All her tricks were tried on the Herr Doktor Pfennig, but Magda only succeeded in getting him to kiss her hand. And that “kiss” did not linger. It was a snappy sullen sweep of his upper lip. With a soft lilting lisp, she’d say: “Doctor, are you not without a spare minute so we can be alone with these matters?”

“As you can see, I do most of the things here. Even the Kaiser’s son, Friedrich Wilhelm, with all his staff helping can’t find spare moments in these times of war,” the doctor answered.

“You’re mistaken. Friedrich Wilhelm viewed my newly acquired Rembrandt, Man in a Golden Helmet. And we were quite alone.” The pouches under Magda’s eyes pulsed with hidden secrets.

When the play was finally cast, with over one hundred wounded to be carted by ambulances to the Goebbels’ summer estate, Magda was nearly an invalid herself so much was she suffering with longing for Dr. Pfennig. Who was this Lilo who had such a hold on him?

Having had a dull Weimar Republic upbringing, Lilo was taught by dubious Jewish teachers and probably even Jewish professors at the University of Würzburg, all of them with Anglophile tendencies. She had studied medicine herself, but gave it up when her first child was born. Tall and thin, she had no thighs to speak of and when the war started, she volunteered to operate the searchlights that spotted Allied planes in the night sky. When Magda asked Josef if this was an important duty, he only laughed saying: “The English fly way too high for any little girl’s flashlight.”

“Then why does the Führer bother giving such assignments?” Magda asked.

“The Führer refuses to draft women. In a spirit of bonhomie, he threw them a crumb. The rise of Germany is a male event. It’s not that we don’t respect women. We respect them too much to contaminate them in battle. In World War I, we shelled Paris from 70 miles away with huge guns called Big Bertha after Krupp’s wife. That’s the kind of respect I’m talking about.”

So this silly Lilo Flakwaffen-Helferin was some kind of heroine to her husband. Magda made sure that Josef’s remark reached the doctor’s ear.

On the night of the pageant, Josef ordered many torches to burn on the grounds of their estate. Hindenburg lanterns were placed in the trees to illuminate the stage. Swastika wreaths were spread in front of the grassy stage where chairs were set up in long even rows. Josef decided to call his masterpiece Turnip Winter, as the old “turnip vet” seemed to him a prime protagonist. Though Magda wore a very narrow skirt and a corselette waistband that pushed up her breasts, I was dressed simply in a pale blue suit with a white collar and pocket flaps of cotton gingham. While my hair was styled more natural and fell softly around my face, Magda’s was swept up in an oversized platter.

Ambulances arrived, and the wounded were placed on various black markers on the stage of grass. Magda had ordered dozens of white scarves for the actors feeling bare necks were inelegant. Cries of pain were heard which annoyed Josef who wanted “pain” only on cue. Bandages on arms and legs leaked ringlets of blood on the ground. Two soldiers held out both arms held rigid in plaster. The doctors called these patients “stukas” because their arms looked like the wings of a Stuka dive-bomber. Josef was delighted with the “stukas” who saluted him in the official way of the armless—by leaning back their heads with their chins held high.

Musicians were ordered to warm up loudly in order to drown out the incidental groaning noise.

Attempting to demonstrate a showy mercy, Magda put a cup of water to a soldier’s lips though Dr. Pfennig advised her not to as the man had been shot in the lungs and water would drown him. Magna was determined. The man drank from her cup and died, and his body was hurriedly carted away, his white scarf fluttering behind.

Wearing a new field gray tunic with a small SS eagle on the left sleeve, Adi arrived exactly on the second as he is never late because of the careful timing he learned from official appearances. He endured all the arms of the audience jutting up and returned their stiff salutes in his leisurely way—simply bending his elbow and raising his hand no higher than his right ear. Until he took his seat, everyone remained standing. Being invisible at the time—the lucky nobody—I was sitting in the back row. Magda pounced beside Adi in the prize position on his right. On the other side of Magda was Dr. Pfennig and Lilo. Much to Magda’s surprise, Lilo wore a stunning Schiaparelli topknot hat with soft feather trimming and a simple black and white herringbone suit looking beautifully unproletarian and very un-Nazi.

The doctor and Lilo were introduced to Adi, and the play began. A short burst of Wagner, and then the “turnip vet” was heard babbling. Adi leaned forward trying to understand the raving gibberish. Anguish echoed down stage when a captain without hands was flapping his arms in torment, screaming in a Bruennhilde-cry for morphine. Fortunately, most of the wounded were in a deep sedated sleep.

Deciding to act in his own drama, Josef delivered a monologue on hand-to-hand combat. Halfway through the oration, Adi leaned over and said to Magda: “The wounded look quite real.”

“They are, Mein Führer. For you, anything less than authentic would be profane.”

“How authentic?”

“From our SS hospitals,” she gushed.

Adi stood and the audience of more than a hundred military personnel stood as well—with Dr. Pfennig and Lilo also jumping to their feet. Lilo’s topknot hat towered in trembling attention.

“This is wonderful.” Walking briskly onto the stage, the Führer stepped in zigzag lines around the sedated and writhing wounded as Josef continued his monologue.

Then… it went terribly wrong.

“These are all vons,” the Führer yelled. And indeed they were. All were aristocratic officers who had impressed Magda. “Where are the noncoms?”

Josef stopped his oratory abruptly. Rushing to the Führer’s side, Magda looked at her authentic cast in horror. How could she have forgotten such a fundamental point?

“Here’s a private, at least.” A soldier with no ears and no arms who wore a pathetic paper surgery gown was one of Magda’s so-called “minor extras.” As Adi is able to stand aside and look at any situation in historical detachment, he observed this pathetic spectacle of a German warrior with no rank and no arms—a true common man—dressed in paper who saluted with his chin. “Decorate this soldier!”

“But Mein Führer… private Oels received his injuries in Bremen when he ran his jeep over his own gasoline can,” Dr. Pfennig said.

“A field decoration! Make him an Honorary Corporal in the German Army Reserves. Immediately.”

Huber Oels was grandly garnished.

Adi was then ushered to a large table of food set up on the summer porch. Taking a horrified look at the abundant and lavish dishes, he turned quickly and told Goebbels he could not allow himself to eat with his troops except when standing at a field kitchen.

The last time I saw Adi so angry is when that idiot American woman, Dorothy Thompson, wrote an offensive article about him saying Adi was “formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man who seems cartilaginous, without bones.” Such words are untrue, sacrilegious and outright propaganda just like those ugly anti-Nazi White Rose pamphlets published by ignorant students who were later found and patriotically executed.

Adi transferred Dr. Pfennig to the Eastern front, a perfect revenge Magda felt for the doctor’s indifference towards her. Though Magda was treated coolly by the Führer for many months, she gradually got back into favor by personally cooking and serving him egg pudding, kasekuchen, and schokoladetortes that coated his throat in cream and left sugary rime on his moustache. She even made cookies in the shape of a special garland that Adi believed signified the eternity of the German world. As a last grand gesture, she took a patch of Blondi’s hair and wove it into a medal for Adi’s uniform explaining that the giving of this hair was a symbol that Blondi would trust him with her life.

Lilo and the children, we heard, rushed to a Stuttgart castle to be sheltered by an old couple still loyal to the Italian king—with Lilo’s do-gooder flashlight career over with.

As a salve to her ego, Magda took a U-boat officer as a lover. They would make love submerged during the day, repeating their ardor as the boat glided on the water’s surface at night. Captain Erwin von Kappe was famous for sinking 250 ships in the Eastern shipping lanes, and he wore the usual U-Boat uniform of khaki pants, suspenders, a gray sweater and a cap with large earflaps. When she asked me what I thought of him, I said: “He looks like a seal hunter.”

“Remember the silly birthday pageant, Magda? Are you over the good Doctor Pfennig? A doctor is hardly a prince,” I said with a taint of sarcasm.

“What made you think of him?” Living in the Black Splotch makes the past seem far away to Magda.

“And your rival Lilo?” I ask.

“That overly marzipan piglet is receding under the trough of failure. But… isn’t it better to think about your own love rather than mine?” Magda taunts.

“My love with Adi is sacred.” With a self-conscious smile, I cross my legs. With Magda around, I try to wear my only pair of nylons despite the runs patched over many times with natural fingernail polish. Thick gauzy clumps aggravate my ankles, and I end up having small red welts. But I refuse to care. I pretend they’re bites from Adi, little intense bites from that one-jagged tooth on the left side of his smile.

“I can stare at him for hours,” I coo. “I love the way he looks in his uniform. It’s no wonder that at the Paris World Fair in 1900, Austria won first prize for the most beautiful uniform on earth.”