Hitler's Niece

With fright she got up from her knees and faced the window. A female equestrian in fur coat and jodhpurs trotted a gelding through the fields of the Englischer Garten, the horse sinking to its fetlocks in the snow. “Are you all right, Uncle Adolf?”

She heard his shoes find the floor, heard him sigh in a halting way, his face perhaps in his hands. “She was everything to me. And now you are. I have such fears—”

“You needn’t—”

The floor shook as he fell to his knees behind her, hugged her thighs, buried his face against her buttocks. “If only I had someone to take care of me!” he wailed, his words like hot, moist handwriting on her skirt.

She felt his hair with a hand. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Will you?”

Clarification seemed necessary. She told him, “You’re my uncle.”

“I have no friends, no family—”

“You have me. You have Angela and Paula.”

She felt him shaking his head. “They don’t love me! I need love!”

“I love you.”

She felt him withdraw from her, still on his knees, his hands riding his thighs. And then he stood as an old man does, finding his balance, hurting and huffing, then collecting himself. “I have to find my hat,” he said.

She gave it to him without turning.

“I do hope you’re happy, putting me through all that.”

She turned. His scowl was as red as a scream. “I didn’t—”

“You have made me look ridiculous,” he said.

“I’m confused, Uncle Adolf. I—”

And then he smiled. His hand oh so gently groomed her hair and fondled her cheek and chin. “Aren’t you pretty,” he said, and put on his hat. “I have rules for you, Princess. Each reasonable and generous. One, I still expect your obedience, your loyalty, and your company. Two, I will be in charge of when you go out with Emil and when you do not. Each of you separately must ask my permission. This is what fathers do for their daughters. Three, you shall keep the relationship secret from the public. You shall not be photographed together. You shall not be seen with him at the university or in the cafés. Four, you shall continue your studies until I say otherwise. You may give them up, but not to get married, and if so, you’ll need my permission. And five, you are nineteen years old. You cannot marry for two years. When you’re twenty-one, we’ll see.”

And then he walked out, and she sat on her bed. Weak and exhausted.

CHAPTER TEN

HITLER’S FRIENDS, 1928

Of his friends in the National Socialist hierarchy, she was fondest of Herr Doktor Paul Joseph Goebbels, but only because he seemed fondest of her. They met in March 1928, when the thirty-year-old Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), journeyed to München on party business and later wrote in his diary: “Yesterday I met Hitler, and he immediately invited me to dinner. A lovely lady was there.”

Geli had heard that he was a former floor man on the Cologne stock exchange and a facile writer of fairly high intelligence, at first politically far left of the Nazis but now a frenzied campaigner and zealot for Hitler, who had affectionately said of him, “Our Doktor is all flame.” So she’d fashioned in her mind a man far different from the one she saw at their first meeting in the Osteria Bavaria, for he seemed a scrawny juvenile of thirteen, just over five feet tall, weighing no more than one hundred pounds, his head too big for his body and his brown hair creamed against a skull that was cadaverously there just beneath his face. Limping to their table in his overlarge white trench coat, he tilted steeply to the left due to a childhood illness, osteomyelitis, which had caused his left leg to halt growing and stay four inches shorter than his right. And yet he seemed to think himself handsome and jaunty, and his eyes feasted on Geli with a lickerish stare as her uncle introduced them.

“Aren’t you lovely,” he said.

She said, “Enchanted, Herr Goebbels,” and offered her hand.

“Herr Doktor Goebbels,” he corrected, and though he was smiling, she felt rebuked. But he was so amiable otherwise, and his huge and luminous black eyes betrayed such tragedies in his youth, such scorchings to his psyche, such an aching to charm and fascinate that Geli forgave him his haughtiness. And she did find him fascinating, for he was cultured, quick, an intellectual, and funny, if malicious; his voice was a beautiful baritone, as rich and sonorous as a full-throated church organ; his fine hands were faultless, those of a skillful pianist who’d never risked injury in work or game of any sort; and he modestly admitted that his play The Wanderer had just a few months earlier been performed at the Wallner Theater in Berlin.

She’d never met a playwright before, and said so, and then she was fearful she’d sounded too impressed and unpoised.

“And he’s a novelist, too,” Hitler said. “Won’t Eher be publishing it this year?”

Doktor Goebbels bowed to him. “With your help.”

“And its title?” Geli asked.