Read Hitler's Niece for Free Online

for rolls because their only bread was the wretched stuff made of potato peelings and sawdust.
    And so the choreography of family allowed his niece to be alone with Hitler in the parlor, watching silently and starstruck as he sat forward in her father’s old chair and held a Dresden teacup and saucer rather daintily in his hands, letting the tea become lukewarm and then cold as he talked and talked about the endless war of attrition that Germany would have won were it not for the pacifists and slackers and traitors who had signed the armistice.
    She imagined this was how it was to have a father or a husband. To be affectionate, first of all, to tell him how gallant he looked, to offer him spice cakes or strudel, to loll in a heated parlor, to hear his voice and be the still pond on which he skimmed his opinions. She tried to seem poised. She found herself adjusting her stockings and her skirt, but he failed to notice. She otherwise kept her ankles crossed and her hands folded and her head tilted in fascination. When she lost track of what he was saying, she’d gently smile and Uncle Adolf would be encouraged to go on with his monologue.
    Often in Belgium, he told her, they were forced to hide from heavy artillery fire for days on end. In cold trenches of crumbling mud. With water up to their knees. And so it was a relief to charge forward, hearing the first shrapnel hissing overhead. Watching it explode at the edge of the forest, splintering trees as if they were straws.
    “We observe it all with curiosity,” he said. “We have no idea yet of danger. We crawl forward on our stomachs while above us are only howls and hisses. Shattered trees surround us. Shells explode and hurl clouds of stone, earth, and sand into the air. Even the heaviest trees are torn out by their roots. We get to water, a stream, and though it offers some protection, we find it choked in the yellow-green stink of poisons. We cannot lie there forever, and if we have to fall in battle, we choose to be killed as heroes. We attack and retreat four times. And do you know, Geli, from my whole company only one other soldier remains, and finally he also falls? And so I am alone. A shot tears off my right coat sleeve, but I remain safe and unscathed. Quickly I find a hiding place. At two o’clock in the afternoon others join me and we go forward for the fifth time, and finally we occupy the forest and the farms. We slaughter all the animals, until the fields flow red with blood. Within a few days, we withdraw.”
    Seeming exhausted, Hitler slumped back into her father’s chair and sipped his heavily sugared tea, waiting for his niece to respond, but she didn’t know what to say. She thought she’d failed to understand him, for his story seemed full of awfulness softly rendered, but his face was pink with vibrancy and his freakishly pale eyes were finely tuned on hers.
    “We used to read about the battles in school,” she said. “It was horrible. The girls used to cry.”
    Hitler held his stare for an uncomfortable minute more. She worried that he was trying to read her mind. And then slowly, like a man just getting used to his body, he curled to his left to gently put his Dresden teacup and saucer down on a shined side table, the clack as faint as when good teeth meet.
    “Another time I was eating my dinner in a trench with several comrades,” he said. “Suddenly I seemed to hear a voice saying to me, ‘Get up and go over there.’ It was so clear and so insistent that I obeyed mechanically, as if it were just another military order. At once I got to my feet and walked twenty yards along the trench, carrying with me my fork and my dinner in its tin can. I found a shell box and sat down on it to go on eating, my busy mind being once more at rest. Hardly had I done so when a flash and a deafening boom came from the part of the trench I had just left. A shell had detonated over the friends I’d just been with. All of them were killed.”
    “We’re