Hitler's Niece

She felt his chagrin as if it were catching. “I think I would have had to grow up with a father to know how.”

“I can do it,” Ingrid hurriedly said, and Geli watched closely as her uncle hesitantly offered his throat to her and oddly held his breath as she tied a four-in-hand, flushing with panic when she got one part wrong, and falling back with relief when she finished.

Sheepishly eyeing his niece, he put on a blue serge suit coat, a calf-length black cashmere overcoat, and a black slouch hat that could have had a former life in the Old West.

Geli told him, “You look like a desperado, Herr Hitler.”

Without humor he thanked her for reminding him, and got a handgun from underneath his pillow and slipped it into his overcoat pocket. “I have to worry about assassination all the time,” he told them.

Halfway up Thierschstrasse was the finance office of the Eher Publishing House, and the official party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer). Walking there, Hitler took joy in telling the girls how he took over the weekly with an interest-free loan from Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl of six hundred American dollars, a fortune in Germany then, but shrewdly paid off the loan a few months later with fantastically inflated deutsche marks, “so I got offices, furnishings, Linotype, paper, and two American rotary presses for the price of a peppermint stick.”

“But I thought Putzi was a friend of yours,” Geli said.

Hitler’s face was full of childish wonderment over what the objection could possibly be; then he informed his niece that Herr Hanfstaengl was also a good Nazi. “Willingly, with no regret, a good Nazi gives all he has to his leader.”

And then he held open the front door to the finance office, and followed the girls inside. Geli saw Max Amann hastily put out his cigarette, get up from his cluttered desk, and proudly offer a straight-armed version of the Italian Fascist salu

te as soon as he saw her uncle stroll in. Hitler’s former sergeant major in the List Regiment, and a graduate of a business college, Amann was a short, gruff, and often irritable man in his thirties with crew-cut hair, a brown inch of mustache that frankly imitated his leader’s—who’d soon order it shaved off—and a face that seemed as hard and cruel as cinderblock. But he softened with adoration whenever Hitler was near. Quickly ignoring the girls, the grinning business manager held out forms and letters for Hitler’s signature and tried to illustrate with a wide green ledger some financial problem that the unofficial publisher ought to be aware of. But Hitler wouldn’t even sit, for a film of dust was on his favorite chair. Everywhere files and papers were heaped and scattered around Amann. An hourglass spider hurried across his hand-cranked adding machine. Everything he touched seemed to have turned into an ashtray.

Hitler sighed as he signed his name twenty times with a Mont Blanc pen, then curtly told Amann that the office stank of tobacco and escorted the girls outside. “Well, that’s done,” he said, as if he’d finished a hard day.

Geli told her uncle that she felt sorry for Amann, that he looked like a hound in a kennel visited only at mealtime.

Hitler laughed. “I’ll have to tell him that.”

“Will he enjoy it?”

Quizzically frowning at her, Hitler said, “I will,” as if that were enough.

They strolled farther, to the Schwabing district where on Schellingstrasse, a few blocks from the university, Hitler waved to a short, buoyant man inside the Hoffmann Photography Studio at number 50, then held open the door to the Müller Printing Press, the editorial offices of the Völkischer Beobachter.

Putzi Hanfstaengl and a few men in brown shirts stood and offered the Nazi salute when they saw their leader walking inside behind the girls, but it was only Rudolf Hess who also shouted out, “Heil Hitler!” Geli found it puzzling that Heil, “well-being” or “salvation,” an old Teutonic salutation that was unfashionable in Austria, was now being associated with her uncle’s name; but he seemed not at all embarrassed by it, and in fact received their Fascist salutes with haughty nonchalance.

“You may sit,” he said, and took off his slouch hat and coat. Looking around he asked, “Where is Herr Rosenberg?”

Hess said, “He just went out for coffee.”

Stamping his foot, Hitler played a child as he wailed, “But wasting time in cafés is my job!”

Everybody laughed too loud and too long.

Hitler turned to his niece. “Have you seen our paper?”

She hadn’t.

Hess handed him an old issue with the headline “Clean Out the Jews Once and for All,” and Hitler held it in front of himself as he fulsomely congratulated Hanfstaengl for thinking up the American format, the slogan beneath the masthead, Arbeit und Brot, “Work and Bread,” and for his getting a Simplicissimus cartoonist named Schwarzer to design the masthead. Simplicissimus, Hitler explained to Ingrid, was a famous satirical magazine with a pronounced hatred of the National Socialist Party, so he thought of Schwarzer’s—and Hanfstaengl’s—contribution as a great victory. The huge Hanfstaengl gracefully bowed to Hitler’s praise, which could not have been new, while Geli saw the forgotten Hess fuming with hurt feelings and anguish. And now he must do something extra, Geli thought.

Hess surged forward and told the girls, “We have been thinking about calling the months by their heroic old Germanic names. We would call May Wonnemonat, which means ‘month of delight.’ Rather than June, why not Brachmond, or ‘fallow moon’? October would be Gelbhart, or ‘hard yellow.’ And Nebelung, ‘mist,’ for November.”

“I find the idea ridiculous,” Hitler said. “We are a party of the common people, not mystics.” And as Hess’s face fell, Hitler turned to an interior page to show the girls a cartoon he thought hilarious, of a handsome Germanic knight on his steed hauling away from his fortress a squalling, fat priest and an ugly Jew whose nose was as large as a gourd. The knight was ruefully thinking, “Must we always have to deal with these two?”

The girls looked at each other: Why is that funny? And then Ingrid quietly hinted, “We have to go practice.”

“What was that?” Hitler asked.

Geli smiled. “Sotto voce.”

“But I have so much yet to show you!”