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Hitler glanced at the pink meat and objected, “Eating that would be like eating a corpse!,” and said that nothing on earth would ever entice him to eat meat again, a promise he henceforth kept but for the occasional liver dumplings.

At dinnertime, Hoffmann recalled how the führer loved spaghetti, and he telephoned Henny to obtusely ask how it was made. Trying his hand for the first time in his life at the art of cooking, he felt his effort praiseworthy, but still Hitler would not eat, and again he filled the night with his footfalls.

At last, on Tuesday afternoon, Adolf Müller, the printer of the Völkischer Beobachter, arrived at his St. Quirin villa and informed the führer that the funeral of his niece had been held that morning. Although he’d hardly slept for three days, Hitler determined that the Austrian authorities would no longer be waiting for him, and a party that included Emil Maurice, Julius Schaub, and Rudolf Hess immediately headed off for an all-night journey to Wien.

At sunrise on Wednesday the party was met at the Central Cemetery by the Nazi Gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld but, humming the funeral march from Die Götterdämmerung, Hitler strolled through the tall iron gates alone, and laid on Geli’s grave twenty-three red chrysanthemums, her age and her favorite flower. And then, since he would not pray, he was soon outside the cemetery again. “She’s the only woman I’ll ever love,” Hitler said. “Germany shall now be my only bride.”

The men just looked at each other for a while until Heinrich Hoffmann suggested they all go out for breakfast, and Frauenfeld invited them to his flat. The führer agreed as long as he could first be driven by the Belvedere Hotel, inside the Ring, where there was a frieze of a sphinx whose face reminded him of Geli, and then past the magnificent Opera, where he sighed theatrically and talked about hearing Wagner there w

ith August Kubizek just before Geli was born.

Schaub, Hoffmann, Hitler, Hess, Maurice, and Frauenfeld gloomily trudged up the stairs to the flat and took seats at a wide, round table as the Gauleiter shook his wife awake in order to have her cook. There was no conversation for a while, only the sounds from the kitchen. She was cracking eggshells, she was grinding coffee beans. And then, to soften the führer’s mood, Heinrich Hoffmann reminisced about the first time he’d met Geli. “She was singing in München with a high school group called Seraphim and she’d been invited to hear you speak.”

Hitler smiled. “I remember.”

“And then Emil brought her to my birthday party for you. She was so lovely. My flabbergasting daughter was blue with champagne and told Geli she had beautiful breasts. She just said, ‘Thank you.’ I wanted to take her picture right away.”

Seeing the führer’s appreciation of that, Julius Schaub said he’d given Geli a tour of München that day; he’d helped her buy fine clothes. “She wasn’t inhibited with men like some girls are. She was open, and full of high spirits, and always ready for a joke.”

Rudolf Hess said he’d first seen her in 1924. “We were in Landsberg Fortress, and she’d come to visit with Angela. She was fifteen. And so fetching. We talked about astrology. I’d just begun typing out My Struggle on that old Remington.”

Emil said, “She had eyes like a poem.”

The heavy wife of the Gauleiter poured tea and a shot of vodka into Hitler’s cup, and coffee for the others. She went away.

And finally Hitler said, “I first saw Geli at her christening in Linz in 1908. She was just a baby, of course. She gripped my finger in her little hand and I introduced myself as Adolfus. That’s my name in the baptismal registry. August Kubizek and I shared a flat here then. We lived in poverty and squalor. My life is a miracle.”

Others concurred.

Then Hitler began talking not of his niece, but of the possiblity of campaigning against the old general Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency. And he hesitated, and held his stare on the wall beside Hess’s head as if on a doorway with a loved one behind it and just about to enter, or as if he were imagining a history still to be written, imagining six million Jews. With a firm and confident voice he said, “And now let the struggle begin.”

THE END