Hitler's Niece by Ron Hansen Page B

had not.
    Hermann Göring, who as a flying ace had won Germany’s highest medal for valor in the war, the Pour le Mérite , and wore it ostentatiously over his fine, black leather jacket, had been hit in the upper thigh and groin. On his hands and knees he’d gotten to a hiding place behind the lions in front of the Residenz Palace where a friend had found him and helped him to the house of the first doctor he saw, at Residenzstrasse 25. The friend had asked if the owner would help them. “Of course, I’ll give aid to any wounded man,” Dr. Robert Ballin had said. “But I call your attention to the fact that this is a house of Jews.” And still they’d gone inside.
    Twenty men were killed, four of them police, and hundreds were injured in a skirmish that had lasted less than a minute. Of the sixteen Nazis whom Hitler would finally make heroes and martyrs, four were merchants, three were bank officials, three were engineers, and there had been a hat maker, a locksmith, a headwaiter, a butler, a retired cavalry captain, and a judicial official of the Bavarian Supreme Court whose bloodstained draft of a new Nazi constitution had been found folded in his pocket.
    Quickly as that the putsch was over. A journalist would later call the day Kahrfreitag , Kahr Friday, a play on the German for Good Friday, Kar-freitag . A few revolutionaries had run off to a nearby girl’s academy and had scrambled under the beds to hide from the police; others had fled to a Konditorei and had concealed their weapons in pastry ovens and flour sacks; some had just returned to their jobs as if they’d only been onlookers.
    With Dr. Walter Schultze helping him, Hitler hurried away in agony, his hair falling over his face, white with failure and shame, and got into a yellow Opel automobile that had a red cross painted on its side. An old friend, Emil Maurice, got behind the wheel and drove them south toward the Austrian border as fast as he could. “What a fiasco,” Hitler sighed, then said nothing more until Mur-nau, where he remembered that Ernst Hanfstaengl, the party’s foreign press secretary, owned a country home not far away, in Uffing, on the lake called Staffelsee.
    They went there. The quiet was stunning. The fields and lawn were white with snow. A farmer was walking his brown milk cows along the five-foot-high granite wall that surrounded the house. Emil Maurice and Dr. Schultze hunkered low in the Opel as Hitler trudged up to the front door and was greeted by Egon, a three-year-old boy whom Hitler often played with, and who knew him as Onkel Dolf. Egon yelled upstairs for his mother and Frau Helene Hanfstaengl came down. She was a pregnant, serene, and glamorous American woman of German descent with whom Hitler thought himself in love. Without saying anything of the putsch, or why his left arm was in a sling, he kissed her hand and meekly asked if she would let him stay for the night, and she put him up in an attic room. And it was there, still threatening suicide, that he was arrested by the police on Sunday night and taken to Landsberg fortress.
    Ernst Hanfstaengl himself had fled to Rosenheim, on the Austrian border, where a physician’s secretary helped him find his way across the frontier illegally. And he was surprised to later learn that the führer had selected Uffing rather than Austria for his hideaway. In fact, Hitler’s odd reluctance to go back into his homeland again only became a greater mystery for Hanfstaengl when, in 1938, at the time of Germany’s Anschluss with Austria, he heard that the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, took it as one of their first obligations to haul off from police headquarters in Wien a box of dossiers having to do with Adolf Hitler in his twenties. And those who knew what was in them were soon found dead.

C HAPTER F IVE
    T HE M ERRY W IDOW , 1923
    Urged by Lorenz Roder, Hitler’s lawyer, to stay away from Germany for a few more months, Herr Ernst Hanfstaengl hid in the house of a