Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  The tall man dropped to his knees and tried to lift the dog’s head, but it was too late. “You son of a bitch, you’ve killed my dog.”

  “Get out, get out!” I found myself shouting. “Out of here quick, or I’ll kill you.”

  The man looked at me contemptuously, seeing my bleeding hand. “Sure you will.”

  Still clutching my thumb with my right hand, I swung my joined fists at his face. But he was ready, deflecting them easily with his left forearm as he punched me squarely in the face with his right. I felt the warm flow of blood from my nose and stepped back dizzily. Otto rushed between us, doubling the man over with a series of punches to the midsection and kicking him hard as he went down. “I told you once, and you didn’t believe me. Now your dog will never attack anyone again.”

  Otto turned to me. “Come on, I know a doctor down the street who will look at these injuries, both yours and Leo’s.”

  “And yours,” I managed to remind him.

  “Mine, too.”

  —

  Luckily, the injuries weren’t as bad as they looked. My thumb required a few stitches, and the wounds on Otto’s hands weren’t very deep; painful, I’m sure, but not dangerous. The doctor also examined Leo’s neck, disinfecting and bandaging it, and assured me that he’d recover quickly.

  “Otto, how’d you do it?” I asked once we were back in his brother’s house.

  “Do what?”

  “You know, kill the dog.”

  Otto looked away and shook his head. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Shouldn’t have done it—are you kidding? You saved Leo, all of us.”

  “Maybe. But the dog is never at fault; it’s his master who is to blame.”

  “But when the dog is out of control?”

  Otto shrugged and said nothing.

  “You haven’t answered my question: How did you learn to do that?”

  “I know dogs; you know I love dogs. And almost all dogs love me. That’s why I can’t shake the feeling of, ‘How could this have happened to me?’ ”

  Otto, it turned out, had once trained guard dogs. And one of the first lessons a trainer learned was how to put a dog down if he got out of control. “A dog has pressure points just like people,” he explained. “Once you know where they are, you can immobilize him or, if need be, kill him by cutting off the flow of blood to the heart. But first you have to reach those pressure points—and the only way to do that is to occupy his jaw with one hand while going for a point with the other. That’s why I hit him with my left fist; he went for it, and then my right hand was free and out of his range.”

  “Good God, I never would have believed it. I owe you a big thanks.”

  Leo nuzzled Otto, who absent-mindedly stroked his back. “I wouldn’t have done it—kill the dog, that is—if I hadn’t seen him before. When I was here a few months ago, the dog attacked my Rex. The owner—that tall guy—managed to pull his dog away, but just barely, at the last minute. I warned him never to allow such a close call again, but he didn’t seem to care. Told me that if my dog couldn’t defend himself that it was his problem. I almost went after him then. I should have; maybe that would have prevented what happened today.”

  In the morning, I thanked Otto again as I prepared to catch the train back to Munich.

  “I told you, you don’t need to thank me,” he said, waving his bandaged hand in a dismissive gesture. “But I hope you’ll still think about joining Gregor and me, about helping us.”

  “How?”

  Otto proposed that I take on two basic assignments. First, I could continue to provide a link between Munich and him and, through him, to Gregor. He knew that not only did Hitler and his aides trust me, but I had struck up a friendship with Emil. “That’s good,” he said. “It can be very useful. You continue to be our eyes and ears down there. We need to know about even the smallest things that are happening within the party.” Second, I could help distribute the Strassers’ publications among the Bavarian members of the party. “Our ideas can’t prevail unless all members are exposed to them.”

  “You once talked about my coming to Berlin to work for you directly,” I reminded him.

  “The time for that may come if you’re still with us. Just wait. But right now you can help us more where you are. You may have to travel back and forth some, but your base still should be Munich. What do you say?”

  He hardly needed to ask. His program sounded noble and fair to me, even if others would later dismiss it as a ridiculous hodgepodge of unworkable political concepts. And when measured against cleaning and painting houses, his offer was infinitely more attractive. It wasn’t even close, although I hesitated for another moment as I thought about how Sabine would see this. But then the image of Otto stepping in to face the enraged rottweiler with nothing but his bare hands flashed through my mind, and I knew I couldn’t refuse him.

  “I’m with you.”

  Chapter Ten

  Bruno the Jewish swindler had kept his distance, but one day he caught me off guard with a bizarre question as I was taking my daily walk in the exercise yard. “What do you do with maggots, vermin, lice?”

  I looked up, startled. “What?”

  “What do you do with—”

  “I heard you the first time. You try to get rid of them, you exterminate them if you can. Why ask a question with such an obvious answer?”

  Bruno’s dark eyes shone with an intensity I found unsettling. “Because that’s what Hitler called Jews like me. We’re spiders sucking the blood out of the people’s pores. That’s straight out of Mein Kampf.”

  “And?” I asked impatiently.

  “And that’s what he had in mind for us—extermination.”

  “That’s crazy,” I muttered, not caring if he heard me or not as I tried to shake him off with a faster stride. Since his limp slowed him down, it wasn’t hard to do. But as I left him behind, he kept sputtering: “Maggots, vermin, lice, spiders. Who was crazy?” He emitted a wild laugh. “Crazy, crazy, crazy. The whole world is crazy.”

  When we came through the door, Sabine dropped to her knees to stroke Leo’s head as soon as she saw his bandaged neck. “Oh my God, what happened to you?”

  “He’s all right, really. It’s nothing serious,” I assured her.

  She saw my hand, also bandaged.

  “I’m all right, too.”

  She rose to her feet, still leaning over to continue stroking the dog, who was reveling in her attention. I saw the flicker of suspicion in her eyes before her next question, asked in a distinctly chillier tone: “Karl, did you drag Leo into one of your Nazi brawls? Are you and Otto responsible for this?”

  “If you only knew,” I said, feeling the anger welling up inside me. I sat down at the tiny kitchen table and gave it a whack with the palm of my hand. “Sure, we’re to blame, you’ve figured it all out.”

  Sabine was watching me carefully. “Knew what?”

  I didn’t say anything for a long moment; then it all spilled out of me. How I had been merely walking Leo in the sleepy town of Land-shut, listening to Otto’s latest political theories, when the rottweiler had attacked; how everything had happened so quickly, and how Leo looked doomed; how Otto had performed his incredible rescue, dispatching both the aggressor and his master. I took a breath. “Otto saved Leo—and me. That was one vicious dog and one terrible owner.”

  “I’m sorry, I just didn’t know. I didn’t know Otto saved him. I thought with his and your politics—”

  “I know, you think it’s always the politics to blame. But there’s plenty of cruelty and viciousness in this world, with or without politics.”

  A memory resurfaced that I’d almost forgotten, and I found myself describing it to her. I was probably only about five or six when my father took Gerhard and me out on a boat on the Wannsee. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny day, and he had either borrowed or rented a rowboat, promising us a swim. We rowed out toward the middle of the lake, but our father insisted that we get closer to
shore before we jumped in the water. We couldn’t actually pull up at one of the beaches, since they were almost all private, so he lifted the oars when we were relatively close to shore. “All right, jump, boys,” he commanded, and we gleefully obeyed.

  Gerhard, who was older and a much better swimmer than I was, raced up and down the shore with a powerful stroke I could only admire as I splashed around closer to the boat. He slowed at one point, put his legs down to see if he could touch bottom and suddenly screamed. “It hurts, it hurts,” he shouted in a high-pitched voice.

  My father ordered me to hold on, and he rowed the boat quickly toward Gerhard, pulling him on board and me immediately afterward. I was horrified to see my brother’s right foot covered in blood. As tears washed down his face, our father pulled out pieces of glass. “Easy, easy, I’m almost done,” Father reassured him. While he wrapped the foot as tightly as he could in a towel, he kept muttering, “Those bastards.”

  “You see, some of those lovely rich folks on the lake were so intent on preventing anyone else from trespassing on their beaches that they put down broken glass in the water, at the edge of what was legally their property,” I explained to Sabine. “We weren’t bothering anyone—no one else was there, but they still did this. See what people are like, especially rich people?”

  She shook her head and gently took my bandaged hand. “That’s horrible.”

  I pressed my advantage, telling her that I had agreed to keep working for Otto—since I continued to believe in him, since he and Gregor would keep the party committed to fighting for the rights of ordinary Germans. They’d make sure Hitler wouldn’t steer the party in the wrong direction.

  “Does that mean you’ll still be playing soldier, like my grandmother said?” she asked, but softly, without any sting.

  “I won’t be playing anything, just helping any way I can.”

  Sabine dropped the subject. As much as she wanted me to abandon what I was doing, she saw that my allegiance to Otto now transcended politics. And she sensed that this wasn’t the moment to push me to reconsider, at least not very hard. I’m sure she hoped there would be a more propitious moment; or, even better, that I’d arrive at her conclusion on my own.

  —

  Emil told me that Hitler was writing the second volume of Mein Kampf on his frequent retreats to Obersalzberg, his hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. I felt more and more that the future of the movement lay in the north. From Otto’s letters and reports, I knew that the Strassers were forging ahead. As a Reichstag deputy, Gregor made full use of his free train pass, traveling all over the north and even the Rhineland to deliver speeches and recruit members. By the end of 1925, he had more than tripled the number of party branches in northern Germany, from 71 before the putsch to 262. Otto launched a newspaper, the Arbeitsblatt, and, with the help of Goebbels, published the fortnightly Nationalsozialistische Briefe. They were making good on Otto’s promise to spread the message of Strasserism far and wide.

  Emil and Hitler knew of my ties to Otto. They were happy to have me serve as a conduit for messages, seeing me as a useful go-between. I worked hard to make sure that the Bavarian leaders, from Hitler on down, received copies of the Strassers’ publications and regular reports about their progress. Otto frequently asked me in his letters whether Hitler betrayed any signs of nervousness about their success, and I could honestly report that I didn’t think so. Since he had been banned from public speaking, Hitler seemed less combative. Although he insisted that only he could make the major decisions, he allowed Gregor Strasser to become the voice of the party in the north.

  But how far would this take him, I wondered. The big issue of the day was what to do with the houses and property of German royalty. Or former German royalty, since the Weimar Republic did not recognize royal titles. There was never any doubt where the Strassers stood on this issue. As Otto had explained to me, those properties should be expropriated. It was a popular position, since workers were eager to see this happen. I couldn’t have agreed more with this socialist part of our agenda.

  I knew also that Hitler was likely to feel differently. I had relayed to Otto the rumors that he was receiving fifteen hundred marks a month from the divorced duchess of Saxony-Anhalt. He also regularly courted other members of the old families and rich industrialists. He never appeared short of funds, although he had no visible means of support. Word spread that Hitler was denouncing the pressure for land expropriation as “a Jewish plot,” and I kept the Strassers fully informed about what looked to me like a looming confrontation.

  To my surprise, Otto betrayed little anxiety about this prospect. “It’s time to clear the air,” he wrote me from Berlin. “And we plan on doing so very soon.”

  Later I learned the details of Gregor and Otto’s strategy. Gregor calculated that if he could line up all the north’s Nazi Gauleiters, district leaders, behind his call for expropriation, Hitler would be forced to follow their lead. The goal was to get Hitler to abandon his flirtation with the “reactionary” ideas of his financial backers in Munich and to commit the party to a program based on Otto’s principles. Gregor asked Goebbels to help him draft the formal program that would then be presented at a meeting of the northern Gauleiters, to be held in Hanover in late January 1926.

  Otto instructed me to formally notify Hitler’s aides, since word would get out anyway. But the northerners were taken aback when Hitler dispatched Gottfried Feder, one of the early theoreticians of the movement, as his personal representative. “No spies in our midst!” Goebbels exclaimed, siding with those who wanted to bar Feder. Gregor argued that Feder’s presence might have its benefits: He’d see firsthand how unified the party leaders were on the major issues, and that Hitler needed to accept the new direction. A narrow majority of the delegates voted to admit Feder as a guest.

  As Otto recounted to me in a long letter he wrote immediately afterward, the meeting turned into an angry battle. The northerners voted to accept the Strasser program point by point, including the call for expropriation of property owned by the royals and the rich. Feder protested every decision. “Neither Hitler nor I will accept this program,” he declared.

  That came close to inciting a revolt against Hitler. “In these circumstances, I demand that the petty bourgeois Adolf Hitler be expelled from the National Socialist Party,” Goebbels yelled. More calmly, Bernhard Rust, the local Gauleiter in Hanover, declared: “Hitler can act as he likes, but we shall act according to our conscience.”

  “It was a magnificent moment,” Otto concluded in his letter. “We had turned the party around, the result of only a year’s work, and Gregor is convinced that Hitler won’t have any choice but to shift his politics to the left. He says we still need Hitler, since he’s a natural leader. But if Hitler doesn’t follow our lead, I say, the party will march off to its future without him.”

  —

  I saw the new big black six-seater Mercedes parked on Maximilianstrasse, and something made me stop and turn my face toward the window of a shoe shop, pretending to examine the kind of soft leather shoes I’d never be able to afford. When I glanced to my left, I could see the back of Emil’s head in the driver’s seat. But there was no sign of the person I assumed he was waiting for. I had no reason to hide from Emil or from Hitler, if he really was somewhere near, but I held back, waiting to see what the boss was doing. If it seemed natural to do so, I’d approach and greet them.

  For several minutes, nothing happened. Hitler finally emerged from a shop between the car and my position, awkwardly carrying a hatbox. Emil must have seen his boss in the rearview mirror, because he was instantly out on the sidewalk, rushing to meet him and take the box. They exchanged a few words, with Hitler nodding briefly toward the shop, looking at his watch, shrugging and smiling. It was an apologetic series of gestures, a confession of his inability to hurry things up. In any case, I hadn’t seen anything like it from Hitler before. I kept my face in the shadow of the shoe store’s awning. Emil smiled as he took the box to the c
ar. Hitler returned to stand in front of the hat store, looking in.

  Several more minutes passed. Hitler was trying to look casual, self-consciously so. An occasional passerby greeted him, and he’d nod curtly in response. I was impatient to know who would keep Hitler hovering for so long. A woman, I had to assume, since this was a woman’s hat shop.

  Then I saw Hitler’s face light up, and a familiar head of brown wavy hair. I stepped forward and stopped. It was Geli, more mature than a year ago, her face less puffy, now accented by strong cheekbones, but with the playful smile I remembered. Hitler seemed to be admonishing her, but she disarmed him as she handed him a second box. Once again Emil materialized to take the box, nodding at a command and returning to the car. Hitler and Geli stood on the sidewalk talking, and he appeared less charmed than earlier. He talked to her rapidly, gesturing toward the car. She shook her head, pecked his cheek and turned around to walk in my direction. I ducked into the doorway of the shoe store.

  Geli walked past, her eyes straight ahead. I peeked around the corner to my right and, seeing that the black Mercedes was gone, turned left and fell in step behind her. “Fräulein, would you prefer mink or sable?” I asked just loudly enough for her to hear.

  Geli whirled around, her face looking both startled and suspicious. “It’s you,” she said, her features softening. “Are you spying on me, Karl?”

  “You think I don’t have better things to do? I was just walking home and saw your uncle in front of the store, and your little exchange with him, so I backed off. I didn’t want to interfere in what looked to me like a family tiff.”

  Geli fiddled with the top button of her coat. “It wasn’t anything of the sort. He wanted to drop me off at my place, but I have other things to do first.”

  “Your place? What are you doing here, anyway?”

  She threw her head back proudly and extended her hand for me to shake. “Meet Geli Raubal, the medical student.” She laughed, putting her left hand up to her mouth as our right hands remained joined. “Come on,” she added, dropping my hand, somewhat to my disappointment. “Walk me a ways, and I’ll tell you about me and you tell me about you.”