Hitler's Niece

“Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler’s official photographer. And his wife, of course. Also there’s a little boy named Heinrich, and a sassy daughter, Henrietta. She’s thirteen.”

Wryly she asked, “And you often go out with girls that age?”

“Even I have limits.”

She smiled. “At least it’s a beginning.”

Within a few minutes they were on a leafy street lined with cars, and halting in front of a magnificent house that seemed to have forty windows filled with light.

Enormous numbers of cakes, candies, and birthday presents were on an intricately carved table in the grand entrance hall. Many inside the side parlors wore dinner jackets and the finest dresses and jewels. All the Brownshirts were absent. Waiters in old Bavarian livery were offering trays of canapés and champagne. Emil felt out of his element, so he took Geli to Herr Hanfstaengl, who was finally in his. Putzi got her a tulip glass of champagne and then she was overwhelmed with names and titles as he gaily introduced her as “Hitler’s niece” to his beautiful blond wife, Helene; and to a socialite named Gertrud von Seydlitz; the former wife of Olaf Gul-bransson, a cartoonist; Frau Hoffmann, the harried and heavily jeweled hostess, who had a little boy on her hip; and Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, a stern man with a gray mustache and a pince-nez. She met a factory owner’s widow, Frau Wachenfeld-Winter, from whom her uncle was going to rent an Alpine house near Berchtesgaden, and her wealthy neighbors there: Edwin Bechstein, of the Berlin piano company, and his wife, Helene, who, though she was little more than ten years older than Adolf, gladly called herself “Hitler’s mommy.”

Putzi then took Geli to a red parlor where she met Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, editor of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, who was talking to William Bayard Hale, an American classmate of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton and a retired European correspondent for the Hearst newspapers. Emil Gansser of the firm Siemens & Halske in Berlin gave Geli his card; Joseph Fuess and his wife invited Geli to their jewelry shop in the Corneliusstrasse; and Jakob Werlin, the München representative of the Daimler Works in Stuttgart-Untertürckheim, who told Geli that her uncle’s custom-made Mercedes must have cost twenty thousand marks. And then there were Frau von Kaulbach, the stout widow of the acclaimed Bavarian painter; a sitting and quietly inebriated Prince Henckel-Donners-marck; a flirtatious railway official at the east station named Lauböck; Quirin Diestl and his wife, who owned a stationery shop near the Regina Hotel; Frau Elsa Bruckmann, who was the former Princess Cantacuzène of Rumania and the wife of the foremost publisher in München; and Erich Ludendorff’s far younger second wife, Frau Doktor Mathilde Spiess Ludendorff, who magisterially proclaimed her hatred for Jewry and Christianity, and was going on and on about a new German religion that she and her husband were founding, and that had its origins in the old pagan Nordic gods.

Walking away from them, Putzi slyly told Geli, “The Frau Doktor’s specialty is mental diseases.”

Geli smiled. “It probably helps to have had so many herself.”

“Hah!” he said. “Precisely what I was thinking.”

Another voice said, “And now I shall quiz you on all the names.”

She turned and found a jovial, blond man of forty in a tuxedo, a few inches shorter than she was, his face flushed with alcohol, his wide shoulders slanting left off a twisted spine. “You are Herr Hoffmann,” she said.

“You knew!”

“The host always has an air about him.”

Ebulliently he said, “So sorry. I shall have all the windows opened at once.”

Hanfstaengl begged Geli’s forgiveness for leaving, kissed her right hand, and was gone.

She told Hoffmann, “My girlfriend and I saw you yesterday on Schellingstrasse, inside your photography s

hop.”

“Was that you with Herr Hitler!”

A pretty and fairly tipsy girl of thirteen slinked up in a quite adult fitted evening gown and linked her arm inside her father’s as she kissed him on the cheek. She wore pink lipstick on her pouting mouth; her chestnut-brown hair was in a chignon. She looked like the high school girls of Paris, flat-chested but soigné and athletic, willfully alluring, with the fretful expression of the frequently disappointed. Hoffmann introduced the girl as “My daughter, Henrietta,” but she put out her hand and said, “I’m Henny.”

“Geli Raubal,” she said as she shook the offered hand, and when she saw the girl’s puzzlement, Geli added, “Hitler’s niece.”

“Interesting,” Henny said, as if that indeed was. She took in Geli from shoes to hair and tilted into her father as she said, “You have beautiful breasts.”

Geli just blushed and said, “Thank you.”

Hoffmann hastened to say, “My dear frank child did not mean to embarrass you, Fräulein Raubal. She was raised among models and actresses.”

“Don’t you think?” Henny asked him.

“It’s true, of course,” Hoffmann said. And then he steered their conversation toward Geli’s views of München.

“I haven’t seen much, just what I could on a short tour today.”

“Who took you?” Hoffman asked.

“Herr Julius Schaub.”

Henny said, “Not much of a talker, is he.”