Hitler's Niece

“Oh good,” said Himmler’s fiancée.

“Sun trine Jupiter?” Geli asked.

Himmler’s fiancée said, “Wealth and success.”

Carin Göring said, “I’d heard that meant religiosity.”

“All those things, as well as a high level of intelligence,” said Himmler. “And Mars?”

“Mars square Saturn,” said Ilse Hess.

“Cruelty. Egotism,” said Carin Göring. She elbowed her husband. Who shrugged.

“Also, Mars trine Jupiter,” said Ilse Hess. “Rudi, how would you put it?”

“We have found such a combination in preachers whose joy it is to offer freedom and truth to those who will hear them.”

“Earlier I so wanted you to do my chart, Ilse,” Carin Göring said. “But how can I bear it now? I’ll be so banal.”

With a sidelong glance, her husband said, “Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

“We all suffer in comparison with the leader,” Doktor Goebbels said.

“And here he is,” Emil said.

Like schoolboys the men hurtled up from their chairs as their master walked over, his forelock fallen, his white tie cocked. Ilse Hess surreptitiously folded up her notes. Widening his arms and smiling, Hitler said, “What a joy for your leader to find all his friends sharing the same table! Would you do me the honor of having you as my guests in the dining room?”

And as they collected their things and Emil took her hand and they all strolled across the grand ballroom, Geli looked at Rudolf and Ilse Hess, Doktor Joseph Goebbels, Hermann and Carin Göring, and Heinrich Himmler and his fiancée, and she thought that if she was in fact one of them, Hitler’s friends, she would be mortified.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PICNIC, 1928

She quit medical studies after her first year at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität. She’d earned fairly good grades in English and fairly poor grades in the sciences, and after her hectic, high-living nights she too often found herself bored and cold and overtired in the heatless lecture halls and ludicrously ill-equipped labs, while being forced to continually report how she was doing academically to a scoffing, proprietary uncle who hated academics. And so she told him on her twentieth birthday, in June, that she would like to try other things in the fall.

They were in the foyer of the Osteria Bavaria, and his face became as somber as her chemistry professor’s. “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he faintly bowed to the owner, who was frantically helping four waiters set up Hitler’s table on the patio.

“I think it is, Uncle Alf.”

With a forced smile of affection he said, “Women ought to be mothers. That is their talent.” And then he stalked ahead of her to his luncheon table.

She felt annoyed enough then to change her mind, but she was fearful of his scolding. She instead told him as she sat next to him, “I haven’t given up on the idea of medicine. This may be temporary.”

“We’ll hope for the best,” he said. His hand fleetingly touched her knee as he unfolded a napkin in his lap, and he immediately rose and jarred his chair farther away. “My apologies,” he told her.

“Accepted.”

And then Max Amann, Alfred Rosenberg, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Rudolf Hess joined them. Each handed Geli a birthday card containing fifty reichsmarks, as if they’d voted on an affordable sum, and then Hitler gave her a flat package in white butcher paper that he’d watercolored and addressed to “My Darling Angelika.” In a silver photography frame inside were four Heinrich Hoffmann snapshots of her uncle in 1926 as he practiced using his hands histrionically in accordance with the instructions of a famous clairvoyant named Erik Jan Hanussen.

“Are you pleased?” Hitler seriously asked.

She was at a loss for words.

And then the five men all fell into laughter and the owner of the Osteria Bavaria walked forward with Hitler’s real birthday gift of a fancy golden birdcage and two bright yellow St. Andreasburg canaries. With joy her uncle told her, “I have decided. You’ll be taking singing lessons.”

She was delighted. She recalled the finch’s proper name from zoology class: Serinus canaria. She stuck a finger inside the cage and the canaries shied from it. “With such good teachers, Uncle Alf!”

“Why not? And then in the fall perhaps with Herr Adolf Vogl, a friend in the party.”