“You mean the Soviet star,” Göring said.
“Same thing,” said his wife. And then they would brawl and buckle with Hitler’s men, who were “hoisting their own glorious red banners with the proud swastikas—but without the crooked noses, of course—force meeting force until the Communists fled, leaving behind their injured comrades. Oh, how I look forward to peace!”
“There, there,” her husband said.
“And how I shall hate and resent seeing all those who have snubbed and avoided us in our hard times as they slink forward and assure you that they always believed in you, dear Hermann, and why didn’t you let them know you were having difficulties?”
“Well, that’s changed now, hasn’t it?” Göring said. “We’ll have our sweet and lasting revenge.”
Carin tilted forward. “Young lady? I didn’t hear your name.”
“Geli.”
“A pretty name,” she said, as though it wasn’t. Carin sat back. “We’ve found a fantastic villa in the Schöneberg district that we can afford now. I have a white harmonium and other fine furniture that we hocked, and I have already put in an order to have it returned. Another woman can appreciate what that means.”
“More housework?”
Emil shot her a look.
Carin turned to her husband. “Who is she, Hermann?”
“Hitler’s niece.”
“Ah,” she said, and held her tongue until they got to the grand ballroom of the Hotel Kaiserhof.
Doktor Goebbels held aloft a glass of champagne as soon as he saw them walk in. “And here’s to Deputy Göring and his five hundred marks per month, free railway tickets, and immunity before the law!”
“Only the beginning!” Göring hollered back, and he grinned as though they were good friends.
A hundred far more solemn party members were there in their finest clothes, the majority of the wives glumly sitting against the wall as a string quartet played all too plaintively at the far end of the ballroom and their husbands conferred in funereal tones about a party that, even with a late infusion of money from northern industrialists, had lost one hundred thousand votes since the last election.
“Looks like fun,” Geli said.
Emil just surveyed the room, hunting for Hitler.
Wishing she were back in the car kissing Emil, she hopefully asked, “Are you bored yet?”
“We’ll get away soon,” Emil promised.
The Hohenzollern Princes August-Wilhelm and Prince Eitel-Friedrich were announced at the grand ballroom’s entrance and waved to the partygoers, then gave way to their host. Wearing a white tie and tails and a peculiarly buoyant expression, Hitler strode in behind them and soaked up the roars and applause from all sides before falling into his habit of torrential talk. The partygoers circled around him. Congratulating the newly elected deputies, Hitler predicted that journalists would call them the Reichstag’s twelve black sheep, but in fact they would be wolves, continually hunting for and sorting out Germany’s enemies. Without a financial or political crisis in the country, the party would not find more adherents, he admitted, but in the Weimar Republic such crises were inevitable. They would just need to have patience. And though he felt the gloom they had felt when he’d first heard how the voting had gone, he’d noticed that their losses were not to the centrist parties but were to those on the far left and right. So the people were welcoming extreme solutions. The party would simply have to concentrate on teaching the public that National Socialism was the only extreme that would not ultimately fail, and would persevere and finally triumph over all opposition. And then, with his voice hinting at the strain of overuse, Hitler ceased talking, and to shouts of joy and thunderous applause he waded into the crush of party members to shake hands and hear their praises.
Emil escorted Geli toward a flourishing bar at the far end of the ballroom, but he was called by a joyless, healthless, chinless man in his late twenties who was wearing pince-nez and sitting with his older fiancée at a big round table, and Emil, for some ungodly reason, felt obliged to go to them.
And that was how Geli met Heinrich Himmler. She would later learn from Göring that Himmler had been born to a Catholic family in Landshut, near München, in 1900, the son of a much-esteemed teacher in a Gymnasium that served high society and the Bavarian royal court. An orderly-room clerk and officer cadet in the final year of the war, Himmler had never found his way to the front and would often say he regretted that, though Emil thought it likely he was just trying to fit in with the other former soldiers around him, for he fainted at the sight of blood. In 1922 he had graduated from the Technische Universität in München with a bachelor of science degree in agriculture, and with a prized dueling scar on his cheek. A job selling fertilizer for a firm in Schleissheim had enabled him to buy his own chicken farm and join a Blood and Soil group called the Artamanen, farming men. And that in turn had led him to join the occult society that was called the Thule Gesellschaft, and through it become friends with Dietrich Eckart and Captain Ernst Röhm, whose adjutant he had been in the putsch.
Emil had first met Himmler in 1925 when he’d been named the party’s deputy Gauleiter and Obmann, or propaganda director, for Upper Bavaria and Swabia. Quietly hardworking and shrewd, highly organized and suspicious, Himmler had found Hitler’s favor over other party officials through his loyalty, his freedom from scandal, and his methodical accumulation of facts about the friends and enemies of the führer. In 1927 Himmler had become deputy Reichsführer of the few hundred men in the Schutzstaffeln, the SS, which functioned as the party police; and now he’d invited Emil Maurice to his table in order to recruit him as an officer, and Geli was of no interest to him.
His glazed hazel eyes were vacant, his handshake moist, his face as bland as a thumb as he officiously introduced himself as Deputy Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. His dark brown hair was all but shaved from the sides of his head, but was scruffed on top, like a squirrel’s tail. Geli was a few inches shorter than he but her shoulders were wider; he seemed without muscle, as soft as eiderdown, ineffectual and passive, but beneath the coldness and dullness of his face she felt she detected a fearsome seething and contempt that he was holding under fierce control. “You are from Wien, Fräulein Raubal,” he said.
“I am.”
“Have you visited the Treasury?”
“With my uncle, yes.”
“And how did you feel about the Holy Lance?”
She shrugged. “It was nice. I was just eleven then.”
His face twitched and he turned from her to Emil. She felt she’d flunked his test. “Shall we sit?” he said, and they did. And then he told Emil about the Aryan criteria he was establishing for those who wanted to join the Schutzstaffeln, strictly judging each applicant on the basis of his family origins—including proof of Aryan forebears for a minimum of three generations—and hereditary biology, health, physique, and physiognomy. The deputy Reichsführer himself would subject each applicant’s photograph to his famous magnifying glass to ensure conformity to his rigid standards. The SS insignia would be a skull and bones, signifying its sworn loyalty and obedience to the führer, even if that meant death. “We’ll be an elite,” Heinrich Himmler said. “We’ll be like Jesuits without Jesus.”
“Aren’t you flattered, Emil!” Geli falsely gushed. “The high honor of even being considered!”
“Are you being humorous?” Himmler asked.
“Apparently not.” She leaned forward to find Emil’s eyes. “What day did we get here?”
Emil smiled. “Soon.”
Geli turned to Himmler’s fiancée. She was Margarete Boden, a shy, desultory, prematurely gray woman seven years older than he was. She talked dully for a while about her faith in herbalism and homeopathy, but then fascinated Geli by saying that her fiancé had foresworn any physical contact with her until their marriage. “Oh, but it’s so hard on him. ‘Don’t you know how I long to hold you and kiss your feet?’ Heinrich says. But he also says that a wife’s perpetual in
nocence and purity give a real man the strength never to falter in even the worst strife he encounters.”
“And have you been engaged for a long time?”
“Six months now.”
“Whose idea was the marriage?” Geli asked.
“Herr Hitler’s. He insisted.”
Rudolf and Ilse Hess strolled over and joined them. Ilse asked Geli, “Are you aware that you and your uncle have the same tarot archetype?”
“Which is?”
“The hierophant.”
“Really!” Himmler said.
“Oh, now you’re impressed.” She looked to Ilse. “I have no idea what that means.”
Doktor Goebbels ambled over to the table and told Heinrich Himmler, “We have further good news. Prince Viktor and Princess Marie-Elisabeth zu Wied have made inquiries about ‘the Hitler movement.’”
Ilse told Geli, “The hierophant was an official interpreter of rites of worship and sacrifice in ancient Greece, and in the tarot represents the principles of learning and teaching. You’re influenced by Isis, the goddess of intuition. You walk the mystical path with practical feet. I haven’t finished your birth chart yet.”
“And mine?” Doktor Goebbels asked as he settled next to Geli.
“I have only Herr Hitler’s,” she said.
Effervescent with victory, Hermann and Carin Göring found their table, but frowned at its barrenness. “We need champagne here,” Captain Göring said, and he shouted to a faraway man with a tray, “Waiter! Three bottles of Mumm’s! And nine glasses!” He held out a chair for his wife, then reversed another and straddled it, hunkering forward with his fleshy, pink cheeks in his palms as he watched Ilse unfold a page of handwritten notes.
She said, “The leader was born on the cusp between Aries and Taurus, just like Mussolini and Stalin, and has his sun in Taurus and Libra, so there’s a fondness for the arts combined with infinite ambition. Which is why he can be tyrannical at times.”
“Oh, what a child I become in his presence!” Captain Göring exclaimed. “I can’t explain it. I’ll be full of certainty and valor, but he’ll turn on me and I wither.”
“It’s his eyes,” Doktor Goebbels said. “They’ll scar you for life.”
Captain Göring hurriedly added, “I meant it only in a positive way, Doktor Goebbels.”
“Me too,” said Doktor Goebbels.
“Continue please, Ilse,” said Rudolf Hess. “We’re very interested.”
“Quite willing to sacrifice his own happiness to a higher ideal,” she said, “he is apt to put off his own matrimonial bliss for the good of Germany. And yet this may cause him fits of jealousy and self-recrimination.”
Heinrich Himmler objected, “I haven’t seen that.”
“She used the word ‘may,’” said Rudolf Hess. “A conditional tense. Merely a possibility.”
“Careful, Frau Hess,” Doktor Goebbels said. “There’s plenty of room for you in Himmler’s filing cabinets.”
“I have no importance,” she said, and went on, “Herr Hitler has Pluto in his eighth house, which is what accounts for his stamina and tenaciousness, as well as his wonderful influence over people. And the moon in his third house gives him marvelous powers of verbal expression.”
“We found that particularly interesting,” said Rudolf Hess.
“Also, ‘sun trine Jupiter,’” his wife read.
“Oh good,” said Himmler’s fiancée.
“Sun trine Jupiter?” Geli asked.
Himmler’s fiancée said, “Wealth and success.”
Carin Göring said, “I’d heard that meant religiosity.”
“All those things, as well as a high level of intelligence,” said Himmler. “And Mars?”
“Mars square Saturn,” said Ilse Hess.
“Cruelty. Egotism,” said Carin Göring. She elbowed her husband. Who shrugged.
“Also, Mars trine Jupiter,” said Ilse Hess. “Rudi, how would you put it?”
“We have found such a combination in preachers whose joy it is to offer freedom and truth to those who will hear them.”
“Earlier I so wanted you to do my chart, Ilse,” Carin Göring said. “But how can I bear it now? I’ll be so banal.”
With a sidelong glance, her husband said, “Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?”
“We all suffer in comparison with the leader,” Doktor Goebbels said.
“And here he is,” Emil said.
Like schoolboys the men hurtled up from their chairs as their master walked over, his forelock fallen, his white tie cocked. Ilse Hess surreptitiously folded up her notes. Widening his arms and smiling, Hitler said, “What a joy for your leader to find all his friends sharing the same table! Would you do me the honor of having you as my guests in the dining room?”
And as they collected their things and Emil took her hand and they all strolled across the grand ballroom, Geli looked at Rudolf and Ilse Hess, Doktor Joseph Goebbels, Hermann and Carin Göring, and Heinrich Himmler and his fiancée, and she thought that if she was in fact one of them, Hitler’s friends, she would be mortified.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PICNIC, 1928
She quit medical studies after her first year at the Ludwig-Maximilian Universität. She’d earned fairly good grades in English and fairly poor grades in the sciences, and after her hectic, high-living nights she too often found herself bored and cold and overtired in the heatless lecture halls and ludicrously ill-equipped labs, while being forced to continually report how she was doing academically to a scoffing, proprietary uncle who hated academics. And so she told him on her twentieth birthday, in June, that she would like to try other things in the fall.
They were in the foyer of the Osteria Bavaria, and his face became as somber as her chemistry professor’s. “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he faintly bowed to the owner, who was frantically helping four waiters set up Hitler’s table on the patio.
“I think it is, Uncle Alf.”
With a forced smile of affection he said, “Women ought to be mothers. That is their talent.” And then he stalked ahead of her to his luncheon table.
She felt annoyed enough then to change her mind, but she was fearful of his scolding. She instead told him as she sat next to him, “I haven’t given up on the idea of medicine. This may be temporary.”
“We’ll hope for the best,” he said. His hand fleetingly touched her knee as he unfolded a napkin in his lap, and he immediately rose and jarred his chair farther away. “My apologies,” he told her.
“Accepted.”
And then Max Amann, Alfred Rosenberg, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Rudolf Hess joined them. Each handed Geli a birthday card containing fifty reichsmarks, as if they’d voted on an affordable sum, and then Hitler gave her a flat package in white butcher paper that he’d watercolored and addressed to “My Darling Angelika.” In a silver photography frame inside were four Heinrich Hoffmann snapshots of her uncle in 1926 as he practiced using his hands histrionically in accordance with the instructions of a famous clairvoyant named Erik Jan Hanussen.
“Are you pleased?” Hitler seriously asked.
She was at a loss for words.
And then the five men all fell into laughter and the owner of the Osteria Bavaria walked forward with Hitler’s real birthday gift of a fancy golden birdcage and two bright yellow St. Andreasburg canaries. With joy her uncle told her, “I have decided. You’ll be taking singing lessons.”
She was delighted. She recalled the finch’s proper name from zoology class: Serinus canaria. She stuck a finger inside the cage and the canaries shied from it. “With such good teachers, Uncle Alf!”
“Why not? And then in the fall perhaps with Herr Adolf Vogl, a friend in the party.”
“Another Adolf?” she asked.
“There’s only one, really,” he said. “And now are you pleased?”
She teased, “Will I still get to keep the photographs?”
“Naturally.”
She kis
sed his cheek and said, “I love you, Uncle Alf.”
He flinched at hearing the word “love” and his hooded stare fled to four parts of the room.
“We all love him,” said Rudolf Hess.
Hunting for some distraction, Hitler took the knife from beside his plate and polished it with his napkin. “And after you finish your final exams tomorrow—”
“With flying colors,” said Alfred Rosenberg.
“—you should hurry and get your things together. We’re going to Obersalzberg.”
Heinrich Hoffmann’s wife had died in the European influenza epidemic of 1928, and he was so worried about his fifteen-year-old daughter being alone and available to boys while high school was out that Hitler graciously invited Henny to stay with Geli in Haus Wachenfeld that summer.
They’d both later remember that July and August as their most glorious time in Obersalzberg. The nights were cool, the fields were green, the skies were azure blue, and the air was filled with the scent of pine and snow and wildflowers. Geli and Henny would finish their housecleaning chores by noon and have the afternoons to stroll through Berchtesgaden with chocolate ice cream in waffle cones, hike up past the treeline on Kehlstein Mountain in their hobnailed boots and feed chunks of snow to Prinz, furiously race at filling in the Sunday crossword puzzles after the Raubals came back from Mass, find hilarity in reading Karl May’s Westerns aloud on the terrace with false male voices, lie flat on the floor of the Winter Garden, their chins on their fists, tuning in a faint London signal on the radio to listen hard and seriously to American music: “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Thou Swell,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” “You Took Advantage of Me.”
Angela shifted her things to Geli’s room so the friends could share Angela’s full-sized bed on the first floor and watch the canaries fly around the room, and chatter and fret and giggle until one or two in the morning. With childish excitement, Henny once told the plot of a chilling film Geli had missed, a film in which a fiendish scientist took control of a prostitute and inseminated her with sperm he’d extracted from a just-hanged criminal. She became pregnant, and the girl who was born grew up to be a sleepwalking temptress named Alraune who ruined all the foolish men who fell in love with her. “You were supposed to fear Alraune,” Henny said. “But it was surprising: I found myself wanting to be like her.”