Hitler's Niece (14 page)

Wildly thrashing, like a fish in a net, Hitler tore away from her and hiked up his dark trench coat to hide his face. “Don’t look at me like this!” he shouted.

With fright she got up from her knees and faced the window. A female equestrian in fur coat and jodhpurs trotted a gelding through the fields of the Englischer Garten, the horse sinking to its fetlocks in the snow. “Are you all right, Uncle Adolf?”

She heard his shoes find the floor, heard him sigh in a halting way, his face perhaps in his hands. “She was everything to me. And now
you
are. I have such fears—”

“You needn’t—”

The floor shook as he fell to his knees behind her, hugged her thighs, buried his face against her buttocks. “If only I had someone to take care of me!” he wailed, his words like hot, moist handwriting on her skirt.

She felt his hair with a hand. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Will you?”

Clarification seemed necessary. She told him, “You’re my uncle.”

“I have no friends, no family—”

“You have me. You have Angela and Paula.”

She felt him shaking his head. “They don’t love me! I need love!”

“
I
love you.”

She felt him withdraw from her, still on his knees, his hands riding his thighs. And then he stood as an old man does, finding his balance, hurting and huffing, then collecting himself. “I have to find my hat,” he said.

She gave it to him without turning.

“I do hope you’re happy, putting me through all that.”

She turned. His scowl was as red as a scream. “I didn’t—”

“You have made me look ridiculous,” he said.

“I’m confused, Uncle Adolf. I—”

And then he smiled. His hand oh so gently groomed her hair and fondled her cheek and chin. “Aren’t you pretty,” he said, and put on his hat. “I have rules for you, Princess. Each reasonable and generous. One, I still expect your obedience, your loyalty, and your company. Two, I will be in charge of when you go out with Emil and when you do not. Each of you separately must ask my permission. This is what fathers do for their daughters. Three, you shall keep the relationship secret from the public. You shall not be photographed together. You shall not be seen with him at the university or in the cafés. Four, you shall continue your studies until I say otherwise. You may give them up, but not to get married, and if so, you’ll need my permission. And five, you are nineteen years old. You cannot marry for two years. When you’re twenty-one, we’ll see.”

And then he walked out, and she sat on her bed. Weak and exhausted.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

H
ITLER’S
F
RIENDS
, 1928

Of his friends
in the National Socialist hierarchy, she was fondest of Herr Doktor Paul Joseph Goebbels, but only because he seemed fondest of her. They met in March 1928, when the thirty-year-old Goebbels,
Gauleiter
of Berlin and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper
Der Angriff
(The Attack), journeyed to München on party business and later wrote in his diary: “Yesterday I met Hitler, and he immediately invited me to dinner. A lovely lady was there.”

Geli had heard that he was a former floor man on the Cologne stock exchange and a facile writer of fairly high intelligence, at first politically far left of the Nazis but now a frenzied campaigner and zealot for Hitler, who had affectionately said of him, “Our Doktor is all flame.” So she’d fashioned in her mind a man far different from the one she saw at their first meeting in the Osteria Bavaria, for he seemed a scrawny juvenile of thirteen, just over five feet tall, weighing no more than one hundred pounds, his head too big for his body and his brown hair creamed against a skull that was cadaverously there just beneath his face. Limping to their table in his overlarge white trench coat, he tilted steeply to the left due to a childhood illness, osteomyelitis, which had caused his left leg to halt growing and stay four inches shorter than his right. And yet he seemed to think himself handsome and jaunty, and his eyes feasted on Geli with a lickerish stare as her uncle introduced them.

“Aren’t you lovely,” he said.

She said, “Enchanted, Herr Goebbels,” and offered her hand.

“Herr
Doktor
Goebbels,” he corrected, and though he was smiling, she felt rebuked. But he was so amiable otherwise, and his huge and luminous black eyes betrayed such tragedies in his youth, such scorchings to his psyche, such an aching to charm and fascinate that Geli forgave him his haughtiness. And she did find him fascinating, for he was cultured, quick, an intellectual, and funny, if malicious; his voice was a beautiful baritone, as rich and sonorous as a full-throated church organ; his fine hands were faultless, those of a skillful pianist who’d never risked injury in work or game of any sort; and he modestly admitted that his play
The Wanderer
had just a few months earlier been performed at the Wallner Theater in Berlin.

She’d never met a playwright before, and said so, and then she was fearful she’d sounded too impressed and unpoised.

“And he’s a novelist, too,” Hitler said. “Won’t Eher be publishing it this year?”

Doktor Goebbels bowed to him. “With your help.”

“And its title?” Geli asked.

“
Michael: The Fate of a German
. It’s just a little thing in the form of a diary, about a young intellectual eager to grasp life with every fiber of his being. Who finds his calling among workers in the mines.”

“I’m in it,” Hitler said, as if that were only fitting and reasonable.

Doktor Goebbels graciously bowed again. “You are Germany’s fate, its man of destiny. The novel would be hollow without you.”

The fawning continued throughout their three-course meal. She thought her uncle was in one of his fouler moods as he flitted from subject to subject, his insights floating somewhere between the banal and the just plain weird, but Geli saw that Doktor Goebbels hung on his every word, hardly eating, as full of adoration as one of Hitler’s hounds. And when Hitler excused himself to go to the
Herrens
, Doktor Goebbels confided, “When he speaks, it’s so simple, but so profound, so mystical, full of infinite truth. It is almost like hearing the Gospels. Like hearing the final word on whatever topic he’s chosen. I feel shudders of awe.” He smiled. “All night I have been fighting the urge to genuflect to him.”

“Self-control is a good thing,” she said.

Doktor Goebbels lifted a goblet of Chianti and softly gazed just over its rim at Geli in a way he might have thought seductive. “You are a very lucky girl,” he said.

“And why is that?”

“With his elementary strength, you can walk safely in the abyss of life. With him, you have at your side the conquering instrument of fate and deity.”

“Oh; I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“Amusing,” he said, and winced a smile, then swallowed Chianti and resettled the goblet on the table. And then there was silence between them. She watched a red tear of wine ever so gradually trickle down the stem and cross the base of the goblet until it stained the white tablecloth. She found him focused on her face. “Would you like to visit me in Berlin?” he asked.

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

With disdain, he said, “Oh yes, Hitler’s chauffeur.” And then he added, “I say that without disdain, you understand. Emil Maurice is an Old Combatant. He took part in the putsch.”

“We’re in love.”

“And there he is, sitting outside in the car,” he said, and scowled at the shame of it. “Waiting for us to finish. Wondering what that devil Herr Doktor Goebbels is up to.”

“And what
are
you up to?” she asked.

“I invite you in all innocence. With no tricks up my sleeve. An American expression. Won’t you come up with your uncle next weekend? We’ll attend to party business, and then I’ll show you the city. Berlin is magnificent.”

Hitler strode back into the dining room and seated himself.

Geli leaned toward him and lightly touched his jacket sleeve. “Uncle Alf, Herr Doktor Goebbels has invited me to join you in Berlin next weekend. May I please?”

Hitler’s right hand held hers to his forearm as he smiled at his
Gauleiter
and said, “Our Doktor always finds ways to make me happy.”

Although
the party furnished Hitler with a suite on the third floor of the first-class Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, just across from the Reich chancellery, Geli and Angela—whose presence he’d insisted on—were installed in the filthy and fourth-class Gasthof Ascanischer in order to give journalists a fitting example of party frugality. And to further make his niece’s misery complete, Hitler had decided that Julius Schaub rather than Emil Maurice should escort them on their railway journey north.

Seeking to avoid Schaub’s company, mother and daughter took their own cold-weather walking tour of Berlin on Saturday, starting out by mistake on Nollendorfplatz and hurrying past dance halls and underworld bars and a fire-red building called Erotic Circus. Even in the morning there were prostitutes standing together in threes, chattering about their children, and dressed just like housewives on their way to the grocery. Angela said, “I ache so for them. In the misery we’re in, how can they marry?”

“I couldn’t ever do that,” Geli said.

Angela softly patted her wrist, saying, “Oh what a comfort you are to your mother.”

They finally reached the Emperor Wilhelm Memorial Church, then visited, for Geli, the Zoologischer Garten, strolled through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag, and took a taxi to Wittenbergplatz, where Angela’s brother, Alois Jr., had just opened a restaurant.

She hadn’t called ahead to warn him, so he was shocked when he carried forward menus and found her in the vestibule with a niece he’d never seen. Alois was the illegitimate son of Franziska Matzels-berger, Alois Senior’s kitchen maid, whom their father had married just two months before Angela was born. Although he was only one year older than Angela, Alois seemed closer to sixty and, with his walrus mustache, thin, graying hair, and skeptical squint behind rimless glasses, he looked far more like the photographs Geli had seen of her grandfather than he did his half-brother, Adolf. The worrisome qualities that Adolf had somehow made work for him, Alois hadn’t; he seemed merely vulgar, selfish, pompous, and conniving, like a stuffy waiter who steals from the till, or a civil servant who alters the rules for a fee. Sharing fireside coffee and sandwiches with them, he seemed avid for news of Adolf, for he was sure their fortunes were connected and he felt it was his turn, as he said, “at the trough.” “And who knows? We could even become friends, once he gets over the bigamy business and his fears that I’ll damage his good reputation.”

Angela quickly grew tired of Alois and his all-too-obvious disinterest in Paula or the Raubals, and she told him they were going to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Alois allowed them to pay the bill, saying he’d treat them to a fine dinner next time, and they went outside to Wittenbergplatz.

“Well, that’s an obligation fulfilled,” Geli said.

Angela was nearing forty-four and was thirty pounds heavier than the woman in Linz who had given birth to Geli, and so she asked, “Would you mind if I went back to the Gasthof now? I have to get off my feet.”

And when they got to their room, there was a message from Emil Maurice saying, “I really miss you,” and another from Doktor Goebbels saying there was a sudden change of plans, that the führer, whom they’d not yet seen, would be having dinner with Edwin and Helene Bechstein, the film actress Dorothea Wieck, and Herr Reinhold Muchow, Doktor Goebbels’s chief of organization for the Berlin Gau, and Herr Muchow’s wife. Would it be an impertinence to offer himself as their sole company for the night?

Angela thought she’d had about as much fun as she could stand, so she gave Geli permission to go out with him, provided Julius Schaub went along.

“Oh, Mother!”

Angela held up her hand, brooking no further argument. “Adolf wishes it,” she said. “And in Wien once, I was a girl.”

Wearing a double-breasted suit to widen his body, Doktor Goebbels was sitting in the front seat of an unfamiliar car when a characteristically gloomy Julius Schaub honked the horn for Geli in front of the Gasthof Ascanischer. The Doktor, as he called himself, gaily got into the rear with her and stayed allergically far away on the ride to the fashionable Charlottenburg district, filling the time with vanity about his doctorate in Romanticist drama from Heidelberg University, as if she’d arranged the night just to talk about the playwright Wilhelm von Schütz. They headed first to a filled restaurant where the Tyrolean chef, himself a Nazi, insisted they have his Colchester oysters and
Adlon
, a honey-glazed breast of duck. And then the Doktor had Schaub ferry them to a nightclub where they drank the Berlin specialty of
Weisse mit Schuss
, or wheat beer with a shot of raspberry juice, and watched an American
Negerin
sing “Madiana” and “La Petite Tonkinoise” while all but naked.

Doktor Goebbels confessed, “Any female excites me to the marrow. It’s horrible. Like a hungry wolf, I prowl around them in pursuit of satisfaction. I can be at an elegant dinner, completely engaged in conversation, but in my fantasies I find myself assessing the attributes of the female guests or imagining how my host’s wife or daughter would be, nude and in bed.”

“And here I am, wearing you out again.”

He smiled. “At the same time, I am timid, like a child. Afraid of rejection. I do not understand myself.”

“Why don’t you get married?” she asked.

“And become bourgeois? And hang myself within eight days?” Doktor Goebbels waved to a cigarette girl, bought a pack of Aristokrats, lit two in his mouth with the flame of a backhanded match, and attached one of the cigarettes to Geli’s mouth in a vaguely sexual gesture that seemed so glamorous the fine hairs stood up on her forearms.

Inhaling his cigarette deeply, he expelled wisps of smoke as he asked, “Haven’t you found me to be completely amiable and charming, Fräulein Raubal?”

“Were you trying to make a good impression?”

“Certainly. You
are
Hitler’s niece.”

She fetchingly asked, “And what have you been resisting?”

“It’s far too shocking for words.”

On the nightclub stage a female troupe in headdresses and gauze see-through tunics was now performing an Egyptian dance to the music of Erik Satie.

“Would you like to go back to my flat?” he asked, and his tone was so silky and enticing that she flushed with nervousness. “I’ll only fantasize, I promise you.”

“Will Herr Schaub be joining us?” she asked.

“Must he?”

“I feel so sorry for him, just waiting for us in the car.”

Doktor Goebbels sighed.

Julius
Schaub took off his jacket as soon as they got to the flat, and he found a bottle of Schultheiss beer in the icebox as the Doktor popped open Taittinger champagne. Schaub squatted by a high stack of thick RCA Victor records, hunting for “
Yats
,” or jazz, and, finding none, tuned an American Crosley radio to a station that was playing Bix Beiderbecke and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. And then he dourly sat on the floor by the speaker as if he were alone in the world.

Doktor Goebbels was like Hitler in thinking the highest order of entertainment was his talking about himself. And so Geli learned that he was from the Rhineland; that his childhood nickname had been Ulex, short for Ulixes, the shrewd hero of the Trojan wars; that his family was petit bourgeois—his father was a factory accountant—and had fervently hoped he’d become a priest, and that he was estranged from them now because of his hostility to the Catholic Church. Like Hitler and others in the party, he’d volunteered for military service in the Great War, but unlike them he’d been rejected because of his “infirmity” and was so frustrated and ashamed that he’d tried to kill himself with a hunger strike but had been rescued by his mother. And then his dream had become that of being a journalist for the
Berliner Tageblatt
, and he’d sent the editor-in-chief, a Jew, twenty or more articles. And each of them had been rejected. “I’ll have the last laugh, though. I’ll be humiliated no more.” While he had once been a radical socialist, he told her, hearing Hitler talk had forced him to further examine his political thinking, and now the conversion was complete.