Hitler's Niece

She smiled falsely and confessed, “Everything about Uncle Adolf, yes.”

A flint of confusion nettled her mother’s face, and then she got the meaning. She seemed staggered as she turned away from Geli and leaned over the kitchen table, flooding with grief, her red hands so flat on the oak she could have felt the whorls of the grain. “He’s a great man,” Angela said. “A genius.”

“He isn’t. He’s evil. They all are. Don’t you see how Uncle Adolf buys us off? If we like the good things, the money and fame, we have to forgive the bad. We say, ‘Oh, that’s just him,’ as if it doesn’t matter. But it all matters: the hating, the lying, the bullying—”

“Don’t say anything more,” Angela said, and tightly held her hands to her ears.

“The things he makes me do,” she said, but softly, so it wouldn’t be heard.

On Thursday morning they were just about to leave for the train when Angela got a telephone call from a frantic Adolf who said he’d changed his mind, he was too lonely already, Geli was not to go to Austria just yet. Julius Schaub, he said, was on his way to collect her.

Angela hung up the receiver and felt a pang when she saw Geli’s face. In a weak effort to console her, she offered, “If he changed his mind once, he can change it again.”

Crying with frustration, Geli tried, “We could go to Salzburg right now. Schaub won’t be here for an hour, and by then I’d be on my way to Wien.”

Angela hugged her and said, “I hear they have Nazis there, too.”

She fumed in the front seat of the Mercedes as Schaub took his truant back to München. With fiercely crossed arms, she frowned out the side window at skies as gray as prison blankets and at fields of hay swaying beneath the Föhn, the hot, humid wind from the south. A farmer was waiting on a haymower and a hired man was holding the harnesses of the horse team as an old woman in a shroud of a dress hastily shuffled toward them carrying handled grocery bags that were so heavy with food her fingers seemed to drain from her hands. Geli told Schaub, “She looks just like me.”

With his customary seriousness, Schaub considered the woman and decided Geli was joking. “Other women are begging to change places with you,” Schaub said.

“Let them,” she said. “I have had my turn.”

“It isn’t all bad,” Schaub said.

“I am in chains.”

With disdain, he said, “A Communist slogan.” Intently watching the highway, he added, “The fact is, the folk don’t know what to do with freedom. Choices confuse them. They wander aimlessly. They gain nothing but headaches and debts. They need a Hitler to think for them and tell them what to do. To force them to do it, if they object.”

“And was it he who told you that?”

“Well, he’s right,” Schaub said. “The leader is always right.”

She sighed. “You’re hopeless. All of you.”

Schaub seemed genuinely baffled. “We are full of hope!”

With effort, she fell asleep. She awoke in front of the flat at Prinzregentenplatz and found her uncle in his Brownshirt uniform, just outside her car window, worriedly staring in. Ever alert to her, her uncle seemed to notice she’d gotten rid of his gift of the gold swastika and was now wearing a crucifix at her neck. “Are you well?” he asked.

She didn’t say. She opened the door and got out. She fe

lt the sting of his mustache as he formally kissed her cheek and in a hushed voice asked, “Can I be the leader of a great nation if even my niece will not obey me?”

“All I do is obey you!”

“Oh, but using your feminine wiles is the disobedience of women.” Avoiding touching her, Hitler sat where she’d been. “I have to prepare a speech,” he told her. “We’re going up to Hamburg tomorrow to launch my presidential campaign.”

“We?”

“Well, not you.”

Geli was outraged. “You brought me back so you could leave?”

Hitler failed to see the difficulty. “This way I’ll know where you are.”

“Alone, in the flat.”

Schaub was finishing setting Geli’s suitcase down on the sidewalk. Without turning to him, Hitler shouted, “Schaub! Are you available tonight?”