Hitler's Niece

Wildly applauding and gleeful, Hitler announced, “And now my niece will perform with you,” and she dutifully got up from a floral sofa to join Putzi on the white piano bench.

“Sweet and short,” she whispered, and Putzi told her to play the left-hand chords of the “Horst Wessel Lied” while he quickened the right-hand notes into a minuet. And then they both turned and bowed.

Eyes wet with pleasure, Hitler hurried to wake up Frau Reichert before they started another song.

Geli called, “It’s two in the morning!,” but Hitler ignored her.

Putzi said, “No one told me you were also a pianist.”

She smiled. “Who can plumb the depths of my talents?”

“Do you and the leader often do duets?”

Geli’s smile faded. She seemed to him to be communicating a secret in her stare. “We try,” she said, “but it’s hard. My uncle only plays the black keys.”

She was invited to a grand costume ball at the Deutsches Theater, and she prevailed upon Baldur von Schirach, whose office was just above Hitler’s in the Brown House, to wear down the führer until he finally agreed to let Geli go. If Heinrich Hoffmann took her, he said. And if she was home by eleven. And a day later he decided that Max Amann ought to go with them, too.

The theatrical designer Ingo Schröder costumed Henny as a white-buckskinned Indian princess as featured in the Westerns of Karl May, but four of his designs for Geli were rejected by Hitler for varying reasons, and Schröder would not try others.

Geli sketched a costume she’d sew for herself on her Köhler machine, and she took it to Hitler for his approval as he shared coffee and strudel with Ilse and Rudolf Hess in the parlor. On the wide, round mahogany table was a sheet of red poster board on which Hess had pasted famous faces and the lettering “Wer ist der wichtigste Mann der Welt?”—Who is the most important man in the world?

“We’ll merely ask the question,” Hess told her. “The conclusion will be inevitable. We wonder, though, if the faces aren’t too hard for the man in the street.”

“She’s very smart,” Hitler said. “She’ll get them all.”

She leaned over the poster. “Herr Gerhart Hauptmann, the playwright,” she said. “Uncle Adolf. Leon Trotsky. Albert Einstein. And him I don’t know.”

“Our new friend Hjalmar Schacht,” Hitler said. “The former president of the Reichsbank.”

Geli shrugged a you-could-have-fooled-me. “Herr General Paul von Hindenburg,” she said. “Max Schmeling.”

Hitler asked, “What does he do?”

“Isn’t he the heavyweight boxing champion of the world?”

“No,” Hitler said. “He demonstrates the superiority of the Aryan race.” And he laughed hard at his own joke as Ilse took Geli’s sketch of her costume.

“Oh, I like it,” Ilse said. “Who is it?”

“Diana.”

“Diana who?” Hitler asked.

Ilse handed the sketch to her husband as Geli said, “The Roman goddess of the moon. The protectress of women.”

Ilse asked, “What fabric?”

“A yellow chiffon.”

“Won’t that be lovely.”

Rudolf silently handed the sketch to his führer.

Examining it, Hitler asked, “What’s chiffon?”

“Oh, you see it in lots of dresses,” Ilse said. “A sheer fabric.”

“Meaning see-through,” Hitler said. He tossed the sketch onto the poster and said, “If you want to wear something like that, you might as well go naked.”