Hitler's Niece

“I feel ill.”

“Sit!”

And then there was silence until a waiter finished serving them bowls of minestrone. Rudolf Hess tried to soften the tension by asking, “Who was it who said, ‘For men love is a thing apart; for women it is their whole existence’?”

“I did,” Hitler said. “But not in those words.” And then he saw tears running down his niece’s cheeks and he changed the subject.

At four in the morning she heard her door open and softly shut, and she got out of bed to find a small package wrapped in gold foil. With it was a card on which he’d sketched an ugly green dragon whose face was his own. “I am a monster,” he’d written. “Will you forgive me?” His gift was a glamorous set of half-carat diamond earrings. And he was so abject all the next day, and so fatiguing in his gloom, that the Winters insisted and she finally forgave him.

There was going to be another election in September, and Hitler thought the party’s chances were so good that he gave up his opera nights and the cinema and his July and August in Obersalzberg in order to campaign. Geli again took Henny with her to Haus Wachenfeld for the summer, and Heinrich Hoffmann mailed them weekly photographs of Hitler in Bremen, Darmstadt, Leipzig, or Potsdam, genially tousling the hair of blond boys, patting the sunburnt cheeks of girls in their village costumes, shaking the hands of factory workers, sitting on a tractor hitch to eat a farmer’s wurst and sauerkraut, congratulating a grocer for the cleanliness of his store, scowling at a map in his chartered airplane, offering a formal bow to the older ladies whose votes he could always count on, stonily addressing a hall crammed full of his hard and lean Sturmabteilung for whom he was ever more an object of reverence. “Six speeches in a row and not a peep about the Jews,” Hoffmann wrote. “We offend no one these days.”

With her father’s Leica, Henny took photos of Geli sitting on the northern terrace with her flowered white skirt lifted to mid-thigh so the jackdaw Schatzi could perch on her knee; of her imitating the flamboyant pose of Lilian Harvey outside the Mirabell movie palace in Salzburg; of her lying in a meadow and laughing hard with her brother, Leo, Prinz Josef cigarettes in their hands; of Geli sleeping nude on the Freikörperkultur beach with a flock of butterflies softly fanning their wings on her suntanned skin.

Because he feared that Communists would try to foil him by kidnapping or injuring his niece, Hitler had given handgun lessons to Geli and Henny and had consigned his Walther 6.35 and four boxes of ammunition to them so they would get to be good shots. And so they’d shoot at pine cones in the high woods near the Pension Moritz or wander farther down the Kehlstein to the horse stables of Doktor Seitz where they’d fire at tin cans on the fenceposts. They liked the maleness of it. They felt like Chicago gangsters, or like Jack Hoxie or William S. Hart in an American Western.

Walking back to Haus Wachenfeld one afternoon, Henny told her friend that she had a confession to make, that Hitler had joined the Hoffmanns for dinner a few months before. Afterward he’d played some Wagner on the piano, and the leitmotiv of Verdi’s La forza del destino, and then he and Henny’s father had gone out. She had been alone in the house when she’d heard the front door open and found Hitler hunting for the whip he’d forgotten. “Don’t you find it strange that he carries that thing?”

Geli shrugged. “I have no idea what strange is anymore.”

“Well, he planted himself on the red carpet of the foyer, his whip in one hand and his felt hat in the other, and with great seriousness he asked, ‘Will you kiss me?’”

Geli forced herself to grin. “And you did?”

“Of course not. I told him, “No, please, really not, Herr Hitler! Kissing you is impossible for me!’ And then he left in a huff.”

“Without trying to persuade you?”

She shook her head and asked, “Has he persuaded you?”

“A little.”

“To have sex?”

“We just touch now and then. And nothing ever in public. We must keep up appearances. We share occasional kisses. Linking of arms. Sentimental looks. A hand to my bosom three times now. Quickly on, and then off, like a jittery boy.”

“Aren’t you frustrated?”

“Well, the ethics of the situation seem to be under a cloud.” A jackdaw she didn’t know stumbled up into the air and flew a few meters to the green lawn of the Hotel zum Türken. Calm women in white summer dresses were having cocktails under a shade tree and staring at the gun in her hand. She said, for no particular reason, “My uncle’s a watcher, I think.”

“Are you still modeling for him?”

Was there a betrayal that would surprise her now? Geli asked, “How did you hear?”

“We saw. My father and I. You can’t tell it’s you, really.”

“Who else saw the sketches?”

“Well, many of his friends, I think. Herr Hitler was quite proud of them.”

In fury she said, “He swore they were just for him! He gave me his word of honor! Am I supposed to face those people now?”

Trying to cheer her up, Henny joked, “They just know you a little better.”

Howling with shame, she folded her arms over her head and cursed him.

“There, now,” Henny said in a motherly way, and smiled as she flung an arm around Geli and hugged her. “It’s just art, Angelika.”

Checking a tear, Geli sniffed and said, “Oh. Easy for you to say. You’re a hussy.”