Hitler's Niece

“And I like making one hundred reichsmarks per month. We have much in common. Have you a song to try out with me?”

She handed him sheet music. “Giacomo Puccini,” she said. “‘O mio babbino caro.’”

“‘O my dear daddy.’ A good choice. Sweet and short.”

They went into his practice room where he sat at his grand piano, and she sang poorly, mispronouncing the Italian and failing for air at the highest notes. When she finished, he was forbiddingly silent, and she smiled in embarrassment. “Well, that was faultless, wasn’t it.”

“We have something we can work on,” he said, and got up from the piano bench to give her instructions about the anatomy of singing, his hand pressing just under her ribs so she could feel her diaphragm and then journeying familiarly between her breasts to her throat, squeezing her larynx, and softly circling her sinuses and the bridge of her nose. She smelled cabbage on his fingertips. “And now just an ‘ahh’ for me.”

“Ahh,” she sang.

“You’re still in your head voice,” he sang in his head voice. “We want to hear your chest voice,” he sang in a fuller voice.

Weakly, she attempted it.

“Head high. Heels together. And now hum for me, Fräulein Raubal.”

She obeyed.

“Much better. Can you feel the flow and arc of the sound, firing out from the bridge of your nose but controlled by the diaphragm? You have to make sure your voice is constantly supported. Work on the muscles. Did you know that there was a great Italian soprano named Tetrazzini who had a diaphragm so strong she could move a piano with it?”

“I have men to haul things for me.”

“Aren’t you funny,” he said. “Oh, that famous Austrian charm.”

Vogl’s far younger wife brought him a tall glass of Weissbier, adoringly kissed his ear, and went out, and Vogl heavily sat on the bench with the beer as he investigated Geli’s range, hitting the C above middle C on the piano, having her match it, and going on to the higher notes.

Geli handled that well enough, but faltered going lower than B flat, and when he insisted she find the F below middle C, she said, “If I go that far down I feel I’ll vomit.”

“We’ll have to work on your lower register then. A good singer has a range of two octaves, sixteen notes. You have fourteen.”

She flushed. “So I’m no good?”

“You can be taught, perhaps. I have a pupil who began with thirteen notes, and now she has sixteen. She practiced. Will you practice?”

She feared she nodded too fervently, like a child.

“Have you heard of the diva Bertha Morena?”

“Of course.”

“Another one of my success stories,” Vogl said. “She learned from me, she practiced and practiced, and now she’s a star.” He collected sheet music and closed the piano fall board as he said in afterthought, “She was Bertha Meyer then. She’s Jewish.” And then his face paled. “Don’t tell Hitler.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m practiced.”

She’d practiced in the fall of 1927 by failing to mention to Hitler a tall, handsome, blond medical student named Christof Fritsch, wide-shouldered but skeletal, his mind full of scientific facts and philosophy, his preferred clothing a black turtleneck sweater, his favorite foods inky coffee and hard rolls, his face always as serious as a final examination. Christof had fallen in love with Geli in chemistry class and often found his way into her company when she was alone, whether she was feeding the swans in front of the Nymphenburg Palace or holding a textbook up to shield herself from the sun in the meadows of the Theresienwiese. She’d failed to convince Christof that she was not interested in politics—she was, after all, Hitler’s niece—so he’d afflicted her with weighty reflections on the new parliamentary system, the Weimar Republic, and the Volk. On the feast of Saint Nicholas he’d surprised her with a fancy gold angel ornament he’d picked up at the famous Christ Child’s Market in Nürnberg. She’d seen him on ice skates during Winter Carnival and Christof had informed her with the coldest intensity that for her sake he’d been studying the history of opera. And on May Day, 1928, Christof had sneaked into the Pension Klein far before sunrise in order to put an oak branch outside Geli’s door in a folkloric sign of his constancy. Christof was still around, writing her highly intellectual letters full of worship, passion, and his own peculiar Weltanschauung, and if she did nothing to encourage him, she did not mention him to Emil either, and she worried about what that meant.

She also failed to mention to Hitler a January 1929 party in Berlin for Hauptmann Hermann Göring and Herr Alfred Rosenberg, who, to their mutual horror, shared the same birthday.

Within months of his election as a Mitglied des Reichstags, Göring found out that Lufthansa Airline wanted government subsidies for civil aviation, so for a consulting fee of fifty thousand reichsmarks per year he agreed to pursue Lufthansa’s goals, and though he would finally give only two addresses to the Reichstag, they were fittingly on topics Lufthansa chose. Soon he was a consultant as well for BMW, Heinkel, and the Messerschmitt aircraft company; Fritz Thyssen of the United Steel Works furnished the decor and zinfandel-red carpets for his luxury apartment on Badenschestrasse in the Schöneberg district of Berlin; and the coal magnate Wilhelm Tengelmann was giving him money for “geological investigations.” So he was happier than he’d been since the putsch, and far more prosperous than he’d ever been in his fairly affluent life, and he was getting so fat that there was a joke about him that “he sat down on his stomach and wore corsets on his thighs.”

But now Göring was in his wide white suit, his eyes so scarily bloodshot there seemed to be no blue in them, and he was confessing that he worked nineteen hours per day, his wife Carin’s health was failing, and Herr Hitler still found him chancy, suspect. As he sweatily told Geli, “I try so hard with your uncle. I have facts and convictions. Opinions in desperate need of expression. But every time I stand before the leader, my heart drops into the seat of my pants.”

Doktor Goebbels overheard and in his cordial, milky manner confided, “Even if we’re powerful in our own domains, all those who work closely with the leader are to a degree slavish and timid in his company. This is as it should be. We should not have contempt for our weaknesses, Herr Göring, but only think of it as a tribute to Herr Hitler’s mystical strength.”

“I have used up my contempt on others,” Göring spitefully told Goebbels. “I have nothing left for myself.”

Doktor Goebbels smiled. “A gross imbalance I shall challenge myself to correct.” And he limped off.