Hitler's Niece

Doktor Goebbels organized six thousand meetings and torchlight parades throughout Germany for the 1930 campaign. Millions of books about the party were sold or given away. And in the last six weeks before the September election, Adolf Hitler gave over twenty major speeches, often in freshly raised circus tents holding as many as ten thousand. No country on the Continent had ever before undergone such furious miseducation, and the fruit of the propaganda was in the polls, where thirty-five million voted—up four million from the 1928 election—and the National Socialists won one hundred seven seats in the Reichstag, a gain of ninety-five. What the masses still called “the Hitler Movement” was now the second-largest party in the Reich.

With success came anxiousness. Hitler was wracked by stomachaches he feared were cancer, his insomnia worsened, he worried about his foot odor and flatulence; his hands, he felt, were too moist. And so a few days after the election he decided that he needed a v

acation, and that he, Geli, and Angela were going to travel to Berlin for what Hitler called “a family outing with Alois,” Angela’s older brother.

Julius Schaub was at a jazz festival in Stuttgart, so Hitler determined they could just as easily take the railway north. Wanting a first-class car without crowds, Hitler got them to the Hauptbahnhof just before four a.m., but as it was Sunday, bicyclists, the hikers who were called Wandervögel, the Jewish sports clubs Maccabee and Shield, the Friedrich Jahn Gymnastics Forum, and the League of German Girls were in full scream at the railway station, waiting for trains to Garmisch, Passau, Nürnberg, and Bad Tölz.”

Hitler tilted his trilby hat and hid his face from the chaotic crowds with an old Berliner Illustrierte as Angela got them all hot tea and Geli wandered through the railway station seeking lozenges for her sore throat.

She found instead, near a closed bookseller’s stall, thirty reverent hikers in Tyrolean costume wearing badges of membership in Saint Michael’s Sodality of Our Lady as they watched a consecration at a folding table turned into an altar. She hadn’t been to church since she’d moved into her uncle’s flat, so she stayed there, trying in vain to pray, but she was soon aware that her uncle was watching, and she walked back to the railway platform for Berlin.

Angela was wearing her cloche hat and raincoat and swastika pin, finishing her tea, and her uncle was pretending to scan track-meet news in the Berliner Illustrierte. She heard him snidely ask, “Still believe in the mumbo jumbo?”

There seemed to Geli no satisfactory reply.

“Oh, you and your smart talk,” Angela said.

“I never found that going to church got the bills paid.”

“Alois is the same way,” Angela said. “Heathens, the both of you.”

Hitler folded the newspaper and said, “We cannot have a strong nation if there are religions vying with us for control of the people. We need all of a man, not just a piece of him. We’ll first get rid of the Jews. And then we’ll rule out Catholicism. And then all the other religions. In a few generations no one in Germany will know that a Jew called Jesus ever existed.” The railway cars for Berlin were shuttling into the station and he craned his neck to see where the first-class cars would be.

“I’m a Catholic,” Geli said. “Mother is. Leo is.”

“And I used to be,” he said. “I have put away childish things.”

A taxi took them to Alois Hitler Jr.’s third-floor apartment on Luck-enwalderstrasse, and his second wife, Maimee, invited them into a purple-hued home so filled with inherited pictures and furniture that she had to sidestep them in order to put coffee on.

Angela and Geli uneasily shared the sofa and Adolf squeezed just beside his niece, his hand so squashed he at first settled it familiarly on her thigh before choosing his own. They were all facing the finest object in the living room, a new, flattering, life-size oil painting of Adolf Hitler in his Sturmabteilung uniform and his “man of destiny” stare.

“Am I really so dashing?” he asked.

Geli did not smile. “What they always miss in pictures is your modesty.”

“And here you all are!” Alois Hitler said, zestfully walking in and widening his arms. At forty-eight he’d changed his mustache to one just like his half-brother’s, but in his rimless glasses and his hard-collared manner there was still an air of the railway waiter and he seemed far too anxious to please as he waved forward from the hallway and introduced his firstborn son, William Patrick Hitler, who was on holiday from his job in London and whom he’d last seen in Liverpool in 1913.

Willie, as he was called, was nearly twenty and worked, Alois told them, as a draftsman in an engineering firm on Wigmore Street. He was a slim, fairly handsome young man in a gray tweed suit, with woe-filled eyes and a full head of brown hair brushed straight back from a high forehead. “My German not good,” Willie said.

Adolf genially said, “Oh, but you are fortunate, English boy,” and waggled Geli’s knee with his palm. “My Geli here speaks your language like the queen.”

With relief Willie sighed and said in German, “What an illustration!”

Alois corrected his “Erläuterung” to “Erleichterung.”

“Oh yes,” Willie said. “What a relief!”

And Geli said in English, “Like telegrams we will talk.”

“Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl and I have just written an article on the elections for the London Sunday Express,” Hitler told him. “And I have an interview with the London Times later this week. I see journalists all the time. Are you understanding my German, Willie?”

Hitler’s nephew nodded and said he did.

With surprising fury, Hitler shouted, “Numskull! Woodhead! Did you think I would not hear about the American newspapers? Only Adolf Hitler talks about Adolf Hitler! I shall not have you or your mother, Bridget, or you, Alois—no one—think they can climb on my back and get a free ride to fame!”

Willie told his father in English, “All the Hearst fellow wanted was a picture of me. And a few questions. I didn’t know that much.”

All too familiar with Hitler’s rages, Geli sighed and got up from the sofa. “Shall we help Maimee with the coffee, Mother?”