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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PRINZREGENTENPLATZ 16, 1929
In June Hitler attended a meeting in Berlin with Alfred Hugenberg, the Prussian head of the conservative Nationalist Party and the owner of many newspapers and movie theaters as well as Ufa, the major film studio in Germany. With upper-class arrogance Alfred Hugenberg told others that he’d found the fulminating Austrian ill-bred, ill-educated, and fortunate to have gotten as far as he had in politics, and he wrongly thought Hitler could be controlled and his oratory directed to right-wing programs if Hugenberg confidentially offered him financial assistance just as Fritz Thyssen had done.
With such gifts Hitler became a far wealthier man and was far less reluctant to have it publicized. Heinrich Hoffmann shot twenty-two rolls of film as Hitler took the Raubal family and a full statesman’s entourage to the horse races at the Hamburg Derby, on a cruise to the island of Helgoland in the North Sea, and on a visit to a film location in Denmark where it was he who signed autographs, not the stars.
Acquisitions became more frequent: a London trench coat and a Savile Row suit; an erotic painting by Adolf Ziegler, the so-called “master of pubic hair” that Hitler privately titled “Nude in Distress” and a purebred Alsatian pup that Hitler named Muck and boarded at Haus Wachenfeld so Prinz would have company. He also shifted funds intended for the National Socialist headquarters in the Barlow Palace—wasn’t he, after all, the Nazi party? wasn’t the party Hitler?—and urged Professor Paul Ludwig Troost, who’d outfitted ocean liners, to design for his own use weighty mahogany furniture that was constructed at the Vereinigte Werkstätte in München. And then all that was left for Hitler to do was shop for and, in September, purchase a grand luxe, nine-room apartment in Bogenhausen at Prinzregentenplatz 16 just a few blocks east of the Isar River and the Angel of Peace monument and only a little more than a kilometer from the future headquarters in Schwabing.
At dinner in Obersalzberg that night he told Angela he could not afford to pay off the mortgages on Haus Wachenfeld and Prinzre-gentplatz and furnish his niece’s rent as well, so he regretted to announce that if Geli wished to stay in Germany she would have to move in with him. They ought not fear scandal or impropriety, however; Frau Maria Reichert, his landlady on Thierschstrasse, would be joining the household as his Mädche’ für alles and would be sharing quarters there with her old mother, Frau Dachs. And since he would be entertaining a great deal now, he’d also engaged the staff services of Georg and Anni Winter, a husband and wife, as Haushofmeister and Koch.
On November 5th, after her uncle was fully moved in, Emil met Geli’s train from Berchtesgaden, but was so unhappy about his girlfriend sharing a flat with her uncle that he wouldn’t even kiss her. Emil failed to mention her high-fashion Rodier jersey and new tweed skirt, he failed to offer to carry the canaries in their golden cage, and as he drove her from the Hauptbahnhof to Prinzregentenplatz 16, Emil told Geli stories of the wild old days when she was still a child in Austria and timid Adolf would give him twenty marks for any girl Emil found for him.
Geli changed the subject by pointing out that in Bogenhausen she’d be within strolling distance of Henny Hoffmann’s house, that four-star restaurants lined the wide avenue, and that she’d be within the
floodlit glow of the stunning Prinzregenten Theater, which, she told him pedantically, specialized in Wagnerian operas and was modeled on the Wagner festival theater in Bayreuth.
“Big deal,” Emil said. And he parked the car.
The five-story Prinzregentenplatz building was sand-colored granite with white-and-teal-blue trim. Two bays of oriel windows bracketed wide balconies on the second, third, and fourth floors. A gray stone frieze of Wotan was just above the entryway; green and gray tiles lined the outside wall of the formal staircase to the upper floors where the gaslights had just been changed to electric.
Emil rang the door chimes next to two tall oak doors on the second floor and asked, “Are you impressed?”
“The Raubal flat in Wien was a lot like this.”
Emil smiled. “With the rats and cockroaches?”
“Many pets,” Geli said.
And then the Haushofmeister was there, welcoming Fräulein Raubal and his old friend Emil, and inviting them inside. Georg Winter was a fine-boned blond in his late twenties, a former orderly for General Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, who was now a Reichstag deputy for the NSDAP. Winter was an officious, ironic, often wryly amused party member wearing a starched white shirt, a headwaiter’s black suit and bow tie, and a red-and-black swastika pin. Quietly taking Geli’s overcoat and the canaries in their cage, Winter went away, with Emil behind him, and she was left staring at the herringboned oak flooring in the foyer and hallways and the freshly painted white wainscotting on the walls.
Taking off a full, white apron, Anni Winter swatted flour dust from the front of a short black dress as she walked to Geli from a far-off room that must have been the kitchen. She curtsied to Hitler’s niece but introduced herself familiarly as Anni, and within their first few minutes together she let Geli know that she’d been a lady-in-waiting to Countess Törring and was an internationally famous cook, and that she felt this job was beneath her but for the chance to be so near Herr Hitler. “And how old is the fräulein?” she asked.
“Twenty-one.”
“I have twenty-four years,” Anni Winter said. She seemed to think she’d established the governance of an older sister.
“We ought to get along well then,” Geli said.
Anni just stared. “Those who have not grown up with servants can be annoying to work for. There’s so much they have to be taught.”
“I’m sure you’ll be the most patient of teachers.”
Anni smirked. She showed her a bay parlor of four oriel windows where a tasseled floor lamp was next to a wide round mahogany table on a vine-and-pomegranate William Morris carpet. Six soft-cushioned chairs surrounded the table. Their color, Anni said, was “claret.” She called a grander sitting room “the library,” though there were only nine short shelves of Hitler’s familiar books, including six copies of Mein Kampf, The International Jew by Henry Ford, and the collected Westerns of Karl May. A high-priced portrait of Otto von Bismarck by München’s own Franz von Lenbach had been hung just above the secretary. A Wilton carpet in a tulip-and-lily pattern was on the floor, and two floral sofas were on either side of a soft leather armchair that faced an arched casement door leading to the balcony. The white Bechstein piano she’d seen in the foyer at 41 Thierschstrasse was huddled like Geli’s Aunt Paula against a far wall.
“Some of these things are Frau Reichert’s?” she asked.
Anni Winter frostily said, “My husband and I have not been privy to the details of the arrangement.” And then she added, “Anyway, everywhere in Germany great fortunes have been lost.”
The other four-windowed bay parlor was called “the breakfast room,” though Frau Reichert and her mother often played cards or worked at puzzles there in the afternoon, Anni said, and, “Herr Winter may be found here with the shades drawn if he is suffering from one of his sick headaches.”
“Oh, that malingerer,” Geli said.
“Are you being funny?” Anni asked.
“I was trying to be.”
Anni grimaced a smile. The Prinzregentenstrasse wing held a laundry room, a bathroom as plain as a plumbing shop, and the Reichert/Dachs quarters where the deaf old mother lost track of time. Anni then took her to the quieter Grillparzerstrasse wing and the formal dining room with its gleaming mahogany table and seating for eight on chairs covered with a jay-in-the-garden fabric. In the hallway Geli heard Emil’s hearty laughter in the kitchen, but Anni walked beyond it and a full bathroom of white marble that she said Geli would be sharing with her uncle, and “he insists it stay immaculate.”
