Read Online Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen - Free Book Online

National Socialist in Salzburg until the ennui was so great that he journeyed east to look up his leader’s family just out of curiosity.
    The Raubals owned no telephone, so they weren’t listed in the Wien directory, but through a few inquiries Hanfstaengl found out that Frau Angela Raubal worked full-time in the kitchen of a Jewish girls’ hostel in the Zimmermannsdamm area. Angela was highly thought of there, he was told. She’d once quelled an anti-Semitic rally in front of the hostel simply by the challenging force of her presence, and she prepared meals that were so perfectly kosher that an Orthodox rabbi brought Jewish housewives to the hostel kitchen to have her show them how it was done. A girl at the hostel thought the Raubal family was renting a flat on the fourth floor of a five-story building on Blumengasse, near the Westbahnhof.
    Imagining Angela a formidable lady, the female version of the tyrant Adolf could be, Ernst Hanfstaengl took along as gifts of homage a box of Empress chocolates and a book of art reproductions that his family’s firm published, Old Masters in the Pinakothek , and visited the Raubals’ flat on a Wednesday afternoon in December. Children already old with misery forlornly watched him as he went up scuffed wooden stairs as cupped as spoons with wear, watched him, too, as he waited in a filthy hallway for one of the Raubals to answer his knock. And then he heard, “Who is it?”
    “Herr Hanfstaengl, my lady. A family friend.”
    Paula Hitler hardly opened the front door five inches as she warily peered up at him. “Which side?”
    “Adolf’s.”
    She slammed the door and called, “Angela!”
    Hanfstaengl heard Angela hurrying down the hallway, and then she opened the flat’s door wide. She was far less like Hitler than he had expected, just a handsome, solid, ill-used Hausfrau of forty, the kind of charwoman his wife would hire on streetcorners whenever their city house wanted cleaning. “Ernst Hanfstaengl,” he said. “I’m the party’s foreign press secretary.”
    She disliked Hitler’s politics, he could tell, but she tried to hide it by considering her chafed and reddened hands. “We heard about the riot. And the arrest. How is Adolf?”
    “We lost some dear comrades in the fighting, so he’s sick at heart, but otherwise well. You know how he thrives on adversity.”
    She didn’t. A flicker of unease seemed to cross her face, as if she were unused to the size and heartiness of men. “Won’t you come in?” she asked, but then flushed and withdrew farther from him as he filled the foyer.
    “Oh, I forgot,” he said, and handed her his gifts.
    “Chocolates! And a book!” Angela cried, as if she’d just noticed them. “You are too kind.”
    “You’re tall, aren’t you,” Paula called. She was a stout woman of almost twenty-eight. She was hiding behind the icebox in the kitchen so that only her tilted head showed. She was just a little fuller in the face than Adolf; otherwise the resemblance was obvious.
    Hanfstaengl doffed his hat and smiled. “You must be Fräulein Hitler!”
    “Oh, yes; must be, forced to be, had no choice.” She fell back from view and called, “We don’t have any money! You go away now!”
    “Quiet, Paula!” Angela shouted. She turned back to Hanfstaengl and with chagrin confided, “She’s strange, you know.” His frown told her he didn’t know; Hitler had hidden that. She realized it was the hour for Kaffee und Kuchen . “Shall I take your coat?” Angela asked. “We still have some coffee, I think.”
    But Hanfstaengl was focused on the squalor of the flat, seeing Leo’s foul straw mattress in the hallway, the old three-legged green sofa that was Geli’s bed, and the few frail pieces of other furniture that hadn’t yet been sold. “I hope you will pardon the observation, Frau Raubal, but it looks like you have had a difficult life here lately, just as we have had in Germany.”
    She told him, “We all get to eat at