Hitler's Niece

She didn’t know what else to say but “Thank you.”

Hesitantly touching her hair, he told her, “And I hope you have come to see me as the father you never had.”

Geli’s flesh tingled as she felt his fingertips graze her skull and then grip a sun-blond hank of hair inside his fist. She told him he’d been quite generous.

“My father was fourteen years younger than his first wife,” Hitler said. “And twenty-four years older than his second. She was Fanni, his first wife’s maid. Did you know that Alois Junior was illegitimate?”

She nodded.

“And Angela was born two months after the wedding?”

“Yes.”

“And then when your mother’s mother became ill with consumption, my father shifted his courtesies to his young niece, Klara, who was taking care of the children. When his wife died, he married my mother. At six in the morning, so he could get to work punctually at seven. She was twenty-five years old, and he was forty-eight. She would continue to call him ‘Uncle’ until he died, at sixty-six.” He freed her hair. He smiled. “Had you heard all that?”

“A few times, but it’s confusing.”

“And that’s exactly why I mentioned it.” Hitler put his china cup on the grass to his right and linked his hands at his waist. “We are given the impression that good German families have their origins in a man and a woman of about the same age who first meet each other as strangers and gradually fall in love and get married. We see, though, that there are many surprisi

ng and successful exceptions to the pattern. Endless variations, really. Children born out of wedlock. A wife twenty-three years younger. A husband who is also her uncle. We are living in times that cry out for ingenuity in how our finest men and women achieve intimacy with each other.”

She was farther ahead of him than he thought. A child of nine would have been. She said nothing.

Emil walked over, sheeted in sweat, and fell to his knees next to Geli. His hard muscles bunched as he dried himself with his shirt. “Are we out of beer?” he asked.

“Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl was standing on the case to hang up his hammock.”

Emil turned. “Oh, I see it.”

“I was just falling asleep,” Hitler said mildly. He tilted his head onto his left shoulder and squinched his eyes shut as he nuzzled his chin into his gray flannel lapel.

Emil kissed Geli’s cheek and left to find himself a Spaten. And Heinrich Hoffmann hushed Geli from making a sound as he hunched nearby with his Stirnschen camera in order to take a photograph. “This will be fantastic,” he whispered, for Hitler seemed so fond of her, so content and youthful yet fatherly, and his niece seemed so feminine and adoring and wryly amused.

CHAPTER TWELVE

NEXT DOOR, 1929

Within a few days Hitler forced his niece to go with him to München to find a flat for her, insisting that the university students would be getting back for their fall classes soon and that the finest situations would be lost. Rudolf Hess found five rentals for them to consider in Schwabing and Haidhausen, the first of them just below the shabby apartment of Franz Xaver Schwarz, the party treasurer. Geli thought it was nineteenth century and ugly, and Hitler agreed, but that was just the start of his dissatisfactions that day. A flat near the Hauptbahnhof Hitler rejected as far too noisy. Another, he was convinced, would be cold in winter; in the fourth he hated thinking about trudging up so many flights of stairs; and the fifth on Rudi’s list, he decided, was foul with the odors of its former occupant.

The Café Heck was fairly near, he said as he checked his watch, and he was hot, and weary of real estate, and so they walked to his Stammtisch for an afternoon luncheon. Waiters were just filling their water glasses when Hitler, whose silver eyes were persistently flitting toward the entrance, joyously smiled and half-stood from his dining chair, lifting his right hand in an effeminate wave. “Look who happened by,” he told his niece. “Princess Cantacuzène.”

Was he trying to seem deceptive? “Aren’t you surprised,” Geli flatly said, and turned to find Frau Elsa Bruckmann. She was the wife of the foremost publisher in München, a former princess in Rumania, and, with Helene Bechstein, one of Hitler’s first socialite benefactors. Chic and worldly and confident, a grande dame in her sixties, she wore a fashionable Zeppelin dress and held a white bichon frise to her significant chest as she offered the café her Egyptian profile and then, in a fraudulent piece of acting, finally seemed to notice the führer. She at once asked the maître d’ to escort her to his table, and she and Hitler both loquaciously overdid the coincidence of their meeting.

She was invited to join them and took some time in silently assessing Geli’s poise and courtesies and clothing as Hitler chatted convivially about his far too short vacation in Obersalzberg—he was working, he said, on a secret book about Aryan blood and the Jews—and then told her about his fractious day trying to find a flat for his niece.

“But, my dear Adi,” Elsa Bruckmann falsely protested. “How you hurt my feelings. You should have called me first.”

“Are you aware of something?”

“She can stay with Hugo and me!”

“Really, I couldn’t,” Geli said, and she felt Hitler touch her forearm in a hushing gesture.

“Wouldn’t it be an imposition?” he asked.

“We have a huge home,” Elsa Bruckmann said. “Rooms for chess. Rooms to cry in. Rooms for polishing silver. I have to send the butler as a scout just to find my husband in it.”

Hitler formally informed his niece, “Herr and Frau Bruckmann inhabit Thierschstrasse, right next door to me.”