Lavonne Mueller - The Patient Ecstasy of Fräulein Braun

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.

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.

Fire hoses and loose specks of stone on the floor are a nuisance. Dripping water from the wall nourishes tiny brave mushrooms. All this artificial light flickers. There’s the sour smell of wet concrete—when first poured it didn’t properly dry and now steams. At night I have to tuck my nightgown under my feet to protect my legs from water bugs. Getting a direct hit, the floor shakes and it’s like we’re being pounded down a mile deeper. But I’m used to that knowing it’s much worse outside. Adi’s personal aide, Heinz Linge, is afraid to leave the Bunker even when it’s all clear. We call him a Bunker Bug. Other staff members are Bunker Bugs, too, especially those functionaries from the Berlin Ministry who thought they were so brave exchanging their brown Party uniforms for the field-gray of the Wehrmacht and who are now Bunker cowards.

We have a 60-kilowatt diesel generator, but it’s shut off from time to time to keep out all the smoke and dirt. When it’s off, I tend to get coughing fits and headaches. Potassium cartridges were tried, the type used to purify air in a submarine, but these didn’t work… probably because of our cavernous space.

Magda Goebbels calls our Bunker the “black splotch,” but she’s very clever in helping with morale as she makes us both fashionable gauze masks with sequins—beautiful red sequins that she took from her taffeta Schiaparelli gown with its leg-of-mutton sleeves. Pink silk butterflies are pinned on the masks of her children. Though cheerful, they also protect us from the occasional thick black dust. Just a simple thing like that can lift your spirits.

I have a wrought-iron chair that was once piled on a huge stack of bricks and beams in Friedrichstrasse. Two young lieutenants rescued it while salvos whistled past them and white flashes seared into their eyes. It’s a daring bunker gift. Since good cloth is impossible to find, I’ll cover it with a large linen dinner napkin. I despise all those civilians in the city up above sewing white surrender flags out of flour sacks that could be put to better use. It’s more helpful to Germany to be like the patients confined to SS hospitals who have hand grenades under their pillows ready to pull the pin and take some Russians with them. As Adi says: “Every person to his duty—even the sick.”

It was Adi’s architect, Speer, who designed my initials into a lucky four-leaf clover design, and I’m having a hard time getting the napkin to fit around the chair with the “EB” showing. This morning I received a silver butter knife from Goebbels, one he took from the gutted shell of the Café Kaiserholf. Goebbels looked so funny wearing a huge camel-hair coat in April, bowing before me, holding out this little knife like a flower, suggesting I use the blade to push the linen into each crevice of the chair.

Oak doors were conveniently catapulted by a bomb explosion to the grass above our entrance. They will be good wall panels to cover up patches of ugly moisture, along with an Egyptian blue curtain with gilded detailing that I brought from the Berghof. Bright blue is a favorite of the Empire Style that Adi so admires. Magda moved in eight pieces of furniture which included her table of enameled iron, a gift from novelist Werner Beumelburg who was among the first artists to sign the appeal in support of the Führer’s decree against elite art. I was allowed to bring a cherry wood table with eight matching chairs and a cabinet by Herr Gruber, one of the most esteemed craftsmen in Vienna. But Adi likes it best when I use things like an old trunk for a table. Magda was reading Gulliver’s Travels to her children and the little midget people in the book found a weird object in Gulliver’s pocket. It was a comb that they used for a fence. I’m forced to use my imagination even being normal, like making a milk carton into a bench. The children place toothpicks alongside their bed like medieval spikes to protect them from the enemy.