Hitler's Niece

“We used to read about the battles in school,” she said. “It was horrible. The girls used to cry.”

Hitler held his stare for an uncomfortable minute more. She worried that he was trying to read her mind. And then slowly, like a man just getting used to his body, he curled to his left to gently put his Dresden teacup and saucer down on a shined side table, the clack as faint as when good teeth meet.

“Another time I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades,” he said. “Suddenly I seemed to hear a voice saying to me, ‘Get up and go over there.’ It was so clear and so insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it were just another military order. At once I got to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying with me my fork and my dinner in its tin can. I found a shell box and sat down on it to go on eating, my busy mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and a deafening boom came from the part of the trench I had just left. A shell had detonated over the friends I’d just been with. All of them were killed.”

“We’re so glad you’re still alive,” she said.

Leo rushed into the flat with the rolls and flinched when he saw Geli alone with their uncle. “Wait for me, Uncle Adolf,” he said. “Don’t tell her anything more.” But when he took the rolls into the kitchen, Angela told him to get changed for dinner. Walking down the hallway, Leo called, “Two minutes!”

Confidentially, Hitler leaned forward and told his niece one more story. “October,” he said, “1918.” In Belgium, near Werwick, his infantry regiment, filled to overflowing with defeatists and pessimists and future deserters, had been attacked by British artillery with a poison called mustard gas and his regiment was forced to retreat. Hitler had lost his voice and his face had swelled like a penny balloon until he was blinded. At a hospital in Pasewalk just outside Berlin, he’d heard the news of Germany’s surrender in the forest of Compiègne, and his heart had ached as it had only once before, after his mother had died in the agony of cancer. Would he ever see again? The question was no longer that. The question was: Would his beloved motherland die as his mother had?

At that point Uncle Adolf placed a surprisingly damp hand on her knee as he said, “But, Angelika, as I was lying on my cot that night—and you must picture it: frightened, confused, full of hatred, in the blackest state of despair—a miracle came to pass! Like Joan of Arc, I heard voices. Each one crying out, ’Save Germany!’”

Geli giggled, for she thought he was kidding, but his face was serious and his eyes were aflame with fury. She thought for a second that he might strike her.

But he controlled his emotions and calmly said, “To be sure, it’s peculiar. Quite out of the ordinary. But you see, when I opened my eyes, I was no longer blind! And I vowed then and there that I would become a politician and offer my life in the hope of changing Germany’s fate.”

“A politician?” she asked. She thought they were all aristocrats. She felt his hand staying on her knee. Would he waggle it as he did when he was teasing?

“You see what these stories have in common? I am a child of providence, Fräulein Raubal.” He released his hand and smiled. “You will hear much about me. Just wait until my time comes.”

Adolf failed to offer Angela money for food though his soldier’s pay had accrued to a tidy sum on the front and the Raubals’ poverty was as obvious as the canning jars they used for glassware. And yet she made him such a feast that even Adolf noticed, he who was like an infant in his alertness only to himself. Tucking a napkin at his throat and fanning it over his medals and ribbons, he smiled at a dining table filled with Tyrolean dumplings on sauerkraut, red beets in a horseradish cream, and four squabs on a bed of celery stalks and onions. And he said, “Such prodigality, Angela! Where is the fatted calf?”

“Well, it’s not like we often see you, Corporal Hitler.”

A fierce glare was flung at Angela, but then it softened as Hitler chose to pinion a squab with his fork and vulgarly dump it onto his dinner plate. And then he sawed so hard at the fowl with his knife that the flames trembled on their candlewicks. Would he be sucking his fingers next? Angela thought. The Raubals just stared, until with a strictness and confidence worthy of his father, Hitler said without lifting his gaze, “Everybody, begin.”

Eating did not halt his talking. Only his listening seemed affected. Inquiry about Angela’s or Paula’s jobs, other opinions, or the children’s hobbies and schools never occurred to him as he told the Raubals and his sister that for a while he had served as a fence guard in a prisoners-of-war camp, near Traunstein, on the Austrian border. But higher-ups had become aware of his perspicacity and loyalty to Germany, even if it was now a republic headed by Jews, and he had been sent back to München to confirm the fidelity of Reichswehr soldiers by spying on the fifty or more organizations of Communists, Anarchists, Socialists, Centrists, even the Bavarian Royal party—politics being one of the few industries that flourished in postwar Germany. Technically an education officer, he had taken courses in propaganda and politics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, where he’d been fortunate in that all the lecturers were, like him, nationalists, anti-Left, and anticlerical; and he could now say with certainty that four years of war had been the equivalent of thirty years in a university. “I have a doctorate in sorrow, a doctorate in treachery, and a doctorate in the ways of the world. I have no use for whatever subject is not included in those.”

Hitler told them he was now a proud member of the “Instruction Commando,” and regularly giving talks to Reichswehr soldiers on “The Conditions of Peace and Reconstruction” and “Social and Economic-Political Slogans,” which were meant to ignite their German patriotism. And he had heard many compliments from his audience, who called his talks “spirited” and hailed him as “a born popular speaker.”

Paula bluntly said, “You think you got all the talent in the family.”

Adolf ignored The Straggler and turned to Angela. “But I have no talent in cooking,” he said. “My older sister got all that.”

“Wasn’t I the lucky one,” Angela said, and rose to collect the dinner plates. And Hitler was talking again. Angela saw that Paula was openly yawning, Geli’s chin was on her fist as she dully fiddled with her fork, and Leo was staring wide-eyed at his uncle, as if thunderstruck by Hitler’s ability to take such pleasure in himself while offering only boredom to others. Angela bent to kiss her son’s head and thought, You all are also a fortune that Adolf is squandering.

Waking at noon on Saturday in Angela’s room, Hitler was astonished to find no one but Geli still in the flat. Angela and Paula were at work—he was not interested enough to ask where—and Leo was at soccer practice in the Wurstelprater park. Geli watched him dither for an hour, sitting and getting up again, hunting for food in the icebox, agitatedly stalking by the front windows, holding up framed photographs of distant family that he frowned at—having forgotten their names—and noisily put down.

Geli asked, “Was there something you wanted to do, Uncle?”

“Something important,” he said, and turned to her. “But I suppose I can’t abandon you here.”

She did not say that she was eleven years old and often alone in the flat. She instead connived to be with him by saying, “You could take me.”

And so he did. Hitler did not tell his niece where they were going, he just strolled gracefully ahead of Geli up Rotenturmstrasse to Sankt Stephansplatz, dourly accepting the praise of Austrians who tipped their hats to his Iron Cross. Geli wore a favorite navy blue sailor dress, with a blue bow and grosgrain ribbon in her lilting, light brown hair, and she thought she looked pretty, but Hitler’s far-off stare failed

to find her. She tried to hold his hand, but he withdrew it. At times she was forced to skip to keep up. When he turned onto Spiegelgasse, she asked him, “Are we going to the Hofburg?”

“Well, not all of it, of course. Only the Schatzkammer. Have you been there?”

She shook her head.

“Shocking,” Hitler said. And then he confided that he’d found a dear friend in the Thule Society, an occult group of deep thinkers in München. They’d taken the name “Thule” from a long-forgotten island in the North Atlantic between Scandinavia and Greenland that had been the origin of Nordic civilization and of a master race of blond, blue-eyed vegetarians. The friend he’d found had told him he must visit the Schatzkammer.

She worried about the odd interests of males. She asked, “Was it a boy friend or a girl friend?”

Hitler halted at the insinuation he heard, then understood her. The friend, he said, was Dietrich Eckart, a poet, a playwright, and the editor of the anti-Semitic, anti-Republican, anti-Bolshevik weekly Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German). “We are seeking together a national messiah.”