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spying on the fifty or more organizations of Communists, Anarchists, Socialists, Centrists, even the Bavarian Royal party—politics being one of the few industries that flourished in postwar Germany. Technically an education officer, he had taken courses in propaganda and politics at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, where he’d been fortunate in that all the lecturers were, like him, nationalists, anti-Left, and anticlerical; and he could now say with certainty that four years of war had been the equivalent of thirty years in a university. “I have a doctorate in sorrow, a doctorate in treachery, and a doctorate in the ways of the world. I have no use for whatever subject is not included in those.”
    Hitler told them he was now a proud member of the “Instruction Commando,” and regularly giving talks to Reichswehr soldiers on “The Conditions of Peace and Reconstruction” and “Social and Economic-Political Slogans,” which were meant to ignite their German patriotism. And he had heard many compliments from his audience, who called his talks “spirited” and hailed him as “a born popular speaker.”
    Paula bluntly said, “You think you got all the talent in the family.”
    Adolf ignored The Straggler and turned to Angela. “But I have no talent in cooking,” he said. “My older sister got all that.”
    “Wasn’t I the lucky one,” Angela said, and rose to collect the dinner plates. And Hitler was talking again. Angela saw that Paula was openly yawning, Geli’s chin was on her fist as she dully fiddled with her fork, and Leo was staring wide-eyed at his uncle, as if thunderstruck by Hitler’s ability to take such pleasure in himself while offering only boredom to others. Angela bent to kiss her son’s head and thought, You all are also a fortune that Adolf is squandering .

    Waking at noon on Saturday in Angela’s room, Hitler was astonished to find no one but Geli still in the flat. Angela and Paula were at work—he was not interested enough to ask where—and Leo was at soccer practice in the Wurstelprater park. Geli watched him dither for an hour, sitting and getting up again, hunting for food in the icebox, agitatedly stalking by the front windows, holding up framed photographs of distant family that he frowned at—having forgotten their names—and noisily put down.
    Geli asked, “Was there something you wanted to do, Uncle?”
    “Something important,” he said, and turned to her. “But I suppose I can’t abandon you here.”
    She did not say that she was eleven years old and often alone in the flat. She instead connived to be with him by saying, “You could take me.”
    And so he did. Hitler did not tell his niece where they were going, he just strolled gracefully ahead of Geli up Rotenturmstrasse to Sankt Stephansplatz, dourly accepting the praise of Austrians who tipped their hats to his Iron Cross. Geli wore a favorite navy blue sailor dress, with a blue bow and grosgrain ribbon in her lilting, light brown hair, and she thought she looked pretty, but Hitler’s far-off stare failed to find her. She tried to hold his hand, but he withdrew it. At times she was forced to skip to keep up. When he turned onto Spiegelgasse, she asked him, “Are we going to the Hofburg?”
    “Well, not all of it, of course. Only the Schatzkammer. Have you been there?”
    She shook her head.
    “Shocking,” Hitler said. And then he confided that he’d found a dear friend in the Thule Society, an occult group of deep thinkers in München. They’d taken the name “Thule” from a long-forgotten island in the North Atlantic between Scandinavia and Greenland that had been the origin of Nordic civilization and of a master race of blond, blue-eyed vegetarians. The friend he’d found had told him he must visit the Schatzkammer.
    She worried about the odd interests of males. She asked, “Was it a boy friend or a girl friend?”
    Hitler halted at the insinuation he heard, then understood her. The friend, he