Hitler's Niece

“My mother.”

“Angela? Oh, please. She’ll do whatever he says. Anytime he says it. Won’t she?”

Nothing was said.

Henny grinned. “What a good game: Who’s not frightened of Adolf Hitler? Try to think. Herr Doktor Goebbels?”

“Definitely frightened.”

“Herr Himmler? Of course, yes.”

“Rudi shamelessly confesses it.”

“Who else?” Henny asked. “Herr Rosenberg?”

“That toady.”

“And Herr Göring’s a child around your uncle.”

“And wears his childishness like a medal.”

“Are you?” Henny asked.

“Still a virgin? I answered that.”

Henny nudged her shoulder.

Geli thought, and finally said, “No. I’m not afraid of him.”

Quiet took even the sounds of their breathing into its stomach. There was only the faint hiss of the candle. And then Henny conceded, “I think that’s probably true.”

“What do I win?”

She was silent for a while, then said, “My amazement.”

On July 28th, they celebrated Angela Raubal’s forty-fifth birthday by letting her sleep in while Geli and Henny fabricated a breakfast of flambéed crêpe suzettes, orange sections and grapes, and a full pot of Italian espresso. Leo Raubal took a four a.m. train from Wien to get there in time, and was with them when they sneaked into Angela’s room with the food tray and woke her by singing the first verses of a song from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Angela’s favorite opera.

She was first astonished by the flooding sunshine and hunted for the alarm clock that her daughter had stolen in the night. “What time is it?”

“Half ten,” Geli said. “We let you sleep.”

With shock Angela then noticed her tall, nearly twenty-two-year-old son, and she started fussing with graying hair, that was as forked and twisted as seaweed. She gruffly said, “Aren’t you cruel children to surprise me like this.”

Leo grinned. “We thought about inviting in the others, too. They didn’t know the song.”

Angela heard Heinrich Hoffmann shouting a joke in the dining room, that Göring was the first man to ascend to a higher realm by means of a parachute. Many men heartily laughed. She held a sheet up over the front of her nightgown. “Who’s here?”

“Emil came,” Geli said. “And Putzi Hanfstaengl, all the way from France.”

“Also my father, as you hear,” said Henny. “And what’s-his-name, the man who lost his toes on the front.”

“Julius Schaub,” Geli said.

“To be with their leader,” Angela said. “Otherwise he might forget them. Are they hungry?”

Geli told her mother they’d been fed, and that the Bechstein’s chauffeur would be taking Angela and her friend Ilse Meirer to Salzburg for the day, so she ought to make herself beautiful.

“And what will you do with all those men?”