She was taken downstairs to the chrome-bright records office where fireproof steel cabinets held the personnel files of five hundred thousand party members. “We’ll stop taking applications when we have one million,” Hitler said. “Either we can do it with a million or we can’t do it at all.”
Then he took her back up to the first-floor “Hall of Senators,” where the highest-ranking dignitaries in the party would be invited for conferences, seating themselves in sixty chairs of red morocco leather arranged in a horseshoe of two rows facing, of course, the führer. Heroic busts of Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire, and Dietrich Eckart, who had died soon after the putsch and to whom Hitler had dedicated Mein Kampf, were on pedestals beside four plaques illustrating phases of the party’s ten-year evolution: its formation, the announcement of its program, its vanquishment at the Feldherrnhall, and its renewal after Adolf Hitler’s release from Landsberg am Lech. Even as he showed the hall of senators to Geli, Hitler hinted that he thought it too parliamentary, too much like the Reichstag he hated, and she got the feeling it would never be used.
Wide doors opened into an elegant first-floor restaurant of soft blond light above walls of herringboned oak, gold damask chairs, and dining tables of tan marble. Waiters were still there after the afternoon luncheon, putting out Dresden china and silverware, arranging hothouse flowers in crystal vases, vacuuming the plush red carpet. Each choice of fabric, color, and ornamentation had been personally made by Hitler.
Offices for Hess, Himmler, Goebbels, Göring, Schwarz, and other party officials were on the second and third floors. Each desk was perfectly clean except for a black telephone, a writing pad and a fountain pen, and a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler. Each hallway held a huge oil portrait of the führer, and on one wall was a green map of Germany with its cities and villages pinned with black swastikas.
Hitler’s office was grander and far too large, perhaps fifty strides from door to door, with a suede wall covering of reddish-brown, ceiling-high windows facing the Königsplatz, a sumptuous red carpet that felt as soft as a mattress beneath Geli’s shoes, a great fireplace and a golden sofa and chairs at one end, and at the other two secretary chairs in front of a huge, ornately carved ambassadorial desk that was free of even a pencil. A full-length portrait in oils of auto tycoon Henry Ford, a secret patron, hung on a wall, a fine stone bust of Benito Mussolini was on a pedestal, and not far from it was one of Heinrich Hoffmann’s haunting, ghostly photographs of Hitler, his face artificially handsome and framed in blackness, his hypnotic stare like a fiery assault.
Geli strolled by a fair illustration in oil paints of the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment on its first attack in Flanders in 1914, and then walked to one of Hitler’s many eighteenth-century paintings of Frederick the Great. She realized for the first time that the king of Prussia’s left hand was effeminately posed on his hip, just as her uncle’s often was.
“Old Fritz,” Hitler said, and she turned. He was sitting in his high-backed chair of pudding-soft leather, his hands folded in front of him as if she were his theater, his entertainment. “Old Fritz kidnapped a pretty Italian ballerina named Barbara Campanini so she could perform nightly for him as his private dancer. But she became more than that. She was his Leyden jar, his source of energy. “La Barbarina,” she was called. Odic force radiated from her and electrified the Prussian king, whose many obligations and long hours may have sapped his poten
cy.”
“Why don’t you have a picture of her here?”
Hitler did not smile. “I have you.”
She looked at him without blinking. “Oh yes. I forgot.”
“Haven’t you found by observation, Geli, that health and vigor and zest for life fairly surge from an older man when he is with an enchanting young girl? You can only agree. Wives are not the same thing at all. Wives ought to be, first of all, mothers. An older man needs a mistress.”
And Eva’s yours, she thought. She spun a world globe on its axis as she felt him frowning.
Abruptly standing up, he knocked the heels of his jackboots together, and raised his right hand high in the Fascist salute. “I can hold my arm up like this for hours! With only my stupendous iron will for support! At the party congress in Nürnberg, Göring tried to keep his own up for as long but failed utterly. He fell limp with exhaustion. Others would not even try.”
She just stared at him.
“I have letters!” he said, and he searched his desk drawers until he found a file swollen fat with cards and envelopes. He put on his spectacles and read one. “This is from a fanatical woman named Hildegard, who also sent me a cake. ‘My dear, sugar-sweet Adolf,’ she begins. ‘I stare at your pictures constantly, spreading them out in front of me and giving them a kiss. Yes, yes, my dear, sweet, good Adolf, love is as true as gold, and I can’t do a thing about it.’ Et cetera.”
“And you have no idea who she is?”
“This is from a Melita. ‘My heart’s own!’ she begins. ‘I’m having a front-door key and a key to my bedroom made for you. In the next letter, you’ll get the first one; and in the letter after that, you’ll get the other. We must be very careful because the scum will try to kill you. But come here as early as you can, whenever you want.’”
“Were the keys sent?”
“Who knows? Hess takes care of my mail. I have another one from a high school girl.” Hitler hunted for it, read a few lines to himself, and smiled. “She calls me ‘Poppet.’ She talks about meeting. ‘If the worse comes to the worst, our parents (because they’re yours now as well) have given me permission for you to come to the house at any time so we can spend the night together.’”
Insolently smiling, she said, “Take her up on it, Uncle Alf. I can feel the Odic force from way over here.”
He took off his spectacles, folded the letter, inserted it in the file, and shoved the file inside his desk. “Hundreds of women find me desirable,” he said.
“I think that’s well-documented now.”
Hitler just stared at her until she glanced away. He said, “Baldur von Schirach is hosting a Carnival party here for the National Socialist German Students’ Alliance. Would you like to go?”
She toned down her excitement before saying, “Could I?”
“I’ll do far better than just give you permission. I’ll be joining you.”
Schirach rejoiced, of course, and extorted party funds for a giant swastika ice sculpture, an effuse Swedish smorgasbord of chilled meats and fish, and a chanteuse and a six-piece band from the Resi nightclub in Berlin. Hearing the führer would be there, hundreds more students came than Schirach had planned for, a few from as far away as Heidelberg and Innsbruck, and a fascinated crowd seethed around Hitler as he shook hands and signed his autograph and Schirach spoke stirringly about him as Germany’s greatest son.
“My church is no longer the altar of Christianity,” Schirach shouted, “but the steps of the field marshal’s hall where the blood of the Old Combatants was poured out for our sake. Their spirit lives on in Adolf Hitler, our leader and hero, in whom rests the roots of our world. Upright, firm, and modest, he remains a man like you and me, and so we love him all the more, for we know he is a genius whose soul touches the stars!”
If Hitler’s niece beside him was looked at, it was with either jealousy or wonder. Who’s the girl? they seemed to be saying. She’d lived in Germany since 1927 and still she was nothing more than an adjunct, a trifle, a plaything, a subject of gossip, an odor of scandal, a niece. She was wearing a Lanvin evening gown in black faille and strass and she felt wealthy, old, and humorless as she sat with Hitler and Schirach in their tuxedos, all three of them glumly watching the many young partygoers fusing and dancing. Then Rudolf Hess was at the entrance, his face as dour as Scotland, and her uncle rose up, saying, “I have a meeting. Ten minutes, no more.”
She asked, “With whom may I talk?”