Hitler's Niece

“Who’s he intended for?”

“You, I think.”

She brightened. “Are you sure?”

Geli found Hitler affectionately watching her from the hallway, a faintly worried smile rocking underneath his little mustache, his shining stare full of sentiment and imagination. She’d become his resting place, his lost civilization. “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”

Uncharacteristically silent throughout dinner, Hitler slouched in his head-of-the-table chair and took joy in his company, fondly gazing at Geli as she talked to Rudolf and Ilse, and lightly touching her hand when he wanted the butter or salt. With formality he finally said, “Tell me, Heinrich. How did you find the lamb?”

Hoffmann joked, “I just moved the potatoes and there it was. Ha, ha!” And then Hoffmann fell into an off-color story that was eventually so carefully sanitized for Hitler’s sake that all that was left of it was innuendo.

Then Baldur von Schirach took up the spirit of fun by telling a story Ernst Hanfstaengl had told him about an old Washington Post article in which a journalist had written that President Woodrow Wilson had taken his fiancée, Mrs. Edith Galt, to the theater, and was so intent on “entertaining” her that he’d scarcely watched the play. Well, the journalist was horrifed the next morning to find there’d been a typesetting mistake in the paper so that it seemed he’d written that the president spent most of his time “entering” Mrs. Galt.

Only Schirach himself laughed when he finished. Confused faces were focused on him. Coldly glaring, Hitler turned to his niece. “Won’t you help us forget this violation of etiquette with a song?”

“I’m really so sorry,” Schirach said.

To rescue him, Geli stood and announced, as Schirach mouthed a thank-you, that she’d sing Mozart’s “Welche Wonne, welche Lust.” What bliss, what delight. And she sang it so prettily and with such humor that there were chortles and titters until the conclusion, when the four men jumped up and wildly applauded. Tears of joy filled her uncle’s eyes as he leaned forward to say into her ear as she sat down, “This is why you are here!”

There would be many more dinner parties, Hitler told his niece at breakfast, and many nights at the opera, so he wanted Geli to fill her closet with fine clothes.

“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and at noon she took the green trolley to Odeonsplatz and bought a hair waver, two pairs of silk stockings, patent leather heels by Ferragamo, a yellow satin housecoat with pajama trousers, a Vionnet tweed coat cuffed and bordered in nutria, a Lanvin evening gown in black faille and strass, and a Lanvin silver coat with a white fox collar. She ordered them sent to the flat. And as she was walking to the trolley she saw Heinrich Hoffman wave to her from his new Mercedes-Benz and roll down his side window. Would she like a lift?

When she got in, he said, “I just heard a good one. What is an Aryan’s Nordic ideal?”

“Tell me.”

“To be thin like Göring, tall like Goebbels, and blond like Hitler. Ha, ha! Don’t you think that’s good?”

“Aren’t you afraid of them hearing?”

“I’m a jester!” he said. And then he started to worry. “Don’t tell, all right?”

“I won’t.”

Heading north on Ludwigstrasse, he said, “I have to have a nap. Too much champagne.” He thanked her for the night before and said he’d never seen the leader look happier. She was the cause of that. All his friends were grateful.

“Well, he’s been so generous to me. If I can give him pleasure, maybe it’s more of a fair exchange.”

“Ho, ho,” Hoffmann said. “You sound like Eva.”

“Eva?”

Hoffmann hit his forehead with his fist, as if he found himself a fool, and he smiled goofily as he said, “I have a big mouth.”

“Who’s Eva?” she asked.

Traffic was halted as horses hauled a freight wagon into Galerie-strasse. Hoffmann sighed and told Geli he’d hired a featherbrain named Eva Braun as a clerk and photographer’s model for his Schellingstrasse studio. She was seventeen like Henrietta, and blonde, with a chocolate-box type of prettiness, and she was just out of a convent high school where she’d not done well. One late afternoon in the October just past she was up on a ladder, filing papers in a high cupboard, when Hoffmann walked into the studio with Hitler, and Hoffmann noticed that the leader was fancying Eva’s athletic calves. Eva later confessed that she’d had no idea who the man in the felt hat and London overcoat was, for he had introduced himself as Herr Wolf.

“You can see how frivolous she is,” Hoffmann said. “She won’t even look at my photos. To her he was just an old gentleman with a funny little mustache. Old, at forty. And she thought he was staring because the hem of her skirt was uneven.”

“Men worry a lot about tailoring,” Geli said.

Hoffmann forced his car into a lane between a green trolley and a milk truck, and headed toward the Englischer Garten. Eva, he said, had been sent out for Weisswurst and Thüringer and Augustiner beer. They all ate and drank together, and just before she’d gone home to her father and mother, Hoffmann had told Eva that she’d been chatting with Adolf Hitler—whose politics her father, a schoolteacher, hated. She did not get along with her Vati, so she was thrilled. Within a few days Hitler visited Eva in the studio, with a flower assortment, a box of Most pralines, a signed photograph of himself, and an invitation to join him at an opera matinee.

“Which opera?”

“She didn’t say.”