Hitler's Niece

Quickly glancing at the jarred Schirach, Hitler pretended to be surprised by the question. “Anybody, of course!”

She said nothing. She did not watch him go out. She saw Henny on the dance floor shaking her head to a boy who’d asked her to join him as the band played a nonsense hit from 1928, “My Parrot Won’t Eat No Hard-Boiled Eggs.”

Henny seemed to see Geli with the handsome founder of the alliance and walked over, flushing a little as she tried not to face Schirach, who stood from his chair and gaily said, “Please join us, Fräulein Hoffmann.”

“Will it be all right?” she asked Geli.

“Certainly.”

Schirach shoved in her chair as she sat.

“Are you here alone?” Geli asked.

Wide-eyed at someone behind Geli, she shook her head.

Geli turned. Henny’s hunchbacked father was merrily strolling over in his tuxedo, his arm linked with Eva Braun’s. She was wearing a shirred, ankle-length taffeta gown and a black wool overcoat with a fitch collar and cuffs. She’d hidden her blond hair underneath a fitch turban by Agnès. Weeks ago the full ensemble had been featured in a store window on Maximilianstrasse. Were they gifts from Hitler?

Schirach stood. “I haven’t had the pleasure, Fräulein.”

She forced a smile onto her kittenish face as she shook his hand. “Eva Braun.”

Hoffmann held her waist as he joked, “I have been telling everybody she’s my niece.” And in a silence as loud as a slamming door, he furthered his insult by saying, “What the leader does, I do.”

“She’s his shop girl,” Geli frostily said.

“Clerk,” Eva said. “And model.”

“Oh, I see,” said Schirach.

“Are you drunk, Daddy?”

“Well, others thought it was funny.”

Eva and Geli exchanged glares. Eva said, “I just saw your uncle. I’m so sorry that he seemed so sad.”

“Was it sadness over seeing you?”

Eva wasn’t a wit. She said, “I think not.”

“Was it over all the monkeys they killed for that turban and coat?”

Eva looked at the fitch fur of her cuff.

“Are you drunk?” Henny scolded.

In a fair imitation of Eva, Geli slacked her jaw and said, “I think not.”

“Changing the subject for a moment,” Hoffmann said, straddling a chair, “I was just talking to one of the students here and he told me he was having a hard time cramming for his examinations in law. Well, so I helped him out by going over the various pleas a lawyer could make for acquittal.” Hoffmann found a hammered silver flask inside his tuxedo jacket and held it out. “Schnaaps, anyone?”

There were no other takers. Hoffmann tilted the flask and finished it, then hid it inside his jacket again.

“The fellow was fine for a while,” he continued, “but he was forgetting the insanity defense. I said, ‘Oh, come now. There’s one you hear about every day. Criminals who are acquitted of violent acts not because they are minors or because they acted in self-defense, but because of…what?’ Well, the fellow seemed lost for a while and then his face brightened with insight and he said, ‘Because they are Nazis?’”

Heinrich Hoffmann guffawed at his joke and glanced around to guarantee that his daughter and Geli and Eva joined him in the hilarity. Baldur von Schirach squirmed uneasily in his seat, and Hoffmann squinted at him with annoyance. “We must puncture the swellings, Herr von Schirach.”

“I just didn’t think it was funny, or fair.”

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