At a sharp left is the iron spiral staircase leading to the upper bunker with a sign telling people to climb the stairs three at a time to ensure robustness—an idea Adi got from Mussolini’s public buildings. At the top of the steps is Adi’s vegetarian kitchen with its huge wheel of cheese from Zurich. A smoked ham and ten-clawed meat hook hang there for the officers. The communal dining area at the top of the stairs always smells of tar, fish oil and sweat. Along with folding stools, there is one spectacular chair upholstered in jute that Adi brought from Paris saying educated people look to Paris rather than New York for creative brilliance. Nearby is an emergency exit to the Chancellery Garden. At the entrance to the Bunker is the sign: “No smoking.”

Adi doesn’t know it, but I’m a secret smoker. My sister said smoking helps headaches and when I’m worried over war news, I go to the stove in Fräulein Manzialy’s kitchen and puff behind the boiling potatoes. I do this when I’m desperate and afraid to go topside. I smoked regularly in those early days when I was jealous of photographs of Adi smiling at beautiful women on his rise to be the Führer. I was especially hurt to see him standing beside Winifred Wagner, daughter of the composer, knowing he frequently visited the Wagners’ home in Bayreuth. Winifred calls him Wolfchen, little wolf. But isn’t that business? Aren’t women essential to his career? It was German women who overwhelmingly voted him into power.

Sometimes my doubts torment me. Such a handsome, fascinating man will always attract beautiful women.

And then there’s my constant jealousy of his niece, Geli.

Not that I don’t sometimes feel sorry for Geli. The stupid 23-year-old girl simply couldn’t cope, shooting herself with Adi’s Walter 6.35 revolver on September 18, 1931, because she was too dense to understand a great man even though she was living in a luxurious apartment in Munich on 16 Prinzregentenplatz. Adi let her take singing lessons and attend Mass. But Göring said Adi was jealous and possessive and wouldn’t let Geli go out by herself or have her own friends. It’s probably true that a girl without much insight would be confused. Maybe even driven to despair by trying to keep up with a genius. But she was his niece, and somewhere in her bloodstream there must have been a speck of His blood. That had to make her smarter than an ordinary person.

I tried suicide. I wasn’t sure of Adi’s love at the beginning. My first attempt was serious. The second wasn’t.

I shot myself in the neck with my father’s army pistol while I was still working at Hoffmann’s photography shop. We were getting pictures to develop showing Adi posing with glamorous women. Smiling at their adoring faces, his lips parted, his eyes fixed with arched eyebrows, his chest leaning forward… I saw the smile all over his body.

Unfamiliar with guns and not as accurate as Geli, I missed my carotid artery. As I was losing blood, I could only think: “I’ll never see him again.” Being so weak, I was still able to call Dr. Plate, Hoffmann’s physician, because I knew Adi would immediately be informed.

Adi was very moved by such passionate devotion and wrote me a tender letter scrawled in pencil that I read in the hospital just before his visit. “Dear Evchen, in your eyes, you see me as unromantic. How can a serious politician deal with this label? If I were an office clerk with little ambition but sorting files, it would all be very simple. Think of the life we can have together in the pursuit of a great Germany, one long truth!” I kissed his signature.

On the second attempt, well, I heard Adi call out Geli’s name in his sleep and fearing I’d never be free of the hold she had on him, I shoved many sleeping pills in my mouth. The specter of never seeing him again and leaving behind “that one long truth” made my mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow them.

Geli’s suicide was caused by many things completely different from me. Goebbels told me the whole story, how Adi hated to take time to urinate so he seldom did when busy delivering speeches. This caused acute urine retention. Making himself into the Führer, and the crude act of urinating disagreed with the image of a super being. It took all of his concentration to be a leader. Geli never understood that.

The doctors, Magda informed me, prescribed a home catheter for Adi, and he became very skillful at inserting the flexible tube. In doing this, he experienced arousal and thought that if the beautiful Geli did the procedure for him, it would save time as he was busy with meetings. The catheter could relieve not only his urine but his spurt as well.

Geli told Bormann that Adi made her do the most terrible things, but Bormann, the insensitive gray eminence, had little patience with a silly squeamish girl. Why was the Führer attracted to a girl who was reluctant to enjoy the satisfaction she could give the future leader of the world?

Using a rubber catheter, Magda told me with excitement, caused Geli to get nauseated and she had rubber fumes on her fingers that wouldn’t wash off. She was unable to pick up a slice of bread to eat as food began to smell like rubber. They tried a variety of other catheters, one metal, one plaster, one with a wing tip, one with three prongs, one with an inflatable bag. But Geli couldn’t enter into the process with the kind of enthusiasm Adi needed. Finally, a party carpenter constructed a thin hollow reed that looked more attractive than rubber, had a forest scent, and was smooth and sanded to a soft golden tone. Though this contrivance looked and smelled appealing, Geli had to not only insert the reed but also blow mouthfuls of warm water into it. After several weeks of puffing into such an appliance each day, Geli committed suicide.

Adi was given the awful news of Geli’s death at the Deutscher Hof Hotel in Nuremberg and was so deeply disturbed that he couldn’t get up in the morning. Goebbels had to stay with him two days and two nights afraid he would take his own life. The Nazi Party was on the rise, but Adi was suddenly helpless and depressed. Why had she done this to him? Why? He gave her everything, all the money she wanted, all the clothes. Giving her gifts was like giving things to himself. And there were times he thought she had adjusted to the reed-catheter. Once he detected shudders similar to a delicate climax as she slowly withdrew the reed, warm water still in her mouth and dripping from her lips. But what was he to think now?

Could Geli have been ill? In some kind of physical pain? Trying to save him from distress?

Goebbels said Geli’s death made Adi more lonely than he had been since the death of his mother. Giving in to loneliness is a weakness a leader can’t afford to have. A woman is expected to provide a love that endures. Being the one constant female in his life now makes me happy.

Adi desperately needed something of Geli. Because she left him so suddenly, he couldn’t stand the thought of her simply disappearing. He sought the help of a very educated man, Dr. Mengele, who was working on important research regarding the Dionne quintuplets and other cases of dual births. When Adi asked the doctor if it were possible to extract something of Geli for him, the doctor readily agreed.

The doctor was eager to begin right away on Geli’s abdominal cavity as he had perfected the technique of lumbar punctures and was eager to dissect. Although preferring to work in vivo, Mengele had heard a speech Adi gave on the superior race and was so impressed he wanted to accommodate this brilliant leader.

The doctor found the mucus in Geli’s stomach inflamed and few gastric juices probably caused her pain and trouble in digestion. This, perhaps, was the reason she wished to end it all.

When the doctor held up Geli’s large intestines, Adi said they were a marvelous reddish-pink, a color he had often used in his painting of poppies. His precious niece’s intestines, he decided, would become a memorial streamer.

Geli’s intestines were floated in a pond of preservatives along with tiny carved ivory flowers and black metallic swans in Adi’s private garden in Munich. When he visited Geli’s glorious “streamer,” Magda overheard him talk to her sweetly about the latest fashions in Berlin and how he flushed out butterflies in the brush sending them fluttering like colorful confetti into the air. If a horrible storm caused by all the fire-bombings hadn’t torn the pond out of the ground and trampled its contents against the hills and gorges, the floating streamer would still be there. So Geli died a second time, this time not by her own hand.

Adi no longer has acute urine retention. His stress has shifted to his bowels. No doubt Geli would have hated that, too, as I often have to use a rectal syringe. You can actually pummel the bowels without hurting them since they have no pain nerves. I can be rough and please him without worry. When the war was going well, the muscles around his anus relaxed. Now those muscles are tense, and it’s a struggle to reach the rectum. Sometimes I have to dig out his stools with my fingers. As feces are mostly water, that sometimes makes it easier. While I gyrate the syringe, he moans in pleasure and reaches his peak. A cleaner bowel is cleaner blood, he always says. Blut und Ehre. Blood and honor.

4

IT’S A CONDITION OF THE BUNKER that important personnel come and go as if thick concrete and the deep underground encourage constant movement. For here below Berlin is a stockpile of great minds quarried from the German earth.

Hanging on the walls are army gas masks for Adi worries about gas since his injury in World War I and is always ordering an overabundance of new filters for them. The large isinglass goggles are frightening looking, and I hate the stinking smell of rubber.