Hitler's Niece

“Which means?”

“Herr Hitler scents his bathwater with essence of pine. You may also, if you wish. His towels are brown; yours are white. His personal soap is Mouson-Ente; you are to use another brand. Hide your lotions and toothbrush and whatnot. Do not hang in here hose or what you hand-wash. Do not touch his things. Dry the faucets and sink and floor after use. Do not fill the air with perfumes, for he sneezes. I forget the rest, but he’ll tell you.”

“It goes without saying,” Geli said.

Her bedroom was just across the hall from the bathroom. Soft green trellis wallpaper was on the walls, and the room held the furniture of a four-poster bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, and a desk that was white but for its hand-painted wisteria trimming.

“It’s beautiful,” Geli said.

Anni nodded. “Yes, it is.”

She touched a canary-yellow floor lamp and matching desk lamp, a new, blue gramophone, and a framed and fairly good watercolor of a Belgian landscape that her uncle had painted in the Great War.

“Aren’t you fortunate,” Anni said.

“Oh yes,” Geli said. “Uncle’s awfully nice to me.”

Anni went out to the hallway and into Hitler’s office. Watercolors from the Thierschstrasse flat were on the walls as well as the framed Simplicissimus poster and a large Heinrich Hoffmann photograph of a haughty Hitler with his head tilted high like Il Duce, finishing a spellbinding speech in his Sturmabteilung uniform. Otherwise it might have been the office of a city government functionary: just a cabinet, an old reading chair, a black rotary telephone and lamp on the left side of the desk, fountain pens and ink blotter in the middle, a dictionary and an oval, silver-framed portrait of his mother on the right. She opened the drawers and found the desk empty. “And here the tour ends,” Anni said.

“His bedroom’s next door?” Geli asked.

“Naturally. One has to sleep.” She did not show Geli the room. She said, “I have kaiser rolls in the oven,” and went out to the kitchen.

Emil and Georg were sitting there, drinking Franziskaners, and Geli saw that the interior windows overlooked a pleasant green garden of shrubs and ivied trees. “And so,” Emil asked, “do you love it here?”

“I do.”

“Will you be happy, happy, happy?”

“Are you drunk?”

Georg Winter winked.

Emil fell forward onto the kitchen table and used it to heave himself up. “I have to go get your luggage,” he said. “And then I get my leader.”

Winter told Geli, “We’re having a dinner in your honor tonight.”

She learned that she and Hitler were hosting Rudolf and Ilse Hess, Heinrich Hoffmann and his daughter, and Baldur von Schirach, the founder of the National Socialist German Students’ Alliance, who was the first to arrive for dinner. Geli was wearing a new Louis-boulanger white chiffon gown printed with orange flowers and green leaves; Schirach was wearing a black tuxedo and was holding a flute of the Taittinger champagne he’d brought. Cologne eddied from him as if he were its source.

Schirach was a tall, soft-bodied man with ice-blue eyes whose fine Nordic face seemed meant to be photographed. Twenty-two years old, he was the son of a Weimar theater director who’d died the year of his birth, so he’d been raised solely by his American mother, whose ancestors included two signers of the Declaration of Independence. He told Geli he was now studying German philology, folklore, and art history in München while assisting Herr Doktor

Ernst Hanfstaengl—Baldur had been forbidden the use of the nickname Putzi—as the party’s foreign press secretary. First looking around the room in caution, he confessed in English, “We actually don’t get along very well.” And he hesitated. “Ernst says you speak our mother tongue?”

In English she said, “Speak it I can some. A little. I need…praxis.”

“Practice,” Schirach corrected, then giggled in a high voice as he laid his free hand gently on her forearm and said in German, “Sorry to torture you, darling. The faces you make hunting for words!”

She found Schirach friendly and suave and stunningly good looking, but wide-hipped, pudgy, effeminate, and insolent in that Nazi way she associated with Göring. He told her that he’d first met her uncle in 1925, just after Hitler’s release from Landsberg am Lech, and that he was party member number 17,251. It was he, Schirach said, who called for the storming of the universities by Nazi youth, and the party was now getting 38 percent of the votes there. “We’ll have all of them in a few more years. With the stock-market crash in America, the Continent’s economies will also be failing soon. And history tells us that our party thrives when financial conditions are at their poorest. Good heavens, are the people going to go to the Communists? They’re so dreary.”

She heard the chimes and watched Winter let in and loudly announce, “Herr and Frau Hess, and Herr Hoffmann and his daughter, Henrietta.” And just then Hitler emerged in his tuxedo from the Grillparzerstrasse wing and forced his guests to tour his new apartment.

She went with them until she noticed Henny hanging back from the group. She ducked into the dining room and Henny joined her there. In a hushed voice she asked, “Don’t you think he’s amazing?”

Geli smiled. “My uncle?”

“Herr Baldur von Schirach! Don’t you think he’s so handsome you can hardly breathe?”

“It’s the cologne,” Geli said.