Page 6

His voice was deep and hoarse, in command, as he spoke into the phone.

“Rudolf,” he said, “I need you at once.”

Six

Present Day

Prinzregentenplatz 16

Munich

IF YOU’RE READING THIS book, then I am both grateful and surprised. Grateful, because while pieces of this puzzle have emerged over time, this book—if it ever even sees the light of day—will be the first time they are put together in a coherent story. And surprised, because if you are reading this, I must have survived at least long enough to get a draft of this manuscript to a publisher. (Unless, I suppose, someone else finished my work.)

My name doesn’t matter, except to me, but it is Eleanor Robbins. I am two years shy of sixty, blind in one eye, divorced, and now childless after the death of my daughter to cancer six years ago. I have led what I call a “small life” as a tenured history professor at the University of Chicago until one morning a month ago, when a man named Francis Linderman requested a meeting. He had materials he wanted to show me, he said, that he felt I could turn into a book for publication.

The materials? They included letters, notes, newspaper articles from Germany in the 1930s, and other assorted documents. But the most significant part consisted of two journals, written by two different men—and for very different reasons.

Luckily for me and for you reading this, he sent those materials in advance.

Luckily, I say, because before we could ever meet, Francis Linderman took his own life.

I pored over the materials again and again, over many days and nights. At first I found the pages difficult to believe, yet impossible not to take seriously. Reading the old-fashioned German handwriting was a struggle, but as you will soon find for yourself, the contents are quite extraordinary.

They included a brilliant plot to murder Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1945.

What’s more, the plot succeeded.

So I took a leave of absence to write this book. But there are holes in the research given to me. Some proof I do not yet have, that I must find in Europe. And if my instincts are correct, there will be people who desperately do not want me to find it.

I stand on the street in Munich, looking at the once-residential building where Adolf Hitler’s half niece, Geli Raubal, died. I lift the lid on my coffee and take a small sip. The warmth feels good going down. The morning weather is cooler than forecast.

Prinzregentenplatz 16 is now a Bavarian government building, including the Munich Police on the floor that Hitler once inhabited. Outwardly, it looks no different, save the POLIZEI sign, and that is by design. Germany does not hide from its past, but neither does it wish to advertise this building, lest it become a shrine for sympathetic neo-Nazis—who are unfortunately a growing movement in Germany (though outlawed) as well as throughout Europe and America.

I can’t help but marvel at the sheer oddness of Hitler and Geli’s relationship. But perhaps it wasn’t so odd to Hitler. After all, his mother and father were in some way related, such that they had to get a papal dispensation to marry; Hitler’s extraordinary attempts to conceal the details of his childhood have left scholars debating whether his parents were also uncle and niece, or cousins. But we know this much of a startling parallel: Hitler’s father, Alois, was twenty-three years older than his wife, Hitler’s mother, Klara, not so very different from the nineteen-year difference between Hitler and Geli. And throughout his parents’ marriage, Klara referred to her husband as Uncle Alois, not unlike how Geli called Hitler Uncle Wolf.

Indeed, by the time of Geli’s death, Angela later said, she had assumed that her half brother and her daughter would marry one day.

Just thinking about it sends a shudder through me.

A man approaches me, a police officer in a light blue shirt, dark vest, and a white cap with blue bill. “Brauchen Sie Hilfe?” he asks. Do you need help? Then he asks if I’m a tourist or journalist.

Given my current mission, “journalist” is not far off, but to the officer, I opt for “tourist,” as it makes things easier.

I am under strict instructions from my brother Tyson, three years my junior, an attorney who lives just outside St. Louis, not to talk about my research. For your safety, he told me, don’t let anyone know what you’re doing in Europe. That said, I am a harmless, half-blind woman in her late fifties. Who would ever consider me a threat? James Bond I am not.

The officer departs, confident that I’m not some neo-Nazi coming to pay homage. Why am I here in this location, precisely? Perhaps because this is where I feel things truly began.

How did Hitler manage to rise within his party, the National Socialists? It’s not hard to understand how a struggling, bitter, vulnerable nation succumbed to his divisive rhetoric and political skills. But how did Hitler convince a nation that he was not only its one and only leader, but a demigod, a “leader-pope,” as he put it? How did he get away with claiming “political infallibility,” and saying things like he did in 1930: “I never make a mistake. Every one of my words is historic”? Who talks like that with a straight face? More to the point, who buys it?

I look again at the small blue POLIZEI sign protruding from this building. Though they had yet to assume power, the Nazis already had a cocky, bullying presence in the streets of Munich in 1931. It’s probably why they felt they could push around the cops, cower the elected officials, and stifle any investigation into Geli Raubal’s death—and at that time, in Munich’s bruised and vulnerable state, they were right.

But they didn’t count on a cop like Thomas Bauer.

Part One

“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons.… We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies: As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”

—Joseph Goebbels, Reichstag delegate for the National Socialist Party, in his paper Der Angriff, April 30, 1928