Hitler's Niece

“We’re going to the Chiemsee for a picnic.”

Aching as she got out of bed, Angela avoided foul language with the slang, “Oh green nine.” And as she hobbled to the bathroom she said, “You ask too much of your old mother on her birthday.”

Geli changed into a fitted navy blue sundress with a white geometric pattern, white ankle-high socks, and brown oxfords. She brushed her hair for the third time that morning and went downstairs to the dining room.

Putzi Hanfstaengl was now a Herr Doktor, having finally gotten his D. Phil. degree in history with a dissertation on the Austrian Netherlands and Bavaria in the eighteenth century; but he was talking with Hoffmann about his family firm’s photography of the art masterpieces of the Louvre, a permission just recently given them by the director, Henri Verne, a nephew of the famous novelist.

“So you’ll be rich!” Hoffmann said.

“If the books sell, possibly.”

“We’ll have to celebrate with champagne.”

Julius Schaub frowned. “Always the drinking.”

Joking with Hoffmann, Putzi referred to Schaub as “Il Penseroso,” but it fell flat because no one else there knew Italian.

“Who’ll want beer?” Geli asked, and four hands flew up.

Emil stood. “I’ll help.”

She shyly smiled and felt Emil watching the feminine tilt of her hips as she went to the kitchen ahead of him. Henny was filling their picnic hamper with Apollinaris mineral water and vacuum flasks of coffee and tea, so Emil hauled a full crate of Spaten out to the trunk of Hitler’s Mercedes.

Then Hitler finally came downstairs and into the dining room, for she heard the other men collectively stand from their chairs and heard Putzi say, “I have the foreign press clippings here.”

And then her uncle gracefully walked into the kitchen in his gray flannel summer suit and yellow tie, a red-and-black swastika pin on the suit jacket’s lapel. His forelock fell as he examined the food wrapped in waxed paper: Swiss cheese and salami and hot, roasted chicken.

“Won’t you make me a peanut butter sandwich?” he whined to his niece. “And put in some Bahlsen biscuits? And chocolate, and an apple tart? Make me lunch like always, Princess; nothing fancy or new.”

She sighed and did as he said.

Emil and Leo wandered in and Hitler told Geli’s brother what a good Hausfrau she was becoming. “She cooks, she cleans, she sews!”

“Rare talents,” Geli said.

Leo Raubal hunted for a handmade cigarette in his front shirt pocket, held it to a flame underneath the tea kettle on the stovetop, and was inhaling it before he noticed the shocked silence and his uncle’s scorn.

“We don’t smoke inside the house,” Emil said.

“I’m allowed,” Leo confidently said. “I have rank in the Austrian SA.” And then he felt his family staring at him in silence. “A firing squad offense?” Leo asked.

“We don’t joke about it,” his uncle told him.

Leo jarred the screen door open and flicked his cigarette outside.

And then they got into the cars. Emil and Hitler were up in the front of the red Mercedes convertible, and Henny and Geli joined Putzi Hanfstaengl in the back where the Herr Doktor could hang his long legs over the folded-down middle seat. Hitler found linen caps in the glove compartment and handed them to his niece and the girl he called Sunshine so their hair wouldn’t fly wildly in the wind, and he and Emil strapped on their cold weather leather aviators’ caps. “Prinz!” Hitler called. “Ride!” And the Alsatian galloped down from the house and jumped inside the car, scrabbling his paws on the jump seat before finding a space on the floor next to Geli.

Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Leo Raubal climbed into Hoffmann’s old Daimler where smoking was not just permitted but was assured. And Angela waved good-bye to them from the upstairs balcony in her purple flapper’s dress an

d cloche hat.

The Chiemsee was a fairly substantial lake with three islands, fifty kilometers northwest of Haus Wachenfeld, but Hitler maintained that the water there was three degrees centigrade warmer than the far closer Königssee, and his enthusiasm for fast automobiles was still so fresh that he considered most highway travel to be a good form of recreation; so they journeyed an hour north. Currying favor, Putzi hulked forward on the fold-down seat to pass on an invitation to visit Adolf Müller, the printer of the Völkischer Beobachter, whose luxurious summer home was in St. Quirin on the Tegernsee, just fifty kilometers south of München; but Hitler told him he couldn’t possibly go there, for the many journalists out to destroy him only thought of the Tegernsee as a playground of the very rich.

Putzi Hanfstaengl admitted that this was true. “I have heard it called the ‘Lago di Bonzo.’”

“Which is?”

“Mafia Italian for ‘Lake of the Big Shots.’”