Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen Read Free Book Online Page A

antimilitary and antinationalist sentiments of the working classes, and the Command had promised him all the financial support he would need. And so he’d become a member and was now chief of propaganda, with his own Adler typewriter and with former sergeant Max Amann as his business manager in a “funeral vault of an office” in the Sterneckerbräu beer hall on the Herrenstrasse. With Röhm’s help, theirs was now a party of soldiers, he wrote Angela, and often one could see whole Reichswehr companies marching through the streets in civilian clothes, hunting down and bloodying those he called “Germany’s enemies,” by which he meant Bolsheviks, Weimar Republicans, and Jews.
    A few weeks ago, he wrote, in the great feast hall of the Hofbräuhaus, he’d talked heatedly for two and a half hours to a hostile audience of about two thousand Communists and Socialists. But they hated the ineffectual Weimar Republic as much as he did, if for different reasons, and by the time he’d finished there was frenzied applause for whatever he said. “Walking away from that meeting,” he wrote the Raubals, “my heart burst with joy, for I knew a great and fearsome wolf had been born, one who was destined to rage against that flock who were the pitiful seducers of the people.”
    The Raubals received another letter in July 1921, informing them that he was now a private citizen and was renting a flat above a drugstore at Thierschstrasse 41, not far from the Isar river. On his insistence, his organization was now called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but was primarily known by an acronym formed from the first and sixth syllables, Nazi, which was, he told the Raubals, Bavarian slang for “buddy,” for, “We are friends of the common man.” It was he who had designed their blood-red flag with the black Old World peace symbol of the hooked cross or swastika, now reversed on a white field in order to represent chaos and conflict, “for we are at war.”
    Within the last year, he wrote, he’d been the featured speaker at eighty mass meetings, harping on the financial collapse under their Jewish-Marxist government in Berlin and arguing for a change to a “patriotic dictatorship.” It was he alone who had been responsible for the burgeoning growth in the party’s membership to three thousand people, and yet the founders feared his prominence and the influx of so many full-throated former soldiers into their meetings, and had sought to enfeeble his influence by an alliance with a socialist group in Augsburg. “Hearing of that, I faced them down by offering to quit. Without me, they knew there was no future for them, and so they went the other way.” In fact, in a fulsome letter the party had noted his great successes, his cunning, his sacrifice, and his “unusual oratorical abilities” and had offered to make him its first chairman, dispensing with further parliamentary debates and the confusions of democracy. And so he was now called its führer, its imperious and omnipotent leader. Which was, of course, as it should be.
    “And he asks how we are,” Angela said, folding up his letter.
    Leo smirked. “And says how much he misses us?”
    “That isn’t funny,” Geli said.
    Their mother said, “Adolf is so busy, he just forgets about others.”
    “But isn’t it nice that he’s doing so well,” Paula said. “With no skills or education.”
    Leo’s uncle mailed the high school boy a flyer announcing the party’s gymnastic and sports division, which offered such things as boxing, hiking, and soccer games to its youthful members, and harnessed their strength “as an offensive force at the disposal of the movement.” At the bottom of the flyer in Hitler’s own handwriting was “Are you interested?”, along with the notation that the name had just been changed to Sturmabteilung (SA), or Storm Detachment. The feisty young men in the SA, he