Hitler's Niece

Emil smiled. “Soon.”

Geli turned to Himmler’s fiancée. She was Margarete Boden, a shy, desultory, prematurely gray woman seven years older than he was. She talked dully for a while about her faith in herbalism and homeopathy, but then fascinated Geli by saying that her fiancé had foresworn any physical contact with her until their marriage. “Oh, but it’s so hard on him. ‘Don’t you know how I long to hold you and kiss your feet?’ Heinrich says. But he also says that a wife’s perpetual in

nocence and purity give a real man the strength never to falter in even the worst strife he encounters.”

“And have you been engaged for a long time?”

“Six months now.”

“Whose idea was the marriage?” Geli asked.

“Herr Hitler’s. He insisted.”

Rudolf and Ilse Hess strolled over and joined them. Ilse asked Geli, “Are you aware that you and your uncle have the same tarot archetype?”

“Which is?”

“The hierophant.”

“Really!” Himmler said.

“Oh, now you’re impressed.” She looked to Ilse. “I have no idea what that means.”

Doktor Goebbels ambled over to the table and told Heinrich Himmler, “We have further good news. Prince Viktor and Princess Marie-Elisabeth zu Wied have made inquiries about ‘the Hitler movement.’”

Ilse told Geli, “The hierophant was an official interpreter of rites of worship and sacrifice in ancient Greece, and in the tarot represents the principles of learning and teaching. You’re influenced by Isis, the goddess of intuition. You walk the mystical path with practical feet. I haven’t finished your birth chart yet.”

“And mine?” Doktor Goebbels asked as he settled next to Geli.

“I have only Herr Hitler’s,” she said.

Effervescent with victory, Hermann and Carin Göring found their table, but frowned at its barrenness. “We need champagne here,” Captain Göring said, and he shouted to a faraway man with a tray, “Waiter! Three bottles of Mumm’s! And nine glasses!” He held out a chair for his wife, then reversed another and straddled it, hunkering forward with his fleshy, pink cheeks in his palms as he watched Ilse unfold a page of handwritten notes.

She said, “The leader was born on the cusp between Aries and Taurus, just like Mussolini and Stalin, and has his sun in Taurus and Libra, so there’s a fondness for the arts combined with infinite ambition. Which is why he can be tyrannical at times.”

“Oh, what a child I become in his presence!” Captain Göring exclaimed. “I can’t explain it. I’ll be full of certainty and valor, but he’ll turn on me and I wither.”

“It’s his eyes,” Doktor Goebbels said. “They’ll scar you for life.”

Captain Göring hurriedly added, “I meant it only in a positive way, Doktor Goebbels.”

“Me too,” said Doktor Goebbels.

“Continue please, Ilse,” said Rudolf Hess. “We’re very interested.”

“Quite willing to sacrifice his own happiness to a higher ideal,” she said, “he is apt to put off his own matrimonial bliss for the good of Germany. And yet this may cause him fits of jealousy and self-recrimination.”

Heinrich Himmler objected, “I haven’t seen that.”

“She used the word ‘may,’” said Rudolf Hess. “A conditional tense. Merely a possibility.”

“Careful, Frau Hess,” Doktor Goebbels said. “There’s plenty of room for you in Himmler’s filing cabinets.”

“I have no importance,” she said, and went on, “Herr Hitler has Pluto in his eighth house, which is what accounts for his stamina and tenaciousness, as well as his wonderful influence over people. And the moon in his third house gives him marvelous powers of verbal expression.”

“We found that particularly interesting,” said Rudolf Hess.

“Also, ‘sun trine Jupiter,’” his wife read.