Hitler's Niece

“Michael: The Fate of a German. It’s just a little thing in the form of a diary, about a young intellectual eager to grasp life with every fiber of his being. Who finds his calling among workers in the mines.”

“I’m in it,” Hitler said, as if that were only fitting and reasonable.

Doktor Goebbels graciously bowed again. “You are Germany’s fate, its man of destiny. The novel would be hollow without you.”

The fawning continued throughout their three-course meal. She thought her uncle was in one of his fouler moods as he flitted from subject to subject, his insights floating somewhere between the banal and the just plain weird, but Geli saw that Doktor Goebbels hung on his every word, hardly eating, as full of adoration as one of Hitler’s hounds. And when Hitler excused himself to go to the Herrens, Doktor Goebbels confided, “When he speaks, it’s so simple, but so profound, so mystical, full of infinite truth. It is almost like hearing the Gospels. Like hearing the final word on whatever topic he’s chosen. I feel shudders of awe.” He smiled. “All night I have been fighting the urge to genuflect to him.”

“Self-control is a good thing,” she said.

Doktor Goebbels lifted a goblet of Chianti and softly gazed just over its rim at Geli in a way he might have thought seductive. “You are a very lucky girl,” he said.

“And why is that?”

“With his elementary strength, you can walk safely in the abyss of life. With him, you have at your side the conquering instrument of fate and deity.”

“Oh; I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“Amusing,” he said, and winced a smile, then swallowed Chianti and resettled the goblet on the table. And then there was silence between them. She watched a red tear of wine ever so gradually trickle down the stem and cross the base of the goblet until it stained the white tablecloth. She found him focused on her face. “Would you like to visit me in Berlin?” he asked.

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

With disdain, he said, “Oh yes, Hitler’s chauffeur.” And then he added, “I say that without disdain, you understand. Emil Maurice is an Old Combatant. He took part in the putsch.”

“We’re in love.”

“And there he is, sitting outside in the car,” he said, and scowled at the shame of it. “Waiting for us to finish. Wondering what that devil Herr Doktor Goebbels is up to.”

“And what are you up to?” she asked.

“I invite you in all innocence. With no tricks up my sleeve. An American expression. Won’t you come up with your uncle next weekend? We’ll attend to party business, and then I’ll show you the city. Berlin is magnificent.”

Hitler strode back into the dining room and seated himself.

Geli leaned toward him and lightly touched his jacket sleeve. “Uncl

e Alf, Herr Doktor Goebbels has invited me to join you in Berlin next weekend. May I please?”

Hitler’s right hand held hers to his forearm as he smiled at his Gauleiter and said, “Our Doktor always finds ways to make me happy.”

Although the party furnished Hitler with a suite on the third floor of the first-class Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, just across from the Reich chancellery, Geli and Angela—whose presence he’d insisted on—were installed in the filthy and fourth-class Gasthof Ascanischer in order to give journalists a fitting example of party frugality. And to further make his niece’s misery complete, Hitler had decided that Julius Schaub rather than Emil Maurice should escort them on their railway journey north.

Seeking to avoid Schaub’s company, mother and daughter took their own cold-weather walking tour of Berlin on Saturday, starting out by mistake on Nollendorfplatz and hurrying past dance halls and underworld bars and a fire-red building called Erotic Circus. Even in the morning there were prostitutes standing together in threes, chattering about their children, and dressed just like housewives on their way to the grocery. Angela said, “I ache so for them. In the misery we’re in, how can they marry?”

“I couldn’t ever do that,” Geli said.

Angela softly patted her wrist, saying, “Oh what a comfort you are to your mother.”

They finally reached the Emperor Wilhelm Memorial Church, then visited, for Geli, the Zoologischer Garten, strolled through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag, and took a taxi to Wittenbergplatz, where Angela’s brother, Alois Jr., had just opened a restaurant.

She hadn’t called ahead to warn him, so he was shocked when he carried forward menus and found her in the vestibule with a niece he’d never seen. Alois was the illegitimate son of Franziska Matzels-berger, Alois Senior’s kitchen maid, whom their father had married just two months before Angela was born. Although he was only one year older than Angela, Alois seemed closer to sixty and, with his walrus mustache, thin, graying hair, and skeptical squint behind rimless glasses, he looked far more like the photographs Geli had seen of her grandfather than he did his half-brother, Adolf. The worrisome qualities that Adolf had somehow made work for him, Alois hadn’t; he seemed merely vulgar, selfish, pompous, and conniving, like a stuffy waiter who steals from the till, or a civil servant who alters the rules for a fee. Sharing fireside coffee and sandwiches with them, he seemed avid for news of Adolf, for he was sure their fortunes were connected and he felt it was his turn, as he said, “at the trough.” “And who knows? We could even become friends, once he gets over the bigamy business and his fears that I’ll damage his good reputation.”

Angela quickly grew tired of Alois and his all-too-obvious disinterest in Paula or the Raubals, and she told him they were going to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Alois allowed them to pay the bill, saying he’d treat them to a fine dinner next time, and they went outside to Wittenbergplatz.

“Well, that’s an obligation fulfilled,” Geli said.

Angela was nearing forty-four and was thirty pounds heavier than the woman in Linz who had given birth to Geli, and so she asked, “Would you mind if I went back to the Gasthof now? I have to get off my feet.”

And when they got to their room, there was a message from Emil Maurice saying, “I really miss you,” and another from Doktor Goebbels saying there was a sudden change of plans, that the führer, whom they’d not yet seen, would be having dinner with Edwin and Helene Bechstein, the film actress Dorothea Wieck, and Herr Reinhold Muchow, Doktor Goebbels’s chief of organization for the Berlin Gau, and Herr Muchow’s wife. Would it be an impertinence to offer himself as their sole company for the night?