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uncle to make sure she was being good. His fists were clenching and unclenching. His hands were fair and hairless. One ankle-high shoe was still on the floor, the other was rucking the quilt. She squatted and stared underneath the bed. A high stack of magazines was there. She pulled out the top one and held it in her lap as she sat on the shellacked planks of the floor. She traced the big letters on the front cover.
    “Ostara,” her uncle said.
    She looked up and found him critically watching her from the feather bed with the Those are mine face that she often got from her brother.
    “Ostara is the ancient Germanic goddess of the spring.”
    With great effort she turned the pages of the magazine, finding a puzzling cartoon of a pretty blond woman whose clothes had fallen off and who seemed to be crying and hitting with her fists a hairy human being or ape who seemed to be trying to lie on top of her. “What’s happening?” she asked.
    “It’s what Jews do to Aryan virgins. You wouldn’t understand.”
    She turned a page. “What’s it say?”
    “‘Are you blond?’” he read. “‘Then you are a culture-creator and a culture supporter! Are you blond? If so, dangers threaten you!’” Hitler got down on the floor beside his niece and held up other magazines in the stack. “The ‘Race and Welfare’ issue,” he said. “And here’s one on ‘Sexual Physics, or Love as Odylic Energy.’” Then he guided Geli’s forefinger under the fancy lettering as he read the front page of another: “‘The Dangers of Women’s Rights and the Necessity for a Masculine Morality of Masters.’” Hitler went to another. “And here’s my favorite, Angelika. ‘Judging Character Through the Shape of Skulls.’”
    “Why is it your favorite?”
    Hitler’s hands fell upon her head and felt all around underneath her hair, saying in a ferocious voice, “Because I can tell if Angelika’s naughty or nice just by feeling the knobs on her noggin!”
    Hitler’s niece squealed with delight.

    When Angela got back to the flat with groceries, she found them still on the floor, wildly laughing as their hands inched along each other’s flushed faces. “I have food for us,” she said.
    Hitler raked a hand through his flowing hair as he sat up. “What kind?”
    “Leberkäs, sauerkraut, and strudel.”
    “And coffee?”
    “Chicory. And milk. Many things.”
    She started putting the food away and Hitler held Geli close as he stage-whispered, “This is what it is to have a mother!”

C HAPTER T HREE
    T HE C ORPORAL AND THE S CHATZKAMMER , 1919
    Late in the first year of the Great War, Angela was pawning an emerald necklace for food money when she happened upon a shop window that displayed a famous press photograph taken in München in August 1914. The photo featured a huge crowd gathered at the Feldherrnhalle, the Hall of the Field Marshals, to register their wild enthusiasm for the alignment of Germany with Austria in a war against Russia and Serbia, a conflict that they thought would be over within a few weeks. And Angela was surprised to find Adolf there in the front of that rally, white-faced and frail, his hair now short, his hat lifted high in a cheer, happier than she’d ever seen him. She found out that Adolf had formally petitioned Ludwig III for permission to enlist in the Bavarian army and, in spite of his general unhealthiness, had been accepted as a volunteer. Even though it meant forfeiting his Austrian citizenship, Hitler was overjoyed, and he later wrote Angela, “I am not ashamed to say that I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time.”
    Angela in fact got few letters from her half-brother in the four years of the war, but Hitler was in regular correspondence with his former landlords, Josef and Elisabeth Popp, and they often forwarded news of him to the Raubals in Wien. And so they heard from Elisabeth Popp that