Hitler's Niece

And then they were at the Hofburg, the common name for the Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was now in foundering pieces. The Weltliche Schatzkammer was a treasury within the palace, and was filled with crowns, scepters, jeweled ornaments, weighty robes, and the other fineries of majesty. But as Geli walked the aisles of the museum with her uncle, she got the impression that Hitler was disgusted by either the wild extravagance of royal wealth or by the hundreds of Czechs, Hungarians, Croatians, and Jews who were crowding around the displays, for he did little beside frown and fan imagined odors from his face until they got to the official crown of the Habsburg emperors. Then he hoisted Geli up higher so she could see the rubies and sapphires on it as he told her, “Everything wrong with Austria begins here. Who could remain a faithful subject of the House of Habsburg when they chose as their insignia the crown of Bohemia rather than the magnificent crown of the German emperors?”

She said, “Uncle, I don’t understand why you wanted to come here.”

And he put her down. “You will.” Walking on, he furiously sidestepped through an official party of foreigners, hurried past a few more exhibits, and then halted in front of a glass case on which was a sign that read: HEILIGE LANZE. Lying on red velvet behind the glass was a leather case and within it was a hammered iron spearhead, blackened by age, a nail tied to it with gold, silver, and copper wires.

“What is it?” Geli asked.

Hitler would say nothing. He folded his arms and stared in a funereal way, as if right then he could tolerate only his own thinking.

The girl found a hand-printed placard that stated that many considered the Heilige Lanze to be the Spear of Longinus, reputedly used by the Roman centurion to thrust into the side of Jesus as he died at the Crucifixion. A nail thought to be from the Cross had been attached to it in the thirteenth century. Otto the Great had once owned the lance, but he was just one of forty-five emperors who’d taken possession of it between Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome and the fall of the old German Empire one thousand years later. Each had believed in the legend that whoever held the spear held the destiny of the world in his hands.

“Are you interested in history?” Geli asked.

“In power,” he said, and then he stood there in silence, shaking; and he stayed that way, lost to his niece, until the Schatzkammer closed an hour later.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE BEER HALL PUTSCH, 1923

Months passed, and then the Raubals got a letter from Lance Corporal Hitler telling them that he was enrolled on the staff of the “Press and Information Bureau” of the Seventh Army District Command, and working for a Captain Ernst Röhm. And they’d become such fast friends that each was soon calling the other by the familiar “Du,” which had helped Adolf to achieve some useful importance among the officer corps.

One night at the Brennessel Wine Cellar, Röhm and Dietrich Eckart, the famous translator of Peer Gynt and “a co-warrior against Jerusalem,” had invited him to join the forty members of the German Workers’ Party, saying they needed a good public speaker like him who was also a bachelor—“so we’ll get the women”—who was shrewd in politics and firm in his convictions, was not an officer or an intellectual or in the upper class, and who’d proven he could face gunfire, for the Communists would try to kill him.

At first Hitler had been unimpressed by the faltering party—it was “like a high school debating society,” he wrote in his memoirs, and “club life of the worst sort”—but the High Command thought it offered a good defense against the antimilitary and antinationalist sentiments of the working classes, and the Command had promised him all the financial support he would need. And so he’d become a member and was now chief of propaganda, with his own Adler typewriter and with former sergeant Max Amann as his business manager in a “funeral vault of an office” in the Sterneckerbräu beer hall on the Herrenstrasse. With Röhm’s help, theirs was now a party of soldiers, he wrote Angela, and often one could see whole Reichswehr companies marching through the streets in civilian clothes, hunting down and bloodying those he called “Germany’s enemies,” by which he meant Bolsheviks, Weimar Republicans, and Jews.

A few weeks ago, he wrote, in the great feast hall of the Hofbräuhaus, he’d talked heatedly for two and a half hours to a hostile audience of about two thousand Communists and Socialists. But they hated the ineffectual Weimar Republic as much as he did, if for different reasons, and by the time he’d finished there was frenzied applause for whatever he said. “Walking away from that meeting,” he wrote the Raubals, “my heart burst with joy, for I knew a great and fearsome wolf had been born, one who was destined to rage against that flock who were the pitiful seducers of the people.”

The Raubals received another letter in July 1921, informing them that he was now a private citizen and was renting a flat above a drugstore at Thierschstrasse 41, not far from the Isar river. On his insistence, his organization was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but was primarily known by an acronym formed from the first and sixth syllables, Nazi, which was, he told the Raubals, Bavarian slang for “buddy,” for, “We are friends of the common man.” It was he who had designed their blood-red flag with the black Old World peace symbol of the hooked cross or swastika, now reversed on a white field in order to represent chaos and conflict, “for we are at war.”

Within the last year, he wrote, he’d been the featured speaker at eighty mass meetings, harping on the financial collapse under their Jewish-Marxist government in Berlin and arguing for a change to a “patriotic dictatorship.” It was he alone who had been responsible for the burgeoning growth in the party’s membership to three thousand people, and yet the founders feared his prominence and the influx of so many full-throated former soldiers into their meetings, and had sought to enfeeble his influence by an alliance with a socialist group in Augsburg. “Hearing of that, I faced them down by offering to quit. Without me, they knew there was no future for them, and so they went the other way.” In fact, in a fulsome letter the party had noted his great successes, his cunning, his sacrifice, and his “unusual oratorical abilities” and had offered to make him its first chairman, dispensing with further parliamentary debates and the confusions of democracy. And so he was now called its führer, its imperious and omnipotent leader. Which was, of course, as it should be.

“And he asks how we are,” Angela said, folding up his letter.

Leo smirked. “And says how much he misses us?”

“That isn’t funny,” Geli said.

Their mother said, “Adolf is so busy, he just forgets about others.”

“But isn’t it nice that he’s doing so well,” Paula said. “With no skills or education.”

Leo’s uncle mailed the high school boy a flyer announcing the party’s gymnastic and sports division, which offered su

ch things as boxing, hiking, and soccer games to its youthful members, and harnessed their strength “as an offensive force at the disposal of the movement.” At the bottom of the flyer in Hitler’s own handwriting was “Are you interested?”, along with the notation that the name had just been changed to Sturmabteilung (SA), or Storm Detachment. The feisty young men in the SA, he wrote, were being given uniforms of Norwegian ski caps and brown shirts and swastika armbands to “infuse them with feelings of solidarity and discipline.” Captain Ernst Röhm was their commander, and “he thinks of them as his private army, though their allegiance is solely to me.”

Leo Raubal was, in fact, interested in the Sturmabteilung, but primarily because he wanted a father so badly and because his famous uncle finally seemed interested in him. Working after school and on weekends, Leo saved enough money to purchase a railway ticket to München for the first Reich Party Day of the NSDAP on January 27, 1923.

The Ruhr Valley, which was Germany’s foremost manufacturing and mining region, had just been invaded by one hundred thousand French and Belgian troops on the pretense that Germany had failed to fulfill the outrageous obligations of the Versailles Treaty in its huge shipments of coal and timber. Angry Germans were fighting back through strikes, massive demonstrations, passive resistance, and sabotage, and as a consequence the Rentenmark lost such value in the world market that in a few weeks it fell from the already inflated seven thousand marks to the dollar to almost fifty thousand to the dollar. Within eight months the Rentenmark would be practically worthless at one hundred thirty billion to the dollar. Currency values were changing so frequently that factory workers tossed their wages to their wives as soon they were paid so the women could hurry off and buy groceries before prices went up again. The Weimar government was forced to use forty-nine office boys carrying huge wastepaper baskets filled with notes just to pay a railway bill. Children stayed indoors because they had no stockings. Coal was so precious that houses went unheated. There was epidemic unemployment, chronic hunger and illness, chaos in the streets, nihilism and purposelessness, and of all the chancellors, industrialists, generals, and quarreling politicians who spoke for the foundering Reich, only Adolf Hitler seemed as personally offended as the people, and the National Socialists achieved greater esteem the more he furiously protested Germany’s avalanche of misery.

Wearing his new Norwegian ski cap and riding proudly in his uncle’s car as Hitler went from town to town in Bavaria, Leo heard his uncle speak at twelve huge public rallies on January 27th, offering Germany only two choices, that of the red star of Communism or the swastika of National Socialism. Leo later told his family of the fanatical excitement of the people for Uncle Adolf and of his own awe in watching six thousand storm troopers hold themselves in rigid attention as they listened to Hitler talk on the windy Marsfeld, withstanding the ferocious cold through sheer effort of will. Röhm saw to it that Leo was given a copy of his uncle’s speech, and in the flat in Wien afterward Leo would quote his uncle saying to the Sturmabteilung, “You who today fight on our side cannot win great laurels, far less can you win great material goods. Indeed, it is more likely that you will end up in jail. But sacrifice you must. He who today is your leader must be first of all an idealist, if only for the reason that he leads those whom the world is trying to destroy. But dream I will.” The crowd was ecstatic. Afterward, Leo said, Hitler had taken him to the fancy Carlton Tearoom on Briennerstrasse where he talked with his intimates on a host of subjects. Leo told Geli and Angela, “Everybody listens with reverence to anything he has to say. What an extraordinary person!”

Angela herself heard no more of her half-brother until November 1923, when she read the headlines of an Austrian newspaper saying that General Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler had attempted a putsch, or revolution, in Germany.

It seemed that on Thursday night, November 8th, cabinet ministers who were scheming to restore the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria had been on stage at a mass meeting of three thousand people sitting at the timber tables of the Bürgerbräukeller—where a stein of beer cost one billion marks—as Commissar Gustav von Kahr had tendentiously condemned Communism, putting many in the audience to sleep. At precisely half past eight, Captain Hermann Göring had invaded the hall with twenty-five storm troopers carrying machine guns. Women screamed, tables were overturned, brass steins rang across the floor, and fleeing men were struck down. Wearing a black, long-tailed morning suit, as if it were a formal wedding, Hitler had strode toward the stage, gotten up on a chair, fired a Browning pistol into the ceiling, and shouted, “Quiet! The national revolution has broken out! The Reichswehr is with us, and the hall is surrounded!”

Hitler had then ordered into a side room Reichswehr Lieutenant General Otto von Lossow, the military commander of Bavaria who was, he thought, an ally, Colonel Hans von Seisser, head of the state police, and Gustav von Kahr, the head of government, and there he’d promised them all high-level appointments in a People’s National Government that would put the former quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff in charge of a great national army that would march on Berlin just as Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts had successfully marched on Rome thirteen months earlier. All three were older aristocrats of high rank in the Reichswehr, and they had looked at the thirty-four-year-old former lance corporal with contempt. Hitler had held up his pistol and threatened, “There are still four rounds in this. Three for you, my collaborators, if you abandon me,” and he’d held it to his forehead, “and one for me if I fail.”

An angry, fifty-eight-year-old General Ludendorff had then arrived in full regimentals and with all his decorations. While he thought Hitler had gone too far in a unilateral way, he did think revolutionary change was necessary in Germany, and he’d sought a private conversation with the three politicians to work out concessions.