Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  After graduating from high school, she had gone to Obersalzberg to help her mother keep house at Hitler’s alpine retreat. She cooked and cleaned, and Hitler sometimes took her on rides in the country, but she grew restless. “My mother is satisfied with that kind of a life, but I’m not,” she declared. “Besides, Uncle Alf likes my company, and he’ll be spending more time here from now on.” She turned to me. “So here I am in Munich and loving it.”

  Hitler had set her up in a rented room on Königinstrasse, on the west side of the English Gardens, and she had just started classes.

  “You’re sure you plan on studying?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I saw you with a lot of hats, but I haven’t seen any books.”

  “You know how I like to play those games.”

  “But they’re for real now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re really buying now. Or your uncle is.”

  “Not really, not much,” she said, tapping me lightly on the arm. “In fact, I bought only a couple of hats today, because Uncle Alf gets so embarrassed when I spend a lot of time trying things on and don’t buy anything. He’s not like you.”

  I smiled at the compliment.

  “And it’s still just a game.”

  “And your studies?”

  “No, no, they’re serious. At least I think so.”

  “Sounds very serious,” I said teasingly. “I’m sure you’re running off from your uncle to bury yourself in your books.”

  “Well, not exactly. There’s this boy I met when I was registering. He asked me for a coffee, but Uncle Alf doesn’t want to hear about such things.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Geli shot me an amused look. “Do I detect a note of disapproval? Or maybe jealousy?”

  We had reached a busy corner and stood waiting for a tram to rattle by before we could cross. I looked away, and we crossed the street.

  “And what about your girlfriend—are you still with her?”

  “We’re married.”

  Geli seemed not to hear. Her eyes were focused on the window of the café in front of us, and I saw them light up as they locked on to a lanky young man with a scrawny beard who looked up expectantly. “Congratulations,” she said, distractedly kissing me on the cheek.

  I already felt forgotten, but she must have sensed my mood. She turned back at the door to the café. “Thanks for walking with me, Karl.” She kissed me on the cheek again, this time letting her lips linger. “And remember,” she whispered as she did so, “married men shouldn’t be jealous of other women.” She drew back, looked me over and added with a gleam in her eye: “You didn’t wait long, did you? I’m the one who should be jealous.”

  —

  I picked up more than just political gossip about Hitler. As a local celebrity and a bachelor in his mid-thirties, he naturally attracted the attention of women. In the case of older, rich women, he seemed to know exactly how to make them open their purses for him. But with other women, he was awkward. Emil told me about his appearance at the New Year’s party thrown by Heinrich Hoffmann, the photographer. Several of Hoffmann’s young models took an interest in the man they had heard so much about, who looked intriguing in his cutaway coat with his small mustache. “And those were some women,” Emil told me, relishing the memory. “Gorgeous, beautiful bodies . . .”

  As Emil told it, one of the models, who was wearing silk stockings and a clinging gold-fringed dress, winked at her friends and crossed the room toward Hitler. She marched over in a way that made him take a step back, which placed him directly under the mistletoe. Then, without any preliminaries, she kissed him on the lips—not a quick peck but a long, inviting kiss. “Me, I would have known what to do,” Emil boasted. “But with the boss, it wasn’t just embarrassing but painful. He stood there like a mummy, not kissing her back. He’d gone completely cold. The poor girl stepped back, not knowing what to say, and it was totally silent in the room for a moment.” The girl scurried away, with Hitler looking after her as if she had committed some unbelievable crime.

  Hoffmann tried to lighten the mood. “You’ve always had luck with the ladies, Herr Hitler,” he declared. Hitler didn’t say anything. He put on his mackintosh and left. “I had hoped to spend the rest of the evening feasting my eyes on those women, maybe even getting one of them to agree to meet me later, and instead I had to scramble after him,” Emil complained.

  There were other stories that Hitler, who went to Vienna as a young man in the hopes of studying art, had dragged a friend along on a late-night walk up and down the Spittelberggasse, where the small houses were lit up so men could see the prostitutes available inside. Hitler had ranted half the night about the repulsive evil of the sex trade, conjuring up images of blond women subjected to the most sordid humiliations by long-nosed Jews. His fantasy life extended in other directions as well. He reportedly told a friend during that period of his so-called romances with several “proper” women. When his friend questioned him, it turned out that Hitler had seen these women only from afar, never daring to try and meet them. According to one story, he was still angry with one of these women for marrying someone else.

  Once when I was delivering the Berlin publications to Hitler’s room on the Thierschstrasse, I saw a young girl on the way out. She carefully averted her eyes as we crossed paths on the stairs, but my glimpse was enough to see that they were filled with tears that she was barely holding back. She looked no more than about fifteen, a schoolgirl rushing away from a secret rendezvous. “She’s sixteen,” Emil assured me later. “Her name is Maria, and the boss met her walking his dog in Obersalzberg.”

  “So he does like women?”

  “Yes, in his own way. When they’re young and in awe of him.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Maria didn’t look very happy. Some sort of quarrel?”

  Emil looked away, and I could sense that he regretted having said this much.

  “It’s not important,” I assured him.

  But I didn’t need Emil to pick up some of the other hints about Hitler’s views on women. Even in mixed company, he talked about the malleability of young women, how a man should put his mark on them. He quoted Nietzsche: “You are going to see a woman? Do not forget your whip.” Women, he said frequently, should be “cuddly and stupid.”

  Otto liked it when I sprinkled such gossip in with my political reports. He savored every tidbit and seemed to have other sources as well. “He has a perverse imagination,” he mused in one of his letters. “And whatever relationships he has with women, I’d bet, are perverse, too. Pity the women who ever cross his path.”

  —

  Otto soon had more important matters to worry about. Hitler didn’t take news of the Hanover meeting lightly. In mid-February, just three weeks later, he convened his own meeting of party leaders in the Franconian town of Bamberg. I sent an urgent message telling Otto that Hitler had summoned the southern leaders and their deputies, who all had been recently placed on the party payroll to ensure their loyalty. Most of the northern leaders still made their own living, and many of them couldn’t afford to break away from their jobs and pay for the trip to Bamberg. Gregor, of course, made the trip with his free railway pass, and he took Joseph Goebbels along for support. My SA unit was called up and ordered to Bamberg as well.

  I hadn’t spent much time with my unit. First, it had been formally disbanded after the failed putsch. Once it was activated again, I kept my distance most of the time, and the officers assumed I was busy with other party assignments. But Hitler wanted to mount a convincing display of his command. We were told to guard the hall but that there shouldn’t be any need for force. I felt uneasy in a role that once had felt natural to me. I wondered what I would do if there was some sort of confrontation. Otto assured me that he didn’t expect anything of the sort. He was convinced that Gregor could talk the delegates into endorsing the decisions made at Hanover and that Hitler, recognizing his miscalcula
tion, would fall into line.

  I was part of the security detail in front of the building where the officially secret meeting was to take place. I watched nervously as a fleet of expensive cars deposited Hitler’s top men. When Emil emerged from Hitler’s Mercedes and opened the door for his boss, he looked unusually stern. He nodded in my direction before stepping back into the car, but there was no hint of merriment. The boss had obviously been in a somber mood on the ride up. I caught a glimpse of Gregor Strasser and Goebbels walking in from the station. Goebbels looked admiringly—and, I thought, enviously—at the cars pulling up with the southern leaders.

  My unit was ordered into the building, and I took up a position near the door of the meeting hall, which allowed me to hear some of the proceedings. I had a sudden urge to relieve myself. If fighting broke out, I thought, my bladder wouldn’t hold. Pissing in my pants when the fighting started, what a way for a brownshirt to act.

  Hitler took the floor and held forth for a good two hours. He talked about the need for Germany to avoid any alliance with Russia, which would lead to the country’s “Bolshevization.” And Bolshevism, he warned again and again, was the supreme Jewish plot to destroy the German nation and seek world domination. Germany’s future had to be secured by colonizing land to its east: in other words, through a direct confrontation with Russia.

  Hitler launched his assault on the decisions in Hanover to support the expropriation of royal land. “For us today, there are no princes, only Germans,” he declared to the enthusiastic applause of the southern leaders. The party “will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of the people.”

  I saw Goebbels rise as soon as Hitler sat down. Here goes the first volley of the other side, I thought. “Herr Adolf Hitler is right,” Goebbels announced. I saw surprise and anger cross Gregor’s face. Hitler betrayed only the slightest trace of a smile. “His arguments are so convincing that there is no disgrace in admitting our mistakes and rejoining him,” Goebbels added.

  I couldn’t hold out any longer. With no officer in sight, I risked deserting my post to bolt for a toilet. I let loose as fast as I could, alarmed but relieved by the stream that didn’t let up for what seemed like an eternity. I hurried back, grateful that no one had noticed.

  Gregor was speaking, although now I was too far back to catch much. I heard Hitler intervening, but he was even harder to hear. Once Hitler stepped up to Strasser, and I tensed. But Hitler put his arm around him and whispered something. By the end of the meeting, I heard everyone pledging their loyalty to Hitler.

  I left Bamberg dispirited and confused. Otto explained in a letter. Hitler, he conceded, had made a “brilliant” defense of the princes, making it sound like he was standing up for German interests. He had stacked the meeting in his favor more than Gregor had realized, but he had been conciliatory. At the moment when he put his arm around him, he told him: “Strasser, you really mustn’t go on living like a wretched official. Sell your pharmacy, draw on the party funds and set yourself up properly as a man of your worth should.”

  Otto was shaken, but he tried to remain optimistic. “We had to reach a compromise,” he wrote. Its essence: The Strassers would continue to run their expanding publishing operations in Berlin, but they had to renounce their Hanover program and accept Hitler’s original party platform. Otto hinted that he had warned Gregor against taking funds from Hitler, since that would enslave him. “We have to maintain our independence at all costs,” he wrote. “But Gregor argues—and I’m willing to accept his argument for now—that we need Hitler and that Hitler needs us. Therefore, this compromise should work. We can still use our newspapers and periodicals to steer the party in a more socialist direction, although I admit that it may prove more difficult than I originally thought.”

  If Otto was willing to continue working with Hitler, he was furious about Goebbels’s sudden switch. Hitler, it turned out, had been quietly courting him even before the Bamberg meeting and afterward invited him for get-togethers with the southern party leaders, making sure that an official car was put at his disposal and that he was treated like a major dignitary. “Goebbels has the character of a dog,” Otto wrote contemptuously. “He’ll go with whatever master pampers him more, and then do anything to please him.”

  Hitler, however, didn’t ignore his chief internal rival. When Gregor Strasser was injured in a car accident shortly after the Bamberg showdown, Hitler paid him a surprise visit in Landshut, where he was recovering. By the end of 1926, Hitler announced two major changes within the leadership of the party. He appointed Goebbels Gauleiter in Berlin, effectively displacing Gregor as the top party leader in the north; and named Gregor the party’s propaganda chief. Otto was nervous about the changes, but Gregor assured his brother that the position would allow him to inject their message more effectively. And that was the tone of the messages Otto sent to me. “We must be patient,” he wrote. “And we have to redouble our publishing efforts in Berlin. Which means I may need you here sooner than I thought.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I was relieved to receive Otto’s summons to Berlin. The distribution of the Strassers’ publications in Bavaria was extremely limited, so it didn’t occupy much of my time. And I was too lowly a party figure to provide much on Hitler’s thinking. Gregor was spending more and more time in Munich, meeting with Hitler and the other top party leaders often. I’m sure he provided more information than I did—although Otto always claimed he found my reports helpful. Did I consider myself a spy? Not then. I believed I was working to keep the lines of communication open between the Strassers and Hitler, ensuring a coordinated national strategy to combine the Strassers’ socialism with Hitler’s popular appeal.

  I occasionally participated in SA exercises, although the brown-shirts were themselves pulled in different directions depending on the loyalties of their leaders. And I helped organize activities for one of the branches of the newly founded Hitler Youth Movement. An occasional camping trip, picnic, that sort of thing. But even when I wasn’t busy, I pretended to be so that Sabine wouldn’t start pushing me again to look for other work. Besides, there were times when I wanted to escape the confines of our small apartment; when, as much as I loved Sabine, I felt restless in her company, unable to share her sense of contentment that we were constantly together.

  Emerging from the Anhalter Station, I hesitated. Sabine had eventually made me admit that I didn’t visit my mother on my last trip, and left no doubt that she wouldn’t forgive me if I failed again. She didn’t mind my traveling to Berlin, she said, but only under this condition. I had made her a solemn promise.

  The S-Bahn would take me north toward the center of town. The U-Bahn would take me south to my old neighborhood of Neukölln. As I stood there, a group of foreigners approached, arguing loudly in what I assumed was Russian, since I had heard the city was full of Russians lately. A short, square man with a wispy mustache was shouting at his tall companion, who looked on with disdain while delivering a terse reply. They passed on either side of me. For a moment, I thought they would come to blows and I’d get it from both sides, but the only thing I got was a glob of spit from the mustached man’s mouth as he started yelling again. Before I could react, they had moved past me to the S-Bahn entrance, continuing their argument. Wiping my cheek in disgust, I turned in the other direction.

  In the U-Bahn, I wondered what I would say to my mother.

  It felt odd to follow the streets from the subway station to our building. I walked past the bar, bakery and tobacco shop that I remembered. Back then they had loomed, imposing; now, they looked cramped and seedy. An old woman behind the bakery counter used to slip me an occasional roll or cookie. My father had been furious when he caught me taking her handout. “I won’t have my child begging,” he informed me after he dragged me home. And then, as so many times, he made me hold out my hand and delivered several stinging whacks with his ruler. As I passed the bakery, I glanced inside and saw a young woman b
ehind the counter.

  Our building was diagonally across the street, a battered, dirty gray six-story structure leaving no doubt that its inhabitants were not among the privileged. I pushed on the main door, which, as always, creaked loudly as it gave way to the courtyard, where a woman was methodically beating a rug thrown over the lowest branch of the single tree. Clouds of dust burst into the air each time she whacked the rug with a broom, and two small children jumped away laughing, only to sneak up on the rug and retreat from the billowing dust again. “Get out of here, you nasty little brats,” she shouted. It was hard to believe that Gerhard and I had once raced around the same way, playing the same game as our mother had performed the same exercise. Yes, that was one nice memory, I thought, but it came with the pang that I felt whenever I remembered Gerhard. Which was not very often, I had to admit. My return was triggering thoughts I hadn’t had for a long time.

  I directed my steps past the garbage bins, which were as filthy as ever, to the third entrance. A familiar dank smell invaded my nostrils as I started up the stairs to the second-floor landing. It was a mix of piss from the stairwell and cabbage cooking inside one of the apartments. I paused in front of the big brown door I knew so well and knocked lightly. There was silence. I knocked again, this time louder.

  The door was flung open by an unshaven middle-aged man who obviously had been drinking. “What the hell do you want?”

  I stood there speechless.

  “Can’t talk?” he growled, slurring his words.

  “Is Frau Naumann here?” I asked.

  He laughed. “That’s a good one—I hope not.”

  I grabbed his tattered shirt and shouted at him. “What do you mean, you hope not? Who are you?”

  He put his hands up. “Hey, don’t do anything to me. I don’t have anything worth stealing.”