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“Herr Schaub’s idea of good communication is to stare at feet other than his own.”
Henny and her father laughed so loudly that others at the party quizzically turned. “Aren’t you delightful,” he said. “We must get to know each other.” With that he got another glass of champagne for himself and guided Geli into his library as Henny tagged along behind them. And then he did all the talking, first showing Geli his book of photos, A Year of Revolution in Bavaria, then the King Gustav of Sweden gold medal he’d won at the Malmö exhibit, the Great Silver Medal of Bulgaria, and other awards he’d been given for progress in the art of photography. While doing so he told her that his father had been court photographer to King Ludwig III, and so he’d naturally fallen into the job and become a war photographer on the western front. Afterward, with the troubles in the Weimar Republic, he’d sold his photography studio for what he’d thought was a fantastic price, “but the nation’s purchasing power so declined that when the first half of the debt was paid, all I could buy with it was a reflex camera. And by the time I got the second half, it was not sufficient for even six eggs.” Two friends and he had formed a company to make a silent film comedy about a hairdresser whose homemade potion put great manes on bald heads until the hairdresser’s assistant—unfortunately played by no Charlie Chaplin—caused much to go awry. “Germany did not find it funny.” While living a hand-to-mouth existence, he had joined the Nazi Party, with membership card number 427, and soon thereafter was sent a telegram from an American agency offering one hundred dollars for a photo of Adolf Hitler, a fortune then. And he’d found out that there were hundreds of others seeking photos of the famous man, of which there were none at the time.
Henny was slumped on a sofa, her forearms folded, her shoeless feet up on a coffee table. Wearily, she said, “To make a long story short—”
Hoffmann sighed. “Children have no patience. In hasty conclusion, I obtained the leader’s trust and got a photograph of Adolf Hitler on my big thirteen-by-eighteen Nettel camera. And would you believe I sold the negative internationally for twenty thousand dollars?”
“You can buy all the eggs you want now,” Geli said, and the girl on the sofa giggled.
“And that is why I am celebrating your uncle’s birthday. I owe all I have to him. Everything. I have been his only photographer since 1923. All others who try have their plates smashed by the SA. And it is my monopoly—to say nothing of Herr Hitler’s kindness—that has furnished my family with this house, our servants, my Daimler and Opel, my Berlin pied-à-terre at the Kaiserhof Hotel.”
Emil stood in the doorway of the library and said, “He’s here.”
Henny shot up and scurried out with her father. Emil waited for Geli to join him. All the partygoers were happily crushed around the grand entrance hall and cheering as Hitler trudged up the stairway, rings of tiredness under his eyes, in a formal black tailcoat, starched shirt, bow tie, and patent leather shoes.
Emil pointed out to Geli a glowing film actress from Berlin who was flaunting her body in the sheerest of gowns. Willingly a gift. “We’ve put together a surprise for him,” Emil whispered.
When Hitler entered the hall, the partygoers wildly yelled, “Happy birthday,” and he smiled, oh so briefly showing his square brown teeth, but then the film actress rushed forward and kissed him full on the mouth as people hooted and whistled and called out jokes. Hitler only stiffened at the laughter and frightened the actress with his glare, and when she shyly retreated from him, his face was white with rage. A cold stillness fell over the house as he sternly evaluated his well-wishers, then turned around and stormed out.
Without him, the party ended.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HAUS WACHENFELD, 1927
Adolf Hitler first became acquainted with the Obersalzberg region of Germany when he vacationed at the Pension Moritz in August 1922, registering as Herr Wolf. Doktor Sigmund Freud and the Austrian playwright Doktor Arthur Schnitzler were also staying there, but he knew them to be Jews and failed to introduce himself. Even in summer the Alpine air was as pure as fresh snow and he would pace the balcony late at night inhaling it until his chest ached. Salt that was mined in nearby Berchtesgaden was generally thought to be so health-giving that he gave himself long, hot footbaths in it just before bed at night and again in the morning when he hungrily scanned the papers for news of himself. Hiking up the northern slope of the Hoher Goll for a solitary noon picnic, he could see green farmlands and white stone villages far below, the sandstone tints of Salzburg twenty kilometers to the north, the jagged slate-gray peaks of the massive Untersberg and Watzmann mountains, the Wittelsbach palace where Crown Prince Rupprecht lived in Berchtesgaden, and, farther west and south, the azure waters of the great Königssee.
The village of Obersalzberg held a post office and fire department, horse stables, a ski lift, a Dresden pensioners’ club, a naval officers’ club, the Seitz Children’s Sanatorium, six inns, twenty private homes, and eleven luxurious villas, including two owned by Hitler’s wealthy patrons, Edwin and Helene Bechstein. Often dining with them when they were skiing in the winter or hiking in the summer, he talked about renting a home for himself there, and it was they who had found him the so-called Kampfhäusl, a one-room plank-sided cabin where he’d finished the first volume of Mein Kampf after his release from Landsberg fortress in 1924. The Bechsteins had recommended Sonnen-Köpfl to him when they’d heard that Frau Maria Cornelius was willing to sell, but Hitler hated sunshine on his face and the villa had been built to invite it. And they themselves were not yet willing to part with Weissenlehen, their home just across the road.
At last Hitler heard that Margarethe Wachenfeld-Winter, the industrialist’s widow, would be renting out Haus Wachenfeld for one hundred reichsmarks a month. High up Kelstein Mountain, at an elevation of nine hundred meters, the chalet had been built in 1916 and had three upstairs bedrooms, one upstairs bathroom, a dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and sunroom on the first floor, and travel poster panoramas from every window. It was only a four-minute hike through woods to the Hotel zum Türken, so friends and aides in the party could stay there, and only a few minutes farther along the winding road that fronted the house was the Gasthaus Steiner, where they served Wiener schnitzel and Hungarian goulash just the way he liked them. Although Frau Winter would not sell it to him until 1931, Hitler fully intended to own the chalet from the instant he first saw it. Within hours of signing the lease, Hitler was moving in.
Doktor Karl Lüger, the former mayor of Wien and the publisher of Das Deut
sche Volksblatt—a prewar newspaper that fascinated Hitler with its erotic pictures and tales of the international Jewish conspiracy—had lived all his life in a household run by his two older sisters, and Hitler sought to imitate Lüger’s sham of respectability by having Angela and Geli handle the chores of Haus Wachenfeld for him. Offering his half-sister full-time pay for far less work, and in a fashionable Alpine resort, Hitler also offered to furnish the funds for Leo to finish his studies at the Universität von Wien, and to rent a flat for his niece in München, less than two hundred kilometers to the north, so she could enroll in the university there.
Angela agreed to the offers and arrived in Obersalzberg in March 1927. Geli arrived in June, after her nineteenth birthday, and after she’d completed her gymnasium studies and received her Abitur.
Angela rushed out to greet her when Julius Schaub drove Geli up from the Salzburg railway station. They hugged and linked arms to walk the grounds, and Geli fell in love with Haus Wachenfeld, just as her uncle had. The first-floor exterior was white stucco, with red-shuttered windows. A balcony railed with white flower boxes was on all four sides of the chalet’s wood-sided second floor, and heavy stones and lath had been laid on the wide, overhanging roof to hold fast the wooden shingles in high winds. East of the chalet there was a fenced-in vegetable garden that tilted on the hill just above the road of crushed pebbles that gave access to the underground garage. West of the chalet was a wide, slate terrace with striped canvas lawn chairs; to the north was another terrace with white-enameled café tables and chairs and with a huge red-and-black Nazi banner hanging from a mast. Clouds would often float like a soft mist while they sat there, but on that first day the weather was so fine that Geli could squint her eyes from the sun and just make out the tall white Cross on the highest peak of the faraway Untersberg.
Angela walked her daughter through Haus Wachenfeld’s interior, showing her the front porch enclosed in tall, uncurtained windows to form a sunroom that was called the Winter Garden and was furnished with a heating stove, a gramophone, a grandfather clock, green ferns, succulents, palms, a crooked and hang-necked rubber tree, and soft, floral-patterned armchairs facing a round oak table. A fine hemp rug of geometric design was on the floor. All were gifts from Helene Bechstein.
The dining room was wainscotted in oak and fussily decorated with green-leafed drapes, four watercolor cityscapes by Hitler, hanging plates of ornate design, old-fashioned and rustic chairs, and pillowed corner benches that formed half the seating for a square oak dining table with inlaid green marble. And there was more to dislike everywhere else. Slurring the window panoramas were the dimity curtains of the peasantry; a fake cactus and a far too literal painting of a huge-buttocked female nude were in Hitler’s upstairs room; on a kitchen wall where a crucifix usually was in Bavaria there was a tin tray with a picture on it of three jolly fat men hoisting steins of foaming beer; in the bathroom was a lantern that when lit depicted a little boy urinating; and here and there about the house were hand-stitched pillows, dish towels, and doilies, all with swastikas or the initials “A.H.” or fancily embroidered expressions of undying loyalty. “Aren’t they ugly,” Geli said.
Angela looked below to the terrace in a precautionary way and found Hitler strolling head down with his Alsatian, Prinz, and Julius Schaub, Hitler holding a dog whip of hippopotamus hide behind his back as he talked and talked. “Ugly as sin,” she told Geli. “Adolf knows they’re not beautiful things, but they’re gifts from party members, so he finds it hard to let go of them, out of loyalty.” She sighed as she went back downstairs. “Our father was the same,” she said. “He shoots for love, but the arrow falls, and he only hits sentimentality.”
Geli was given the chores of a handmaid. Each morning she got up with her mother at eight and helped Angela in the kitchen with vanilla pancakes, plum cakes with cinnamon, or Austrian puff pastries. She let Prinz out of her uncle’s room and watched him sniff and sign the forest trees as she walked to the Hotel zum Türken to buy newspapers from Austria and Germany. She got the mail from the post office box on the walk back and put what she’d collected on a red-painted chair just outside Hitler’s door. On Sundays and holy days of obligation, she and Angela would join other workers for a ride down to Berchtesgaden and the ten a.m. Mass at the twelfth-century Stiftskirche, or Abbey Church, next to the Wittelsbach castle. On weekdays she and Angela would simply wait for Adolf to wake up. Around eleven Geli would generally see his forearm and hand as he got the mail and papers from the red chair, and then she would go make a fresh pot of coffee, peel and section an orange, and carry his breakfast to him on a fine silver coffee service that had been a gift from Princess Cantacuzène. When she got up to his room, Hitler would have shaved with two blades, patted his face with a liniment of aloe, and fully dressed in lederhosen, a white shirt and tie, knee-high stockings, and hiking boots, though if company were expected he generally wore his black dress shoes and a light gray woolen suit. She’d watch as he soaked his hair with Dr. Dralle’s Birkenwasser, then tilted forward and combed his wet, dark hair flat to his forehead, fastidiously parted it, stood upright, and jerked his head so that his forelock fell to the left. Only then would he acknowledge her, often kissing her hand and saying how pretty she looked, at other times sulking as if she’d offended him, once shrieking in terrifying wrath because he’d found a spiderweb wobbling frailly inside the upper sash of his window.
Rudolf Hess was now Hitler’s private secretary and was paid three hundred reichsmarks per month. Each day Hess would stroll up from the Pension Moritz at noon, find Hitler’s reading glasses, fondly steam them with his breath, dry them with his handkerchief, then solemnly and patiently stand beside his leader on the terrace, saying not a word until Hitler had finished perusing the newspapers. Geli would carry out a tray of Apfelstrudel and apple peel tea, then the men would talk politics and economics while Geli folded her uncle’s pajamas, tightened the blankets on his bed, collected laundry, vacuumed the floor, and wiped the furniture with linseed oil, or the window glass, mirrors, and bathroom fixtures with watered ammonia.
After that she was free for the afternoon. While listening to operas on the gramophone, she sang with the sopranos and sewed her own clothing or filled in crossword puzzles or read the continuations of serialized romances in five or six magazines. Often there were picnics with sandwiches, fruit, and mineral water; or a frowning Schaub would be forced to take her down to the Königsee for a cold swim; or she’d walk in the shade with her uncle and Prinz, and Hitler would show her how he’d used fried chicken gizzards to teach the Wolfshund to climb a ladder, walk on a railing, jump over a two-meter fence, heel, sit, roll over, crawl, beg with praying paws, and play dead. Each afternoon he strolled with Prinz to the same corner of his lot, picked up the same stick, and threw it in the same direction until the Alsatian had fetched it six times and they could head back to the house.
Evening chores began at eight as she and Angela cooked a late dinner. She set the dining room table with Rosenthal porcelain and Irish linen napkins, then put wildflowers in a Steuben vase that had been a gift from Frau von Seidlitz. She and Angela ate in the kitchen when guests were there, with him when the three were alone. With dinner they’d have a Liebfraumilch or a Moselblüm-chen wine, or, if they were dining on Zungenwurst, a strong Salvator beer. When they’d tidied the kitchen, they would loll in the Winter Garden with coffee and dessert and quietly listen to Wagner, or to Hitler’s flood of opinions on Charlemagne, the childishness of Mozart, the physics of flight, Karl May’s Westerns, future pharmaceuticals, horses—which he hated, and never rode—lipstick, which he insisted was made from wax and sewage, why red cabbage was far superior to green, why champagne caused headaches, why the children of geniuses have far less talent, of his plan to fully employ Germany in the construction of a network of Autobahnen, of his hopes of having a factory produce for ordinary people an inexpensive automobile that he would call the Volkswagen.
But Hitler generally avoided harangues about Jews and political strife when he was at Haus Wachenfeld, and only once that first summer was he visited by a party official other than Rudolf Hess. That official was Franz Xaver Schwarz, a former accountant in the finance section of the München city hall who had lost his job after the putsch and was now party treasurer. Clenched in his hands was a valise that stayed with Hitler when Schwarz went away that evening. Geli presumed it held the money that financed Hitler’s lazy life of interrupted unemployment.
Schwarz was in his fifties and far older than other Nazis she’d met, a graying, dour man with a high forehead, owlish black glasses, and a little gray mustache. Like Hess, he was wholly and wistfully subordinate to Hitler; like Prinz, he willingly subjected himself to Hitler’s gallery show for Geli, in his head multiplying two five-digit numbers, adding the populations of Germany, Austria, and England, and subtracting from them Belgium and France. Hess dutifully checked the sums on paper, found them correct, and Hitler slapped his thighs with joy, saying Schwarz was just what the party needed, the sheer intellect of an adding machine and the spirit of a Knicker, or skinflint.
Schwarz flushed at the scorn behind the praise and sought to change the subject by asking, “Are you going to join the party, Fräulein Raubal?”
