat sleeve, but I remain safe and unscathed. Quickly I find a hiding place. At two o’clock in the afternoon others join me and we go forward for the fifth time, and finally we occupy the forest and the farms. We slaughter all the animals, until the fields flow red with blood. Within a few days, we withdraw.”

Seeming exhausted, Hitler slumped back into her father’s chair and sipped his heavily sugared tea, waiting for his niece to respond, but she didn’t know what to say. She thought she’d failed to understand him, for his story seemed full of awfulness softly rendered, but his face was pink with vibrancy and his freakishly pale eyes were finely tuned on hers.