Hitler's Niece

She felt tears of frustration filming her eyes, and hated the fact that it so manifestly gave him satisfaction. She stood in silence and walked to her bedroom. She didn’t slam the door.

And then she found that he’d followed her. Worms of rage were there in his forehead and flames seemed to churn in his stare. “You have made me helpless and pitiful,” he said. “You see that, don’t you? I have fallen in love with you, and you have loathed and rejected me. And yet I am seized by you. I am lost and in ruins. Even now my throat tightens. My heart cracks in two. You cannot destroy Germany in this way.”

“You hate! You destroy! You’ll do to Germany just what you’re doing to me! And I won’t have it anymore!”

He screamed, “My will is your will! Your will is not mine!” And then he slammed her door and the foyer door and thundered down the stairs.

She was solemnly watching at the high window as Hitler’s jackboots strode to his waiting car.

Maria Reichert later reported that she’d heard Geli weeping behind a locked door all afternoon, but Anni Winter said she went to the Drogerie for Zuchooh Creme and Carmol Katarrh-Pastillen. And when she gave it to Anni to add to Hitler’s toiletries kit, she said, “I have no idea why he won’t let me go; I really have nothing at all in common with him.”

Anni later protected the führer by telling an interviewer she’d miserably said, “I have no idea why I can’t let him go; I’m really getting nothing at all from my uncle.” Anni further suggested that Geli was in a funk because of Hitler’s heightened affection for Fräulein Braun, saying she’d found the note from Eva in his jacket as she’d helped Anni pack. She also said she’d gone past Geli’s room just before leaving that evening and had found it locked from the inside. She had been listening to American jazz. Duke Ellington.

Widow Reichert got into a green Bavarian headdress and full-skirted dirndl that choked her waist but plumped up her breasts, and, after shouting the night’s instructions to her deaf old mother, she went off at five to work in one of the giant beer tents of Oktoberfest.

At five-thirty the führer returned again to his flat to bathe and change into a fashionable navy blue suit and a homburg. And when Anni and Georg Winter left the building at six, Julius Schaub and Heinrich Hoffmann were loitering under the gray stone frieze of Wotan at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. The fine-boned Haushofmeister was tilting to the right with Hitler’s suitcase, and Schaub took it from him to put it in the trunk of the Mercedes.

Upstairs in her room, Geli was paging through the fashion magazine Die Dame when she heard her uncle hesitate outside her bedroom door and softly knuckle it to offer his farewell. Without shifting on the sofa, she called out, “Will you let me go to Wien?” And she heard Hitler’s heavy stride down the hallway.

She got up to raise the venetian blinds and watch Prinzregentenplatz, and she pushed up the sash on her window farther when she saw her uncle shake Heinrich Hoffmann’s hand and mince his way toward the front-right passenger door that Schaub was holding open. She leaned out on the sill and shouted down, “Will you let me go to Wien?”

Childishly stamping his shoe, he shouted up, “For the last time, no!”

She withdrew from the window and heard him explain, “We have been quarreling.”

She heard Heinrich Hoffmann coolly say, “She’ll get over it.”

Seeking to pacify his niece, Hitler said, “One minute,” and headed inside the building again. And his official photographer followed just in case he needed to intercede.

She greeted the führer at the flat’s door, and softly asked again, “Will you please let me go to Wien?” She chilled as she felt him fondly stroke her cheek, and then she heard him relent and say, “All right, Little Princess. You can go just as soon as I get back.” She smiled. “Au revoir, Uncle Adolf. Au revoir, Herr Hoffmann.”

And then the men left for Hamburg. She shut the foyer door and saw old Frau Dachs in the hallway, haltingly holding out a luncheon tray with a spoon and a bowl of potato soup on it. “Would you like?” she asked.

“I’ll make my own dinner.”

“What?”

With exaggeration, Geli shook her head.

“Well, I’m going to my quarters,” the old woman said. “Don’t stay up too late.”

She strolled on Prinzregentenstrasse in t

he lukewarm zephyrs of the Föhn, buying a chilled brown bottle of Liebfraumilch, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and a waxed-paper funnel of fragrant yellow freesias that she carefully arranged in a Dresden vase and situated on her white dresser next to the framed photograph of her favorite Alsatian, Muck. She took a glass of wine to the foyer and sat on the herringboned oak as she telephoned Elfi Samthaber and genially chatted about the fall fashions she’d seen in Die Dame, promising to call Elfi again on Saturday. Maybe they’d go to the theater. She ate cheese and crackers and listened to Radio Berlin as she painted on nail polish. She leafed through magazines. She went to her desk and got out a sheet of Wedgwood-blue writing paper with “Angelika Raubal” printed on it in English script in the upper-left corner. She began a friendly letter to Ingrid von Launitz. And she was head-down and writing when she heard the shush of the front door opening, then heard it softly chunk closed. She looked at the Longines clock beside her bed. Half-past eleven. She called, “Maria?”

She heard no answer. She got scared.

Whoever it was seemed to be holding himself motionless, as if he were sensing if others were still up. And then he was walking down the hallway. She stared at her door but heard his shoes stride past it on the runner and go into the office. She heard the give of a drawer as he tugged on it, then the harsh grind and thump as his thigh bumped it shut.

“Uncle?” she called.

Stillness. Was he hesitating? Was he checking himself in the mirror? She was still holding her pen. She let it go. She fastened the free buttons of her dress and groomed a wing of hair from her face. And then she saw the brass door handle gently lower and the tall oak door fall open like a page of an old book.

Hitler was stolidly there, still in his fashionable blue suit, hunched forward a little and frowning, his hands behind his back. He looked like a banker who’d sought a theater exit and found himself onstage. His face was white. His forelock had fallen. He seemed full of sentences and huddled emotions. Embers of their argument still flared in the ash.

She asked, “Aren’t you going to Hamburg?”

“We only got as far as Nürnberg,” he said. “We registered in the Deutscher Hof Hotel, and Schaub took me to the railway station.”