Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen Read Free Book Online

said, was Dietrich Eckart, a poet, a playwright, and the editor of the anti-Semitic, anti-Republican, anti-Bolshevik weekly Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German). “We are seeking together a national messiah.”
    And then they were at the Hofburg, the common name for the Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was now in foundering pieces. The Weltliche Schatzkammer was a treasury within the palace, and was filled with crowns, scepters, jeweled ornaments, weighty robes, and the other fineries of majesty. But as Geli walked the aisles of the museum with her uncle, she got the impression that Hitler was disgusted by either the wild extravagance of royal wealth or by the hundreds of Czechs, Hungarians, Croatians, and Jews who were crowding around the displays, for he did little beside frown and fan imagined odors from his face until they got to the official crown of the Habsburg emperors. Then he hoisted Geli up higher so she could see the rubies and sapphires on it as he told her, “Everything wrong with Austria begins here. Who could remain a faithful subject of the House of Habsburg when they chose as their insignia the crown of Bohemia rather than the magnificent crown of the German emperors?”
    She said, “Uncle, I don’t understand why you wanted to come here.”
    And he put her down. “You will.” Walking on, he furiously sidestepped through an official party of foreigners, hurried past a few more exhibits, and then halted in front of a glass case on which was a sign that read: HEILIGE LANZE. Lying on red velvet behind the glass was a leather case and within it was a hammered iron spearhead, blackened by age, a nail tied to it with gold, silver, and copper wires.
    “What is it?” Geli asked.
    Hitler would say nothing. He folded his arms and stared in a funereal way, as if right then he could tolerate only his own thinking.
    The girl found a hand-printed placard that stated that many considered the Heilige Lanze to be the Spear of Longinus, reputedly used by the Roman centurion to thrust into the side of Jesus as he died at the Crucifixion. A nail thought to be from the Cross had been attached to it in the thirteenth century. Otto the Great had once owned the lance, but he was just one of forty-five emperors who’d taken possession of it between Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome and the fall of the old German Empire one thousand years later. Each had believed in the legend that whoever held the spear held the destiny of the world in his hands.
    “Are you interested in history?” Geli asked.
    “In power,” he said, and then he stood there in silence, shaking; and he stayed that way, lost to his niece, until the Schatzkammer closed an hour later.

C HAPTER F OUR
    T HE B EER H ALL P UTSCH , 1923
    Months passed, and then the Raubals got a letter from Lance Corporal Hitler telling them that he was enrolled on the staff of the “Press and Information Bureau” of the Seventh Army District Command, and working for a Captain Ernst Röhm. And they’d become such fast friends that each was soon calling the other by the familiar “Du,” which had helped Adolf to achieve some useful importance among the officer corps.
    One night at the Brennessel Wine Cellar, Röhm and Dietrich Eckart, the famous translator of Peer Gynt and “a co-warrior against Jerusalem,” had invited him to join the forty members of the German Workers’ Party, saying they needed a good public speaker like him who was also a bachelor—“so we’ll get the women”—who was shrewd in politics and firm in his convictions, was not an officer or an intellectual or in the upper class, and who’d proven he could face gunfire, for the Communists would try to kill him.
    At first Hitler had been unimpressed by the faltering party—it was “like a high school debating society,” he wrote in his memoirs, and “club life of the worst sort”—but the High Command thought it offered a good defense against the