Tears streaming down her face, Geli held on to Emil’s hands and yelled for him to quit.
Emil seemed to hear nothing. “So you think you can have my girlfriend, and in my leader’s house?” With a strength greater than his middleweight size, Emil grabbed hold of Christof’s mackintosh and lifted him to his feet before hurtling him into the doorjamb, shivering the room, then hauling him out. And then Emil manhandled him down the hallway to the foyer, yelling his hatred for intellectuals and sissies, his hands flashing out into Christof’s face whenever he saw a free shot, his postwar years with the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade remembered as he threw Christof into the walls and the shaking doors of the library.
Christof fell and Emil kicked at him; then Emil wildly swung his leg again and his foot hit the wall. Even with his jackboots on, Emil hurt his toes, and he tried to walk off the pain as Christof lay in the foyer oozing blood.
And then Hitler was there with a pistol in his hand, shouting, “We cannot have this!”
Emil was startled, his eyes on the handgun. “Are you talking to me?”
“Who else? You have made my niece cry!”
“She was—” he started, but Hitler swatted Emil’s head with his free hand, as if he were just a boy, and Emil fell miserably into a sit as Hitler railed at him for subjecting his home and his niece to such violence.
Geli screamed, “I hate you, Emil! I hate you!” And then she got a wet hand towel to hold to Christof’s face.
While Emil pitied himself, Hitler went on and on, not letting up, lifting up Emil’s chin with his handgun so he could shout that Emil’s actions were shameful, unforgivable, an outrage against decency.
Woozily Christof got to all fours, then his feet, saying into the reddening towel, “I have to get to a doctor.”
Hitler forced Emil to help Christof up, then he glanced at his niece and said, “My deepest regrets, Princess. This won’t happen again.”
At first she’d thought he’d be angry with her, then she saw how this suited him. Emil would be fired from his job, she knew, and Christof was no fool. She was Hitler’s alone now.
Christof staggered out, hanging on to Emil’s shoulder, his galoshes squeaking on the flooring.
Geli asked, “Was the pistol in your car?”
Hilter looked at the Walther in his hand. “I heard you screaming.”
“Christof just came to say he’d joined the party.”
With forlorn eyes her uncle glimmered a smile and said, “We needn’t talk about it,” as if he had much to forgive. And then he was gone and there was nothing for Geli to do but sponge the blood from the floor and the walls.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELECTIONS, 1930
An American businessman named Owen Young chaired an international commission that sought to give Germany economic relief by amending many punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Agreeing with Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s foreign minister, the commission established a ceiling of 121 billion reichsmarks in war reparations, to be paid off in fifty-nine yearly installments that would finally end in 1989. Taxes on industrial obligations, and other duties, were abolished. Arbitration was to take the place of sanctions. And the Allies would give up their occupation of the Rhineland four and a half years ahead of schedule.
All the changes only outraged the enemies of the Weimar Republic, who thought the original treaty was grossly unjust and ought to be wholly rejected rather than modified. Communists and other parties on the left joined the Stahlheim (the army veterans’ party), Alfred Hugenberg’s Nationalists, the Pan-German Association, the Resistance to Oppression Movement, and the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party in urging that the agreement be voted down in a December 1929 plebiscite.
And with no one to match him for stirring oratory, Adolf Hitler became the featured speaker at some enormous rallies—seven thousand heard him at the Zirkus Krone—where the majority of his audience otherwise felt no affinity for his politics. Hitler took advantage of the opportunity to widen his popularity by saying nothing about the Jews, having the inflammatory swastika taken off rally posters, and concentrating on the noxious elements of the Versailles Treaty. He shouted that Germany was not guilty for causing the war, it was only guilty of having lost it by tolerating the treachery of politicians; that while Germany was being disarmed and shackled, the countries around it, preaching peace, were constructing great armies and navies; that Germany was in no want of food and raw goods and fuel, except for that which was being stolen from it. “Shall we consent to pay out eighty marks per second for the next sixty years? Shall we be slaves for three generations? Shall we continue to say yes to our oppressors? I say no!”
The Reichstag finally adopted the Young Plan anyway, but for Hitler it was a victory, for party membership increased by forty thousand, Alfred Hugenberg’s chain of newspapers had portrayed Hitler as an ultrapatriot, and he was more than ever salonfähig, or worthy of acceptance in upper-class society. Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the kaiser’s son, publicly joined the party in 1930 and induced Prince Philip von Hessen, a grandson of Queen Victoria, to join the Nazis as well.
Hitler knew that, with the worldwide depression, American creditors were calling in their loans on the Continent, farms were being foreclosed, factories were shutting down, three million in Germany were already unemployed, and onerous taxes were being attached to income, property, inheritances, and every commodity but beer. All the party needed, he decided, was a major new offensive in public relations founded on a martyr for the National Socialist cause. And Horst Wessel, he thought, would do.
Horst Wessel was the twenty-two-year-old son of an Evangelical pastor who had rejected his father’s advice and had joined the Sturmabteilung in order to fight the Communists in the streets. Der Angriff had publis
hed Wessel’s sentimental poem “Raise High the Flag,” which he’d written to commemorate those friends of his who’d been “shot dead by the Red Front and Reaction,” and the party had liked it so much that Wessel set it to a tune from an old Austrian cabaret song, but “hotted up,” as he put it, to fit marching time.
Wessel had fallen in love with a prostitute named Erna and had moved in with her, but they fought loudly and often, and their landlady hired Communists who were friends of Erna to harry them out of the flat. Since Wessel was famous for his viciousness in the streets, one of the Red Front militants took advantage of their meeting to shoot him in the mouth, shouting, “You know what that’s for!” Three weeks later, Horst Wessel died.
With his genius for propaganda, Doktor Goebbels reported the shooting in Der Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter so that it seemed a political assassination, and he organized a spectacular funeral at the Sportpalast in late February 1930, where he sonorously recited, “Horst is one who, leaving home and mother, lived with gentle concern among those who scorned and spit on him. Out there, in a tenement attic, in a proletarian section of Berlin, he proceeded to build his youthful, modest, caring life among depraved subhumans. There can be no doubt, he was a Socialist Christ! One who appealed to others through his generous deeds. His spirit has risen in order to live in all of us now. He is marching within our ranks. Even now he raises his weary hand and beckons us into the shimmering distance, shouting, ‘Forward over the graves! At the end of the road lies Germany!’”
Then six great choirs joined in on what was now called the “Horst Wessel Lied,” singing, “The banners flutter, the drums roll, the fifes rejoice, and from millions of throats resounds the hymn of the German revolution, ‘Raise high the flag!’”
Doktor Goebbels had wanted Hitler there to deliver the oration and to make the occasion more politically important, but Hitler was afraid that Communists would murder him and didn’t want to say so; instead he claimed he was ill, or busy, and, with the shilly-shallying he was not yet famous for, he went into hiding for a fortnight with Geli.