It is interesting that Mimi Reiter describes the mustache as “flies” at that point, because a study of Hoffmann’s portraits shows that, at that very period, Hitler was making a transition in mustache styles. Up till then he had preferred a thick, bushy, taller rather than wide look.
But a Hoffmann portrait of Hitler in lederhosen which is dated very close to the time he met Mimi Reiter shows his first rather unsuccessful experiment with a different look. He seems to have chosen to trim away thin patches directly beneath the septum and above the upper lip to give his mustache a more horizontal, less overgrown and furry look. Unfortunately, in this early photograph of the new look, he seems to have trouble avoiding the ragged and unsymmetrical appearance that conjured up two black flies nesting on his upper lip. Still, she did not permit her discomfiture with the “flies” to dissuade her from seeing him again. This time, Hitler, sensing the source of his attraction, began to lay on the political-celebrity bit rather thickly. He invited her to a dinner and speech he’d be giving at a private political meeting in Berchtesgaden (his parole conditions still forbade him from making public speeches).
That evening, Mimi and her sister were shown to the head table, to a place of honor next to Hitler. “I was very embarrassed and blushed. It was as if he had organized the meeting just for me,” she said, waxing rhapsodic in her Harlequinesque way, “as if all that counted for him now was just to conquer me.”
Hitler then applied even thicker layers of Viennese charm like impasto. At a private dinner after his speech, “he fed her pieces of cake like a little child. He treated her like a child and then again like a grown woman”—an alteration that had a powerful effect on the sixteen-year-old.
Then he invoked his sainted mother. Hitler talked “about the death of Mimi’s mother,” then he “repeatedly told her that she reminded him of his mother and that they had the same eyes. These words,” Peis says, “deeply impressed the young, inexperienced girl.”
Hitler followed these tender sentiments about his mother’s eyes, Mimi told Peis, with a “coarse” sexual advance. While another dinner guest asked Hitler why he hadn’t gotten married (he answered that he had to save the German nation first), “Hitler touched my legs with his knee and heavily stepped on my toes with his shoe . . . a funny and rude hint at what he wanted to say.” Reading this account is problematic to say the least. One is tempted to give in to the crude, clownish, bucolic comedy of it, the combination of cartoonish sentiment and oafish coarseness, but one is unable to forget, to reconcile it with the later horror, the high tragedy with the low comic idyll.
When, soon thereafter, a darker note enters the account, one almost begins to hope its portents will be fulfilled by even darker ones:
We went out into the night. . . . Hitler was about to put his arm around my shoulders and pull me toward him when the two dogs suddenly attacked each other. . . . Hitler suddenly intervened, like a maniac he hit his dog with his riding whip . . . and shook him violently by the collar. He was very excited. . . . I did not expect that he could hit his dog so brutally and ruthlessly, the dog which he had said he could not live without. Yet he beat up his most loyal companion.
“How can you be so brutal and beat your dog like that?” I asked. “It was necessary,” Hitler said.
It was after midnight now, and brutality was succeeded by tenderness. They return to Mimi’s sister’s apartment. “Hitler came up very close to me and looked at me for a very long time. I could feel his breath. Tenderly, he touched my shoulders, his mouth changed, his voice sounded sad, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ he asked.”
She forces herself to say no, that they shouldn’t see each other again. Hitler takes the rejection badly, he “turned cold . . . kindness disappeared from his face . . . abruptly he turned away . . . said ‘Heil’ and left.”
But he had not given up. He sends a confidant around to Mimi’s store the next morning. The surrogate tells Mimi, “I have never seen him like that. Herr Hitler poured his heart out to me. Believe me: The man is on fire.”
Mimi agrees to another meeting. Hitler arrives in the store “radiant with joy.” Mimi accedes to an excursion to the picturesque Starnbergersee, which is to be the scene of their first kiss, although Hitler begins the intimacy on the drive itself. With his chauffeur, Emil Maurice, up front at the wheel, Hitler sits very close to Mimi in the back. “He took my hand and put it into his lap, then he took my other hand as well and pressed it: ‘Now I have your hands, and I have you, and I will keep you now.’”
Next he does his mesmerist act: “He puts his right arm around me and tenderly placed his hand on my temple, pulled my head toward his shoulder and wanted to close my eyes with his fingers. He said I should dream.” This combination of coarseness (the hand in the lap) and tenderness works its magic on Mimi. “I think that during those first minutes on our ride to Starnberg my reserve was broken.”
Next date: the graveyard. Hitler takes Mimi to her mother’s grave. Hitler is overcome, thinking of his own mother, “moved by something he did not want to tell me. What he said sounded very grave, in utmost distress: ‘I am not ready yet.’”
Hitler, holding on to his riding whip, comforts a sobbing Mimi and strangely chooses that moment to tell her, “I want you to call me Wolf” (a favorite pseudonym for him when he traveled incognito).
One wants to read in portents of abnormality here, a Hitler so mesmerized by his memory of his mother, he is incapable of a normal sexual relationship, which seemed to be in prospect then. But again, this is contradicted by Mimi’s account, which becomes suddenly less courtly and more explicitly sexual.
Hitler takes Mimi for a walk in the woods, which she describes like some sappy cinematic love-in-bloom montage: “Lightheartedly, we ran across a meadow as if driven by the sun.” Hitler leads her to a fir tree, poses her in front of its, steps back, and gazes at her “from top to bottom. Then he stretched out both hands and begged me to come to him, ‘You know what you are now? Now you are my “Waldfee” [wood nymph or fairy].’”
She laughs at the extravagant theatricality of it, which provokes him to come close. “He gripped me and kissed me. For the first time, he kissed me wildly and passionately. He pulled me toward him and said, ‘Mimilein, my dear, beautiful girl, now I cannot resist any longer.’ He embraced my neck and kissed me. He did not know what to do. He said, ‘But, Mimilein, I like you too much. What I am feeling for you is everything. Kiss me.’”
Even three decades later, even after the crimes she knows he’s committed, Mimi Reiter seemed swept away by Hitler’s passion in her Harlequin-novel way. “I was so happy, I just wanted to die. Again and again, Hitler stopped and gave me a startled stare, then kissed me again, my forehead, my mouth, my neck.”
She does report there are some disturbing or disconcerting aspects to his expression of passion: “I could feel how he clenched his fists. I could see how he was fighting with himself. ‘My child, I could squash you in my arms at this very moment.’ I did not resist any longer, his true self had come out.” (Mimi’s blinkered notion of Hitler’s “true self” is astonishing if one considers it in the 1959 context of her remark.) Next, according to Peis, Hitler “told her that he wanted her to be his wife, to found a family with her, to have blonde children, but at the moment he had not even the time to think of such things. Repeatedly, Hitler spoke of his duty, his mission.”
At this point, a curious period of delay ensues before any further physical consummation—a long period, in fact, when Hitler is away in Munich. Finally, when Mimi’s ice-skating club makes a trip to Munich, she and Hitler have a rendezvous at Hitler’s favorite spot, Café Heck. There are endearments and caresses, but Hitler puts her off with grandiose talk of his search for a new apartment: “In between caresses, Hitler again and again mentioned that he had to look for a bigger apartment . . . and that he needed it for himself and Mimi,” Peis reports.
Mimi recalls that “Wolf pressed his forehead against my neck, ‘You must not leave me, Mimi, do
you hear? When I get my new apartment you have to stay with me . . . forever. We will choose everything together, the paintings, the chairs, I already can see it all: beautiful, big lounge chairs of violet plush.’”
Mimi is still entranced by the violet plush of Hitler’s love rhetoric, but again there is no actual proposal, no actual consummation, and the bewildered young woman is driven to distraction and ultimately to a dangerous course of action.
She returns to Berchtesgaden, and Hitler begins to ignore her. He returns there himself some months later, but he does not visit her. She waits despairingly for word from him. Alone, she starts weeping desperately. “My whole world started tumbling down. I did not know what had happened, nothing that explained” his inattention. “All sorts of pictures appeared in my mind . . . faces of other women and Hitler smiling at them. I did not want to go on living.”
“In this depressed mood,” Peis reports, “she went to find a clothesline. One end of it she slung around her neck, the other around a door handle. Slowly, she glided to the floor. Slowly, she lost consciousness.” At the very last moment, her brother-in-law arrived to bring her word from Hitler and “saved her life at the last minute.”
I dwell upon this account because, for all its ludicrous sentiment, it serves as a kind of counterstatement to the School of Perversion in Hitler studies (and it is at least as well, in fact, slightly better corroborated—if we take the word of sister Paula—than those accounts). Waite has attempted to make Mimi into the first woman driven to suicide by outrage and humiliation over Hitler’s alleged “perversion.” It’s a vision of Hitler that has crept into the literature, into popular culture without much serious critique, a popular vision because it offers an easy explanation for Hitler’s political monstrousness. But in Mimi Reiter’s version, the suicide attempt seems more like the melodramatic act of a teenage girl with an unrequited crush on a celebrity, a love that is exploited by the celebrity for a limited amount of physical gratification and fantasizing. But up to this point—unfortunately, one wants to say—there are few hints of abnormality, much less of monstrous perversion.
One darker note does enter here. When Mimi recovers, her brother-in-law tells her Hitler’s explanation for his sudden silence and absence: poison-pen letters. According to Mimi, “Hitler told [the brother-in-law] that anonymous letters had been mailed to the party office saying that Hitler was having a relationship with a girl who was underage. The letters said, ‘Hitler seduces young, inexperienced girls. He just found a sixteen-year-old girl in Berchtesgaden who obviously will be his next victim.’”
Threatened with the possibility of a scandal, Hitler told her, via this emissary, he could not see her for some time in order not to “jeopardize the success of his party.” As it turned out, Mimi says, the poison-pen letters were actually written by a woman within Hitler’s circle who was either concerned about Hitler’s infatuation as a potentially threatening scandal or jealous of it: one more instance of how Hitler’s every move, his entire existence in the Munich period, was enmeshed in blackmail, poison-pen consciousness, often generated by his own intimates.
Still, the long-promised consummation was postponed once again. This time, two years and a marriage intervened. Mimi marries an Austrian hotelier, moves to Innsbruck with him. But then, two years later, she quarrels with her husband, decamps to Munich, and calls Hitler’s adjutant Julius Schaub. Informed that Mimi is in town, Hitler tells Schaub, “Bring her over.”
Mimi places the episode that follows in the summer of 1931, when Hitler was living in his big, new apartment with Geli Raubal. Peis believes it’s possible Mimi has the date wrong and that the visit occurred after Geli’s death; however, if it happened while Geli was alive, Peis suggests it “would for the first time shed some light on Geli’s mysterious suicide. She might have heard of Mimi’s visit.” Because on this visit, Mimi insists, “I let everything happen.”
In fact, since Geli’s death was so public and so scandalous and since Hitler turned Geli’s room in his apartment into a lugubrious shrine to the departed, it’s unlikely Mimi would have forgotten such details if the visit had taken place after Geli’s death.
In any case, this is Mimi’s reconstruction of the night of consummation: She confesses to Hitler she’s left her husband. He professes himself shocked. “Not for any moral reasons” but for fear he might be publicly linked to a divorce scandal. She asks Hitler if he can find her a job. Instead, Hitler laughs and invites her to stay with him. He now had the big apartment with the violet plush chairs. Now he could offer her everything.
“He told me, ‘From now on, I will take your life into my hands.’”
And at last, she says, he took her body into his hands: “He pulled me toward him and kissed me. It was well after midnight. He leaned back on the sofa, further and further. He held me more and more firmly. I let everything happen. I had never been as happy as I was that night. . . . Around 2 A.M. he got up. After a while he said, ‘Mimilein, I am rich now. I can offer you everything. I can remove any obstacles for you. Stay with me. My beautiful darling, dear Mimi. You must stay with me.’”
She tells him she cannot be an illicit live-in lover. At which point, “he suddenly turned on me. ‘What do you want from me?’ he shouted. ‘I want to have you. I want to have you here. Why don’t you understand I have never had such a relationship with any woman but you?’”
Still Mimi refused to move in, although when she returned to Austria, Hitler had his lawyer Hans Frank help her initiate divorce proceedings on her behalf. “When they parted,” Peis reports, Hitler “assured her once more that she was the only woman he loved.”
Their final scene played itself out three years later. She recalls it as a 1934 visit to Munich, although Hitler was then in power in Berlin. “Once again,” Peis reports, “the relationship came to life, once again he asked her to stay with him as his lover.” She insists she will not be part of an illicit relationship; she wanted to be married and have children. “Suddenly, Hitler had a fit of rage. He shouted, ‘Why do you women only think of having children?’ . . . He kept shouting—it was around 3 A.M.—that he could not take care of a woman. He shouted he had a big mission to fulfill. They argued for two more hours, then they departed, never to see each other again.”
What do we make of this? Peis characterizes it as “a ridiculous, sad, miserable episode.” It is certainly all these things, and yet it falls far short of the monstrousness attributed to Hitler, far short of the kind of monstrousness many long to attribute to him. Here he’s a cad, a roué, with perhaps an unhealthy interest in underage girls. There is something halting, hesitant, obsessive, yet repressed about his courtship and lovemaking style. There is something disturbing about the mixture of stilted courtliness and crude brutality. There is a whip, yes, but he uses it to beat his dog, not Mimi. And if we believe Mimi’s account, there is, ultimately, “normal” sexual consummation: “I let everything happen.”
One can find reasons to be skeptical of her account (the romance-novel sensibility; the fact that if there had been “unnatural” acts, she might be reluctant to identify herself as a participant). Yet nothing has emerged to contradict her, and, according to Peis, Paula Hitler confirms Mimi’s importance to her brother: “maybe the only woman my brother had ever loved.”
If those who have debated the nature of Hitler’s sexuality can be divided into a Party of Normality, a Party of Perversion, and a Party of Asexuality, Mimi Reiter’s account must be considered exhibit A for the Party of Normality. If it doesn’t necessarily refute the rumors and hearsay about the nature of Hitler’s relationship with Geli Raubal, it is reason to examine them more closely and skeptically, to see if they might be the product of a kind of perverse wishful thinking—the wish to believe Hitler “unnatural” in order to avoid the consequences of thinking he was in any way “normal.”
CHAPTER 7
Hitler’s Songbird and the Suicide Register
What was so “frightening” about Geli Raubal?
It’s a dusty, faded blue-green ledger that looks like an accounts record for a small business. It is, in a sense, a ledger of lost souls: Munich’s Selbstmörder (self-murder) register for 1931, the record of all suicides or suspected suicides the Munich police have investigated that year. Inside this grimoire of despair, between hand-ruled lines spread across two pages, spidery black handwriting inscribes in mournful detail the truncated lives of the 334 men and women who have hacked, stabbed, shot, hung, poisoned, or flung themselves to death within the city limits that year.
Archivist Weber opens the ledger to the page on which the details of suicide number 193, Angela Raubal, are listed. The first two entries, date of birth (June 4, 1908) and place of birth (Linz, Austria), are both true. There follows one entry which is only half true.
This one identifies Geli as a “medical student,” perhaps wistful misinformation supplied by a mother who felt the tragedy wouldn’t have happened if Geli had not abandoned her medical-student ambitions for a singing career. (Geli’s mother told an officer of U.S. Army Intelligence in 1945 that the source of Geli’s quarrel with Hitler was her relationship to a singing coach in Vienna—not the first or last time this spectral Viennese seducer makes an appearance.) Or perhaps “medical student” was preferred by Hitler himself, sounding as it did less lurid than “singer” with its overtones of “siren.”
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