Hitler's Niece

Geli gently cuddled the newborn and held her cheek to his head as she swayed from side to side. She said, “Oh, I want a baby, too!”

Adolf Vogl’s wife asked, “Whose?”

Geli just blushed. “Oh, you know who.”

She smiled. “Would it b

e Herr Hitler perhaps?”

“He’d say I have already said way too much.”

Which was true. Of the many roles Hitler played with his niece—father, confidant, educator, financier, swain—she disliked most his role of warden. Walking down the hallway one afternoon, she discovered that her uncle was back from his meetings in Essen and was in the kitchen interrogating the Winters about what she’d done while he was away. She slammed open the kitchen door and found him sitting at the pantry table, still in his chocolate-brown leather trench coat. Without hesitation, Hitler continued, “And Thursday afternoon?”

“Singing lessons,” Anni Winter said.

“She left when?”

Anni tried to recall. Georg said, “Wasn’t it one o’clock?”

“I’m here,” Geli said. “Why not ask me?”

Smiling at her fleetingly, but with irony and mistrust, Hitler again turned to Georg and asked, “She got back from Herr Vogl’s when?”

And she was at Hitler’s Stammtisch at the Café Heck in June. Thirteen months earlier Alfred Rosenberg had finished a book that in self-flattery he’d insisted on calling his magnum opus, and he had given Der Mythos des 20 Jahrhunderts to his leader to read lest he find anything objectionable in it. She knew her uncle had not troubled himself to, in fact, read the book, but kept it for a full year before giving it back with the hastily penned comment “Very good” on the title page. Still, Rosenberg was elated, and as Rudolf Hess talked to Hitler about some pressing matter in the north, Rosenberg sought to give Geli a few reasons why her uncle was so impressed.

With a halitosis that forced Geli to shield her nose with her hand, Rosenberg leaned close to say that The Myth of the 20th Century was the fulfillment of the race theories that had first been formulated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. “I have outdone them, however, for I have proven that the highest cultural achievements of the West all had their origins in ancient Germanic tribes. And that Christianity, corrupted by Jesuits, Freemasons, and international Jewry, has destroyed Germanic culture by urging the dilution of our blood with feeble strains.”

“And you call for what?”

“We need war,” he said. “A cleansing.”

Without thinking, Geli said, “Oh good. Begin with the teeth.”

Affronted, he sat back and in full volume said, “Others have reported that you are an impudent girl. I now have confirmation.”

She was stunned that Rosenberg would dare talk to his leader’s niece in that way, but when she turned in outrage to her uncle, she saw that he and Hess were watching them in a tolerant silence that seemed to endorse Rosenberg’s insult. Had he been put up to it?

Hitler smiled. “Men have little use for cleverness in women. We want them to be nice, little, cuddly things. Soft and sweet and perhaps a tad stupid.”

Her face was hot. Her mouth was weak. She felt a flutter in her stomach. “Am I here to be corrected?”

“Only as it seems necessary.”

She was near tears, so she just stared at her plate. She heard Hitler tell Hess and Rosenberg, “I find nothing more enjoyable than educating a young thing. A girl of eighteen or twenty is as pliable as wax.” Geli was going to say she was nearly twenty-two, and then she remembered that Eva Braun was younger.

Rosenberg asked Hitler, “Would you mind if I quoted you to Herr Hess?”

“On this subject?”

“You were saying it just yesterday.”

“I say so many things.”

“If I have it right it was, “A man must be able to put his mark on every girl. Women wouldn’t have it any other way.’ I find that so psychologically—”

Geli began to get up from the table.

“Where are you going?” her uncle asked.