Hitler's Niece

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She half turned out the chair next to her. “Would you like to sit, Pater Mayer?”

“Your uncle would find that highly inappropriate, Fräulein Raubal.” Crinkling his eyes, he smiled in private merriment, though his mouth was little more than a wide, flat line. He told her they went back a long way, Herr Hitler and he; to 1919 when they’d both participated in a public debate in München on the false teachings of Communism. Corporal Hitler had been an “education officer” then and had followed Mayer to the platform and said, “We have had a religious attack on Communism from a priest; now I shall attack it politically.” And he had electrified the crowd. Even Mayer had been carried away. But beneath the brilliance of his oratory, the Jesuit had found ideas that were so disturbing that he’d begun attending Herr Hitler’s meetings whenever he could. “And now I have heard a hundred times what Adolf Hitler has to say,” he told her. “I regret the offense to you, his niece, but your uncle is a dangerous man.”

Geli reddened in defensiveness, but the priest simply wished her a good evening and limped off to his faraway seat. Then the hall lights went black and Rudolf Hess stiffly walked onto the spotlighted stage below, his sunken eyes zigzagging beneath his fabulous eyebrows, and in his shrill, frightened voice he went on and on with his fawning introduction, flattering Hitler so fulsomely that people began to rhythmically stamp their feet with impatience. Hess finally turned to his leader, offered the Fascist salute, and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” And then, as his followers cheered and five hundred inflamed storm troopers jumped up as one and yelled over and over again, “Victory, salvation!,” her uncle walked onto the stage.

Without looking at the crowd, Hitler put his pages of notes faceup on a plain table there, diffidently arranged and squared them, and coughed softly into his fingertips in a way that Geli thought of as prim and effeminate. He seemed at first as reluctant to speak as Hess. He held his stare on the floor and stood a little behind the table, as if he’d totter without its support. Quiet settled on the audience and he uttered in a guttural, hardly intelligible bass voice a few sentences about the crisis they were facing in this twentieth century. She could see others leaning forward just as she was, frowning as they tried to hear.

Then both the timbre and the volume of his voice began rising, and in a good High German that was often tinged with Austrian slang and pronunciations, he gave his own interpretation of their motherland’s plight since November 11, 1918. “When we ask ourselves today what is happening in the world,” Hitler said, “we are obliged to cast our minds back to the kaiser’s abdication and his flight into Holland.” And then he reminded them of how the armistice had been signed by weaklings and criminals in Berlin, stabbing a knife in the back of the great German army when it was on the brink of victory. Communist Spartacists had incited a revolution against the Weimar Republic, but were quelled in hundreds of street battles by the Ehrhardt Brigade and other soldiers in private armies, many of them now his loyal and necessary storm troopers. But while they were shedding their blood for their friends and families, European and American enemies humiliated, in fact, sought to murder, their precious motherland with the Treaty of Versailles—“the treaty of shame,” he called it—compelling Germany to take sole responsibility for the war, and calling for fantastic reparations payments, the theft of 13 percent of its territory, and the occupation of the Rhineland and Saar by Allied forces. “The hands that signed that treaty shall wither!” Hitler shouted, and his audience leapt to its feet in wild applause.

Waving them down and quieting, he reminded them that the Weimar government had foolishly tried to fulfill those war debts that were impossible to meet by simply printing more money, hence its currency had soon become worthless. An American dollar could purchase a little more than four German marks in 1914, about eight and a half in 1918, and well over two hundred billion five years later! Hard-won savings were lost, factories were shut down, houses were sold to foreign investors for the price, to them, of a cup of tea.

We are on the right track again, Hitler said. Errors in policy have been corrected. But we are still being preyed upon by the four horsemen of hunger, illness, unemployment, and loss of national pride. There were Europeans at Versailles who wanted the “pastoralization” of Germany. Shall we permit them to do that? Have we, in fact, become sheep? And when he got them shouting no, his face turned fiendish as he threatened, “I’ll haul all those bargain-hunting, pact-making sissies right off the political stage.” Which was followed by tumultuous applause.

And so on. The history was familiar to Geli and everyone else in the Hofbräuhaus, but her uncle’s recitation of it was stunning in its conviction, its poisonous wit, its passion. Shunning rationality, he sought the peoples’ faith with his own certainty. Hard questions were given easy answers. Objections were overcome with insistence. Opinions difficult to accept were continually repeated. Every complex issue was simplified. Every suspicion of paranoia was offered due consideration and respect. The ill-educated in the audience got the impression that they finally understood politics.

Geli looked at her watch and realized an hour had passed since her uncle had begun speaking, and there was no sign he would soon quit, but the people seemed rooted in their seats, fully absorbed in what he was saying. She felt almost as if they’d furiously turn on her if she stirred, for he was healing them in his peculiar way, acquitting them of hostilities in the war, justifying their fury and spite, holding up as praiseworthy their most petty and shameful emotions, for hatred, fanaticism, and mercilessness were not only good but obligatory if the Aryan nation was to find its rightful place in the world. Exalting warfare and struggle as “the father of all things,” insisting that death in battle was a soldier’s highest duty, stressing his own ruthlessness and brutality, frankly admitting the intolerance of his ideology, Hitler was far less a politician than a ferocious prophet of wrath.

Geli later learned that each of Hitler’s ten or twelve large foolscap pages of notes contained fewer than twenty words, which served as cues for what would be ten or fifteen minutes of his rant. Each of his speeches was no less than two hours long and frequently closer to three, obeying the rules of a Wagnerian symphony in its fiery construction. Watching her uncle from afar, she saw how he kept the crowd, like his friends, off balance, first quarreling with the right wing for their feudal economic system, their meanness and class prejudices, their fears in the face of adversity, and then attacking the left wing for their facile thinking, their lax moral values, their abandonment of the great Germanic traditions. Without saying so, he gave the crowd the choice of agreeing with him or of being annihilated by his contempt, and they found themselves in his sway.

She saw that her uncle could do what cannot be faked: He honestly, deeply, majestically felt the hurt, the shame, and the outrage of being in Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Hitler’s gift was to make his hearers feel he was speaking to each one personally, heart to heart, and that he was proudly one of them, a Völkischer—ill-educated, ill-favored, from humble beginnings, a failure in all his undertakings, just another wounded, unknown soldier, and he had suffered precisely as they had. And yet he foresaw a glorious future for them if they would put their complete faith in him as their führer. “One is either a hammer or an anvil,” he shouted. “The only choice is between Hitler and death, victory or destruction, glory or ignominy. We shall be rich or we shall be poor. We shall be conquering heroes or sacrificial lambs. We shall be hot or cold, but those who

are lukewarm shall be damned.”

Even beyond the inflammatory wording, Geli saw that Hitler captivated his audience with a skilled actor’s talent for histrionics: his fists at his heart when he talked of his patriotism; his face ravaged, his shoulders shrugging beneath their heavy burden as he talked about Germany’s afflictions; his hand reaching upward, his face transfixed, as he talked about seizing the future. Often, though, he stood like a soldier at ease, his hands folded protectively in front of his crotch, his head high, his face reddening, his voice an orchestra of primal emotions as he shouted out his enmity for the Weimar parliamentarians, the Communists, the industrialist war profiteers, the intellectuals, and the Jews, promising that all the enemies of the people would one day be “beseitigt,” eliminated. And in case there was any question about who the foremost enemy was, Hitler finished his second hour with one long harangue against those he called “the Hebrew defilers” and the “ferment of decomposition.”

Everything wrong in Germany, he said, was wrong because of the secret Zionist conspiracy to conquer the world. The Jews were parasites; they were vermin. They had stood by idly as Aryan soldiers died at the front, they had forced the armistice, fostered Communism, put their signatures on the “treaty of disgrace,” and gotten fat on Germany’s misery in their black markets. And now they were manipulating financial affairs, miseducating the young, radically changing the sciences, filling the humanities and arts with their ugliness and degeneracy, polluting Aryan blood with intermarriage. With a rage verging on hysteria, his face running with sweat, his shirt soaked through, his voice growing hoarse, Hitler shrieked, “I will pull out the evil of Jewry by its roots and exterminate it!”

Was this why he had invited her here? Was he aware that Geli had girlfriends who were Jewish, that Angela worked in a Jewish hostel and Paula in a Jewish firm? Was he trying to change that, to make them regret it? She felt he was screaming at her personally, like an unhinged, upbraiding father in the midst of four thousand witnesses. She was chagrined. And she was shocked by other feelings as well, for if what he said was hateful and terrifying, it was also electrifying. Each sentence was being cheered now. Half of those in the hall were on their feet. Even grown men joined the high school boys in getting up on the tables to hoist their steins to him and yell their enthusiasm. Geli saw a girl faint with ecstasy. Elderly ladies were weeping with love of him. Cold weather was not as real as the thrill she felt around her.

Quickening his tempo, Hitler heatedly pounded out the final paragraphs of his speech in a rhapsody of words, offering the people food, order, full employment, European supremacy, and a complete end to the confusions and upheavals of democracy. (“I feel the heat of the audience,” he later told Geli, “and when the right time has come, I hurl a flaming javelin that sets the crowd on fire.”) And so he heightened his outrage, forging ahead with rhythmic, pounding sentences, his face as red as blood, his fists clenched, his neck straining, until, in a final orgasm of words, he grandly offered them himself as the messiah of the Germanic people. “I shall be your leader,” he screamed. “And ours shall be the kingdom, and the power, and the glory! Amen!”

With that the four thousand affirmed him in such a giant voice that the hall’s rafters shook. Quickly Hitler saluted his Sturmabteilung, signaling his Brownshirts to link arms and roar out the national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles.” While the exultation was still at its highest pitch, Hitler weakly escaped from the stage, but the hurrahs and singing and banging of tankards continued. And though Geli felt that the priest in his faraway seat was watching her with disappointment and scorn, she joined the others in wildly applauding her uncle. She couldn’t help it. She was enthralled.

Emil Maurice got hold of her hand and hurried Geli down hidden stairs to the outside, where the Mercedes was thrumming, its running lights off, and Julius Schaub was behind the wheel. Waiting in front of it was a taxi. While Emil gave Schaub instructions, Geli opened the passenger door to congratulate Hitler, but was stunned to find he’d fallen asleep, his mouth hanging open as if he’d been slain. His gray suit coat was off and his white shirt was so wet with sweat that she could see through it. And the odor was hideous, like a hellish whiff of skunk and offal. Geli held a hand over her nose and mouth as she shut the door.

Emil smiled. “We’ll go in the taxi.”

She heard the thousands still singing as she got in the backseat with Emil and he leaned forward to give the taxi driver an address in the fashionable district of Bogenhausen. When Emil sat back, his right knee widened against hers and did not withdraw. “Were you amazed by the talk?” he asked.

She was. “Mesmerized.”

“Exactly. Max Amann was his first sergeant, and he says Hitler was quite an oddity in the trenches. ‘The White Crow,’ they called him. Constantly serious. Didn’t drink or smoke. Wasn’t interested in women. Took duty at Christmas so he wouldn’t have to join in the festivities. Even then, though, he could talk politics for hours. ‘Spinning,’ Amann called it. You look at his writing and it’s not very good. Dull; hard to read. Ugly grammar and misspelled words…”

Exiting traffic from the Hofbräuhaus was tying up the street. Emil hunched forward to give the taxi driver instructions before familiarly sitting back against her thigh and finding his train of thought. “But when Hitler speaks, it’s hypnotic,” he said. “You have no will of your own. Only his. You forget to think. You give up your liberty. You submit. And you find the faith you lost. Hear him once and you become a friend of the party. Hear him twice and you become a fanatic.” Emil grinned like a boy as he said, “Won’t Germany be glorious when Hitler’s in charge?”

She only felt his thigh firmly against hers. She agreed by nodding. Emil watched as the taxi got onto Maximilianstrasse and headed east toward the Isar.

“We’re going to the house of Herr Heinrich Hoffmann,” Emil said. “We’re having a birthday party for Hitler now because he’ll be in Hamburg on April twentieth.”

“I ought to know this, but how old will he be?”

“Thirty-six. And you?”

Geli thought about trying twenty, but admitted, “I’ll be seventeen in June.”

Emil took that in like a factor that he hadn’t considered, then focused on Geli so intently she lost the rhythm of her breathing. “I often go out with girls that age.” And then he turned away, saying, “Your uncle, too. Old ladies and girls.”

She was aching with questions about Emil’s girlfriends, about Hitler’s, but figured they were all too invasive, and she knew men were often chary with their thoughts. She silently watched the city streets until the taxi turned left onto Ismaningerstrasse. She then asked, “Whose house is it?”