21
Gerlich residence
Haidhausen
“EVEN DURING HIS TIME serving faithfully in the List Regiment of the Imperial Army on the Belgium front, comma, Hitler was known to be at odds with most of the other officers, period. He was aloof, intense, judgmental, puritanical, even unwilling to undress around the other soldiers. Period, with commas between the adjectives.”
“I know where to put commas, Fritz,” said Sophie, Gerlich’s wife of eleven years, looking up at her husband, her fingers poised over the keys of the portable Underwood typewriter on their circular oak kitchen table.
Since the attack, Gerlich had been reluctant to spend much time at his office at the Illustrierte Sonntag, preferring instead to work out of a vacant flat owned by a landlord friend or, in the evenings, at home with Sophie in their small bungalow near the city center in Haidhausen.
“Hitler doesn’t like to undress in front of others?” Sophie asked him now. “Why?”
“Hard to be sure. The soldiers I interviewed said his genitalia were ‘freakishly underdeveloped,’ that he only had one testicle. He won’t even let doctors examine him.”
“Oh, my.”
“Or maybe his modesty owed to his unnatural affection for his mother, whose death appeared to be the end of him until the war came along and gave him some direction. All I know for certain is that his personal life is bizarre, and his sexual appetites run to the extreme, if not Oedipal.”
“If not pedophilic,” agreed Sophie. “And your theory is that these sexual oddities are a window into his character?”
“Wouldn’t Freud say so? But he wants the public to see only a serious, patriotic man committed to a cause, not the sadistic, twisted, manipulative savage beneath.”
Sophie scooted her chair to face him. “Fritz, you’re worrying me.”
“I’m worrying you?” He put a hand on his heart. “Hitler should be worrying you.”
“He is, love. He worries me a great deal.” She walked over to him and put her hands on his chest. “My serious journalist, with the pen that’s mightier than the sword.”
“Don’t make light.”
She rose up on her toes and kissed him softly.
“Don’t lose your sense of humor, Fritz,” she whispered.
“Don’t become so possessed with that man that you lose everything else about you.
You’re not eating. You’re not sleeping. Even when you’re here, you’re not.
You walk around mumbling this or that about him. ”
“I just can’t sit back and watch our nation be deluded by this charlatan, Soph.
They think he’s giving them something to believe in.
He’s not. The only thing he believes in, besides his hatred of the Jews and the Communists, is that he should hold absolute power.
I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to do everything in my power to stop him. ”
He looked at her, saw the concern in her expression.
“You know who you married, Sophie.”
“Yes, I am well aware of the man I married. Just promise me you’ll be careful, Fritz.” She tapped his nose with her finger. “That tiger you’re poking may one day be let out of his cage.”