Hitler's Niece

She didn’t. A flicker of unease seemed to cross her face, as if she were unused to the size and heartiness of men. “Won’t you come in?” she asked, but then flushed and withdrew farther from him as he filled the foyer.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, and handed her his gifts.

“Chocolates! And a book!” Angela cried, as if she’d just noticed them. “You are too kind.”

“You’re tall, aren’t you,” Paula called. She was a stout woman of almost twenty-eight. She was hiding behind the icebox in the kitchen so that only her tilted head showed. She was just a little fuller in the face than Adolf; otherwise the resemblance was obvious.

Hanfstaengl doffed his hat and smiled. “You must be Fräulein Hitler!”

“Oh, yes; must be, forced to be, had no choice.” She fell back from view and called, “We don’t have any money! You go away now!”

“Quiet, Paula!” Angela shouted. She turned back to Hanfstaengl and with chagrin confided, “She’s strange, you know.” His frown told her he didn’t know; Hitler had hidden that. She realized it was the hour for Kaffee und Kuchen.

“Shall I take your coat?” Angela asked. “We still have some coffee, I think.”

But Hanfstaengl was focused on the squalor of the flat, seeing Leo’s foul straw mattress in the hallway, the old three-legged green sofa that was Geli’s bed, and the few frail pieces of other furniture that hadn’t yet been sold. “I hope you will pardon the observation, Frau Raubal, but it looks like you have had a difficult life here lately, just as we have had in Germany.”

She told him, “We all get to eat at the hostel, so we have it better than most.”

“We have lost a war,” he somberly said, “and the world won’t let us forget it.” Then his gaze shifted farther down the hallway, and Angela saw that he was smiling at Geli.

She’d been studying geometry on the floor of the bedroom that Angela shared with Paula, but she’d been so intrigued by the American accent she’d heard that she’d hastily fussed with her hair and changed into her finest gray wool skirt and the pink angora sweater that Angela thought was too formfitting for a girl of fifteen. And then she’d sashayed out to find in the foyer a homely but jolly man with a jutting jaw and underbite, fully six feet four in height, in a chalk-gray English suit and black cashmere topcoat, a gray fedora in one huge hand, his brown hair oiled slick and middle-parted and still grooved by his hat.

“And you must be Angelika,” he said. “Aren’t you pretty!”

“My friends call me Geli.”

She felt her hand lose itself in his as he introduced himself first as Herr Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, and then as his friends and family knew him: Putzi, a childhood nickname that meant Cutie. “Say it, please.”

“Putzi.”

“And so we are done with formalities,” he said, and offered Geli’s hand back to her.

Angela held up the gift box and said, “Look, Geli, chocolates!” And then she shouted to the kitchen, “Paula, won’t you have some?”

“Hah!” Paula said.

Putzi Hanfstaengl’s hand found Geli’s forearm as he tilted toward Angela to offer, “You know what I would like to do, Frau Raubal? Rather than have coffee with you here, I’d far rather take your family out.”

Leo Raubal was still at his high school, where he assisted the night janitor, and The Straggler preferred to stroll Stadtpark as she always did, one hand in a sack of crushed zwieback toast, hunting in vain for pigeons to feed. So only Angela and Geli went with Hanfstaengl to the swank Café Sacher for mocha mit Obers and their famous Sacher torte.

Riding there in a taxi he cordially lectured Angela on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a little pamphlet that Adolf insisted she read in order to understand fully who the party’s archenemy was. With an intensity she associated with high school acting, Putzi informed Angela that the Jewish Nationalist Movement of the Zionists had been founded at a congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Ostensibly their intention was to lead the Jews back to a homeland in Palestine, he told her, but in their secret sessions the Zionist elders had been hatching a heinous plan for a Jewish conquest of the world. Each of their speeches had been recorded in shorthand and the collected papers had been sent by courier to Frankfurt am Main where they were to be stored in the archives of the Rising Sun Lodge of Freemasons. Czarist secret police had somehow intercepted them, however, and the pamphlet had been published in Russian just before the revolution. It was then that Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic architect who was often called “Hitler’s co-thinker,” had fled to München and, fearing that a Jewish conquest was already well under way, had joined the National Socialists, for whom he had translated the text into German. The famous automaker Henry Ford had been so shocked by the protocols that he’d had them published in America under the title The International Jew.

“And what do they say?” Putzi rhetorically asked. “‘We’—the Jews—‘shall create unrest, struggle, and hate in all of Europe and thence to the other continents. We shall poison the relations between peoples by spreading hunger, destitution, and plagues. We shall stultify, seduce, and ruin the youth. We shall use bribery, treachery, and treason as long as they serve the realization of our plans. We shall paint the misdeeds of foreign governments in garish colors and create such ill-feeling toward them that the people would a thousand times rather bear a slavery that guarantees them order than enjoy the freedom offered them by others.’”

Angela frowned. “Are you saying this is occurring right now?”

“Oh, so you’ve seen it in Austria as well?”

“The Jews I know aren’t like that,” she said.

“There are Jews and there are Jews,” he said. “I would only caution you to be suspicious.” Putzi found his fountain pen, tore out a page from his address book, and wrote on it The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He handed it to Angela and watched with satisfaction as she dutifully put it in her purse. And then he saw Geli in the front seat, hiding a yawn. “All this grown-up talk,” he told her with a smile. “We do go on, don’t we?”

“I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I was just enjoying the ride. I haven’t been in a taxi before.”

They were in front of the Sacher, and as Putzi Hanfstaengl got out his wallet, he grinned and said, “We’ll make this a night of firsts.”

Coffee in the Sacher Café was a first for Angela, too. She found herself frightened by the high prices on the menu, the haughty ladies in furs, the Old World opulence of the furniture; and she was embarrassed by her faded dress with its cooking stains on the front, the shine on a green gabardine overcoat that she’d bought before the war, the hair that she’d been cutting with kitchen shears since the hard times after the armistice. She was forty, and just four years older than Putzi Hanfstaengl—whom she could not call by his nickname—and yet she felt dull and male in his company, without fascination or joy. She forgot the Jew-hating after a while and found herself liking this huge, generous, genial man; she even liked his ugliness—it gave a flavor of wry comedy to whatever he chanced to say. But he seemed to find it hard to unfasten himself from Geli’s admiration, and he seemed to be talking only to the girl when he said he was from an old family of art dealers and publishers on the Continent and in America, that he’d graduated from Harvard and had belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club, that he’d worked on Fifth Avenue in New York City for twelve years, then had returned to Germany to work on a doctorate in eighteenth-century history, that he was German on his father’s side and American on his mother’s, that his grandfather had been a Civil War general and a pallbearer at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.