Hitler's Niece

She had no choice. She nodded.

On September 11th she went to the Brown House with Hitler for a short visit before the afternoon showing of a mountaineering film, The White Hell of Mount Palü, costarring Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl. But the führer was in his office so infrequently that Rudolf Hess and Franz Xaver Schwarz hurried to take advantage of his being there to finally get his signature and have him review a calendar of forthcoming events.

Waiting in the hallway, she looked at an unskilled watercolor of Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, featuring a fearless and far taller Hitler, his fist raised defiantly as he faced a fusillade from green-uniformed police and as his fellow putschists fell at his feet. Other faces were hard to make out, though the furtive, smallish man behind him seemed to be Erich Ludendorff. The quartermaster general and her uncle were not now on speaking terms, she knew, and she supposed the picture had been hung in the hallway to alter the memory of the putsch, when Ludendorff was the heroic one and some foreign correspondents had dismissed her uncle as “Ludendorff’s noisy lieutenant.” The facts, for her uncle, were instruments that merely needed management.

Carrying his leather portfolio, a jovial Heinrich Hoffmann walked down from the upstairs offices with the seemingly giant Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose hand was on the far shorter man’s shoulder, but their faces fell when they saw Geli, they failed to offer greetings, and she thought she heard Putzi whisper, “Empty-headed slut,” as they exited the building.

An officious Rudolf Hess found her in the hallway. “We have many transactions and deliberations that require the indispensable wisdom of the leader. With profound regrets he suggests you go on to the cinema without him.”

Hiding her pleasure, she said, “Certainly.”

The film had been his idea. She instead strolled south in fine weather to the fruit vendors’ stands of the Viktualien Markt and to the hundreds of shops surrounding the gray bricks of city hall and Marienplatz. She was audience to fire-eaters, jugglers, accordion players, an old man who grinned as he chewed bottle glass, and a blond, burly woman who called herself “Madame Nobody” and would bend iron bars in her hands for ten pfennigs. At a bookstall she bought Erich Maria Remarque’s best-selling antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and she was reading it with a tankard of Franziskaner at an outside table on Neuhauserstrasse, just across from St. Michael’s Church, when she heard a man say, “We meet again!”

She shaded her eyes but at first couldn’t find the man’s face because of the fierce sun behind him. And then he limped to the shade and she saw that it was a tall, soldierly priest in his fifties wearing a black wool coat and fedora, the Jesuit she’d seen years before in the Hofbräuhaus, the one who’d regretted to say that her uncle was a dangerous man.

“Are you a Nazi now?” he asked.

She told him she wasn’t. She then remembered his name: Rupert Mayer.

“The jewelry gives the wrong impression,” he said.

She fingered the gold swastika at her throat. “A gift. Won’t you sit?”

“I have confessions soon.” With firmness the Jesuit said, “A Catholic cannot be an anti-Semite. Are you aware of that?”

She affirmed him with friendly uncertainty.

“Many aren’t,” Mayer said. He folded his hands. “And so, in spite of the political climate, are you liking Germany?”

“Yes. I find it beautiful.”

“Good. You have been here for how long now?”

“Four years.”

He frowned with further assessment. “Are you happy?”

She felt affronted in some way, and said, “Why do you ask, Pater Mayer?”

“The fräulein is not the woman I first met.”

“I’m older,” she said.

“No. I can tell. The yoke isn’t easy.”

Tears blurred her eyes, and she turned away to stall them. She seemed ready to cry at anything now. She heard the priest ask, “Are you all right, Fräulein Raubal?” and she nodded and fluttered her hand. Waving him off. She finished her Franziskaner and slid the tankard aside as he touched his fedora in good-bye and tilted on his cane in order to cross Neuhauserstrasse to St. Michael’s. She watched him waiting for a fleet of trucks to pass, and she got up and hesitantly walked to him.

He smiled. “Traffic.”

She told him, “It’s true. I’m unhappy.”

With sympathy, he said, “I’m not surprised.”

“Would you please hear my confession?” she asked.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SEPTEMBER 18, 1931