Hitler's Niece

  Schirach escorted her onto the floor, and softly held her waist as he took her right hand. As they waltzed to the song with fifty others, she felt his strength and largeness, the fascinating difference in his torso and footsteps. She felt small and safe, feminine and cared for. She’d missed this. Cologne water was in his jacket and she even found herself liking that. She smiled up at him. “I haven’t waltzed since high school.”

  “Am I too clumsy?” he asked.

  “Not at all. You’re very graceful.”

  “Well, my parents were in the theater.”

  “Mine were in the kitchen.”

  Schirach laughed. “Aren’t you funny!”

  She found herself self-consciously counting steps as Schirach hummed along with the singer. She felt his soft belly forcing their turns. She asked, “Have you seen The Blue Angel?”

  “Twice,” he said. “Wasn’t Marlene Dietrich marvelous?”

  “My favorite was Emil Jannings.”

  “Oh, but his Professor Unrath was so stuffy and middle class and sad. All I could think of him was ‘He is the Germany we are rebelling against.’”

  “At least he was in love. She was so callous and insolent and sadistic.”

  “Well, there are those who find that—”

  “Mesmerizing?” she asked.

  Schirach laughed. “Are we on the subject of your uncle again?”

  She shook her head, then tilted it farther toward his chest as she sang Marlene Dietrich’s famous song, “‘Men cluster to me like moths around a flame. And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame. Falling in love again. Never wanted to. What am I to do? I can’t help it.’”

  And finally the song ended, and the singer was generously applauded, and Geli felt a funneling stare from off the floor, and she knew who it was but failed to turn. She forced him to embarrass himself by walking out to her like a fuming emissary, a lane widening as the many dancers fell back, his shoes as loud as wood in the hush. And then she did turn, and his face was as white as a faint, canceling any hint of his wrath for the sake of all his children there. “We are going now,” Hitler said.

  Schirach was still young enough to be surprised. “My leader,” he implored, “it’s just ten o’clock. I have access to a car. Won’t you let me get her back to your flat in an hour or so?”

  Clenching his jaw, Hitler held the large twenty-two-year-old in his scalding eyes until Schirach’s fortitude, his friendliness, the flush in his feminine cheeks were all gone. “She is with me,” Hitler said, and she followed him as he went to where Rudolf Hess was holding the coats.

  They were driven to Prinzregentenplatz in a silence as great as that of a closed museum, his anger trying to disfigure everything he glared at, he in the front seat, she in the back. She ran up the stairs ahead of him and when she got inside the flat heard Maria Reichert call from her quarters, “Fräulein Raubal?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have four messages for Herr Hitler.”

  Hitler was just then walking inside. He frowned at his niece, then went to Frau Reichert, and Geli hung up her overcoat, got a beer in the kitchen, and went to her room, firmly locking the door. She put Verdi’s Requiem on the gramophone and took her canaries out of their cage, lying flat on the bed as she watched Honzi and Hansi fly wildly from wall to wall and then find the fingers she held out just above her face. She kissed their beaks. She cheeked their feathers. She finished the beer.

  She heard Hitler in his office next door, railing over the telephone at Himmler, then Göring, then Doktor Goebbels. “Won’t any of you ever think for yourselves?” he shouted, and slammed down the receiver just for her. She heard him stewing in the hallway outside her door, and then she heard him in the library at the white Bechstein, childishly pounding out the overture to Wagner’s Rienzi until she finally lifted the needle from “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” in Verdi’s opera Nabucco and there was peace.

  She got into her pink flannel nightgown, glanced down the hallway, and hurried into the bathroom. She urinated, washed her hands, cold-creamed her face, worked up a froth with her toothbrush and her uncle’s Clorodont powder, then opened the mirrored vanity cabinet above the sink and carefully put her things on the second shelf, his on the first. She found an old towel in the straw hamper and polished the chrome faucet and handles, wiped spots of water from the mirror and the porcelain. She stowed the towel away again and flicked the lock on the bathroom door.

  Hitler was there, frail and woeful and still in his tuxedo. “This is not enough,” he said, and fell to his knees. His face flattened against the flannel just below her heart, thudding now like his shoes on the staircase, and he said, “Oh, Geli, this is not enough. This is not enough.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “This!”

  “The way we are?”

  “We aren’t.”

  She felt his petulant breathing like moisture, and she found herself softly petting his chestnut-brown hair, though her palms, she knew, would glisten with oil. “What would be enough, Uncle Alf?”

  Like a little boy begging for a pfennig, he said in a weak, measly way, “Affection.” And he tilted down to forcefully kiss the pink flannel over her pubic bone, his mustache prickling her.

  She felt a thrill flow up her spine, but she held his head and gently lifted it. “We can’t have you kneeling here like this. The ladies.”

  Worriedly, Hitler glanced down the hallway toward the quarters of Maria Reichert and her mother. There was a faint hint of a Christmas concert on Maria’s wireless; otherwise all was dark. Squatting back on his heels, he groomed his forelock, then gripped the doorjamb and Geli’s offered forearm to find his way up to his feet. And then he focused on her and she felt pinioned, his stunning irises as silver as mercury, his face wolfish and stern and full of control. Wordlessly overmastering her. Others in the party talked about his Svengali eyes, and now she knew what they meant. Within a few seconds she felt so enfeebled she feared she’d slide to the floor.

  “We have both been depriving ourselves,” he said. “We haven’t given our love an outlet.”

  Was she in love? She knew she was confused and sad and yearning. Was that love? She wanted to be inward and alone with her emotions for a while, but he took her hand and tightly held it behind his back as he forthrightly walked them to his red-walled room.

  She stood there in the coldness as he shut the door and tore loose his black bow tie. She felt adrift in the geography of dreams, somewhere between fright and fascination, where she seemed to have no volition, where she seemed to watch herself as she watched him.

  He sat in his fire-red wingback chair to take off his shoes and stockings and stocking garters, and he focused on her with great seriousness as he twisted the studs and cuff links from his formal shirt. “Are you just going to stare?” he asked.

  “I have no idea what else to do.”

  “Aren’t you a child of nature?”

  She’d never heard the words “child” and “nature” voiced with such snide criticism. She said, “I don’t know what you have in mind.”

  With flat, tan teeth, he smiled. “Oh yes you do.” He stood and strode to his closet and found a wooden hanger for his tuxedo jacket. Without turning, he said, “Lift off the nightgown, Geli.”

  “Uncle Alf, I’m not sure—”

  In a tolerant, teacherly, quiet way, he told her, “Do as I say.”

  She did. She was in free fall and knew it. She felt hellbent and unruly, as if she were riding a flood that was seeking the sea, the wild tide of it erasing all fences, boundaries, government, calendars, plans, and intentions. She heard a male voice in her head say, Aren’t you the fat cow?, and she flicked off the overhead light so that there was only the yellow glow from the wall sconces. And then she walked naked to the high, wide, feather bed and sat with primly crossed legs on the gold satin quilt.

  “Don’t look,” he said, so she held her stare on the floor as she understood him to be shaking the trousers off his skin
ny legs and folding them onto a hanger. She’d forgotten that he wore long underwear in winter. She stole glimpses of the jiggle of his soft flesh as he shrugged and fought and jumped his way out of the underwear and jammed it into a laundry basket. Eyeing his niece to ensure her shyness, he posed as he did in his Brownshirt photographs, his features ferocious, his fists clenched, his flabby stomach sucked in and his chest inflated, his head haughtily high. And then he said, “Look now.”

  She found his pose ludicrous, but hid it, and she hid, too, the fact that his maleness was so odd and disconcerting, for he had skin so white it seemed powdered, no formation of muscles in his shoulders or arms, the hairless, female breasts of a girl in puberty, and a flaccid, purple, uncircumcized penis that was like a short thumb above a boy’s compact scrotum. She shifted her gaze to Adolf Ziegler’s healthy nude.

  “I have had the benefit of seeing you,” her uncle said. “And now we are on the same footing.”

  She asked in a flat voice, “Are we going to make love?”

  She watched his shadow shift shapes on the floor as he crossed to her. She shivered with cold. She felt the feather bed sag with his weight as he sat just beside her. “Aren’t you the randy harlot,” he said with a smile. “To try to rush me like that.”

  She was exhausted and did not know why. “What then? Shall we kiss?”

  Considering and striking various options, he finally said, “Walk to the closet.”

  She felt his leer like hands as she did.

  “On the floor inside are my jackboots. Put them on.”

  She did.

  “And hanging inside the door is my dog whip.”

  She got it but said, “I find this distinctly odd.”

  “Hush,” he said. “Walk to me now.”

  The jackboots were so loose they fell from her feet as she walked, so she shuffled to within a foot of him and found herself giggling, and then she faced his hot glare and was silent again.

  There was no letup to his glare as it journeyed down to the great curiosities of her breasts. Was he trying to make her feel ugly? Leaning forward, he laid out a gray-coated tongue and licked circles around her right nipple, then took it between his teeth and tugged until it hurt. Seeing her wince, he smiled and said, “Teach me.”

  “Tenderly,” she said.

  “With the whip, I mean. Teach me.”

  She heard the male voice in her head say, Hit him. “Hit you?”

  “Yes!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Hit the side of your boot with the whip.”

  She stropped it.

  “Oh, that’s it. Again.”

  She did.

  His jaws widened like a python’s and he hideously took as much of her full left breast in his mouth as he could, hurtfully sucking and swallowing it until she whacked a jackboot with the whip and said, “No!”

  Withdrawing his mouth from her breast, he smiled. “Aren’t you quick.”

  “I don’t like this game,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not for you, it’s for me.”

  “Don’t you want affection?”

  He smirked. His hand knifed between her thighs and found her vagina. She angrily squeezed her thighs tighter and fought off his hand with her own. Whining, he said, “Won’t you make me obey?”

  She stropped the whip. “Don’t!”

  He fell in a heap and held his head with his hands. “Oh, you’re right! I’m a worm! I’m vermin!” Crouching at her feet, he started to masturbate, his head nodding up and down.

  “I hate this,” she said.

  “Hit me then!”

  “No!” She tried to squirm away from him, but his left hand forcefully held the jackboot at her ankle and she couldn’t free it.

  And then he was flat on his back, staring up at her vulva as he feverishly jerked at himself. “Oh yes, oh yes, that’s it. Closer. Squat close.”

  She yelled at him, “I hate this!”

  And he yelled, “Don’t argue with me! I have the right to you after all these years!” There was an odd change in him that she couldn’t identify; she only knew it was terrifying. She froze and his free hand lifted and fiddled with her labia as he warned, “If you say no one more time…” A finger found its way inside her, and she flinched. “We are lovers,” he said. “And this is how we love.”

  She did as he ordered.

  On the floor of her room the next morning Geli found his cartoon of himself naked and impotent, a long limp wienerwurst hanging low between his legs while a giant question mark and exclamation point seemed to spring from his head. Geli angrily left the cartoon on her desk so Anni Winter would see it as she cleaned.

  She’d hardly slept, so she stayed in her bed, glumly paging through the score of Paul Lincke’s operetta Frau Luna until she heard the hall telephone ring, and then she heard Anni just outside her door, calling, “Fräulein Raubal! It’s your mother!”

  She went into Hitler’s office and held the black receiver in her hands until she was confident she wouldn’t cry. She put it to her ear. “Hello, Mommy.”

  “Did Adolf tell you?” Angela asked.

  She raked hair back from her face. “What?”

  “He’s going to buy me a car! A Wanderer! I just can’t believe it! I’m so happy!”

  She grimly faced his photograph. “Then I’m happy, too,” Geli said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CONFESSIONS, 1931

  She flattered him with imitation: fuming, ranting, weeping, falling to the floor in tantrums, soaring giddily when things went well, sinking into full-day pouts over imagined snubs or neglect. She loathed him. She did not. She feared she was too prudish and timid. She felt sullied and odious. She screamed at waiters in restaurants. She would not pay a shopkeeper without complaining of piracy. She was becoming, she knew, a bitch, and she hated it, hated him saying, “We are so alike,” hated his infatuation, his sticky enthrallment, his cruelty and unnaturalness, his unoriginality in choosing such a vulgar, bland face to offer the world.

  In March, Hitler and Geli attended a Bavarian play by Ludwig Thoma at the Kammerspiele Theater, where he fancied his niece in a cloying way, finding reasons to confer with her, to fondle her, to angle his head childishly into hers, to just watch. Tiring of his scrutiny, she put a finger to her lips to shush him, and he folded his arms and sulked for a while before mooning over Geli again. And then he noticed Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl observing him from a side gallery, and his face took on the slaughter-of-the-innocents look of his publicity photographs.

  Afterward they all dined together at the Schwarzwälder Café, where a continually yapping schnauzer so annoyed Hitler that he walked to the far table and truculently stared until the schnauzer cowered and was silent. And then he returned to the table, demeaned his niece by feeding pinches of cake to her, and flourished in front of Putzi his latest royalty statement from Eher Verlag. Mein Kampf was then nearly six years old and had averaged sales of just six thousand copies per year, but suddenly in 1930 fifty-four thousand books were sold, and with foreign rights, he boasted, he’d soon be a wealthy man.

  “Well, that calls for some glasses of the finest fizz!” Putzi said.

  Instead the führer fell into an hour-long monologue on the next elections in 1932, on the “clownish elements of salon bolshevism” who’d drifted into the party and would have to be weeded out, about his forbearance when being tested by the persistent conflicts between the hooligan SA and Heinrich Himmler’s disciplined and increasingly formidable SS force, organizations faithful to him who were vying to be his favorites. “When a mother has many children, and one of them goes astray,” Hitler told his foreign press secretary, “it is the wise mother who grips the child by the hand and won’t let go.”

  Even then Putzi Hanfstaengl was aware that Geli was that child, for she was plainly bored by Hitler’s monologue and was flagrant in yawning and tinking her forks and yearningly gazing over her fox stole at all the jolly couples around them.

  At closing time
at the Schwarzwälder Café, their still far-from-sleep führer persuaded Herr and Frau Hanfstaengl to join him and his niece in the Prinzregentenplatz flat for cordials. And when there he further persuaded Putzi to favor them with his famous piano playing, for he had the ability to flawlessly perform short pieces in any style or key, and he first entertained them that night by interpreting the trifle “Hänschen Klein” in five different ways, as if it had been scored by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner.

  Wildly applauding and gleeful, Hitler announced, “And now my niece will perform with you,” and she dutifully got up from a floral sofa to join Putzi on the white piano bench.

  “Sweet and short,” she whispered, and Putzi told her to play the left-hand chords of the “Horst Wessel Lied” while he quickened the right-hand notes into a minuet. And then they both turned and bowed.

  Eyes wet with pleasure, Hitler hurried to wake up Frau Reichert before they started another song.

  Geli called, “It’s two in the morning!,” but Hitler ignored her.

  Putzi said, “No one told me you were also a pianist.”

  She smiled. “Who can plumb the depths of my talents?”

  “Do you and the leader often do duets?”

  Geli’s smile faded. She seemed to him to be communicating a secret in her stare. “We try,” she said, “but it’s hard. My uncle only plays the black keys.”

  She was invited to a grand costume ball at the Deutsches Theater, and she prevailed upon Baldur von Schirach, whose office was just above Hitler’s in the Brown House, to wear down the führer until he finally agreed to let Geli go. If Heinrich Hoffmann took her, he said. And if she was home by eleven. And a day later he decided that Max Amann ought to go with them, too.

  The theatrical designer Ingo Schröder costumed Henny as a white-buckskinned Indian princess as featured in the Westerns of Karl May, but four of his designs for Geli were rejected by Hitler for varying reasons, and Schröder would not try others.