‘W hy didn’t you believe Strasser?’ she asks.
Fritz’s hands are shaking. He has never said such things to a woman before, in any circumstance.
‘I believed his story. I did not believe his conclusions. I thought that a man who robs a house will probably not burn it. Sitting here forty years later, it is easy to draw links. Yes, Hitler was a man who had a quick temper, who beat women, who misused them sexually, a man who ordered an entire race of people to their deaths, who approved all sorts of experiments, who sacrificed millions of lives for his ambitions. I know that now. You listen to this, knowing that. It makes a difference.’
‘But?’ she asks.
‘But I did not know it then. He was a politician whose power was growing. He was not unlike so many others. We had no crystal balls. We did not know the kind of power he would gain.’
‘So I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You didn’t believe Strasser because you liked Hitler?’
‘No,’ Fritz says. ‘I did not like Hitler. Nor did I like Ernst Thälmann, the Communist, or even Hindenburg himself. I was not a political man. I still am not. I do not see other men as the answers to our problems. I see them as a reflection of who we are, and who we were. In 1931, we were not a nice people.’
‘But Strasser,’ she says again. She clearly found his argument compelling.
Fritz nods. Perhaps if he knew then what he knows now, he would have found Strasser’s argument equally compelling.
‘Strasser created many problems for me,’ Fritz says. ‘He was a well-known critic of Hitler. I also thought Strasser might have killed her to discredit Hitler and to put his own brother in power. What better way to do that than to have Hitler arrested for murder?’
‘But he said that Hitler beat the girl and her body did have whip marks when you found it.’
Fritz reaches for a cigarette. ‘And most of the NSDAP carried small whips with their uniforms. No one as yet had seen Hitler hit the girl. And all I had was one jealous man who claimed to have dated the girl, and that she told him that Hitler treated her badly.’
The girl grips the edge of her notebook. Her knuckles are turning white. ‘What about the paintings?’
‘What about them?’
‘Don’t they show Hitler’s unnatural relationship with his niece?’
‘Half-niece,’ Fritz says. ‘No one denied that he loved her. And the paintings, while explicit, showed nothing unnatural. In fact her body had no marks on it at all. I had enough information to confuse me, and nothing more.’
‘But you believed Eva Braun.’
‘I believed what she did not say.’ His smile is small, his stomach tight with tension. ‘Forgive me, but in those days it was not so unusual for a man to hit a woman.’
She pulls the notebook closer to her stomach as if protecting it. ‘What a of the physical evidence? You have said nothing about it.’
He shrugs. ‘Because there is little to tell. This case, unfortunately, was not Demmelmayer. It could not be solved with science. There was no gun. The fingerprints in the room were also from Geli, Hitler, Frau Winter, and Frau Reichert, and on the door were Max Amann’s as well as Rudolph Hess’s.’
‘But Hess never said he was there.’
Fritz smiles. She is at last seeing some things on her own.
‘No,’ he says, ‘but I knew he was there. I knew from the beginning there was a third man, and I knew it had to be a Brownshirt. When he was with the body, it became clear that Hess had been in the apartment that morning.’
The girl frowns, her fingers pulling at the spiral wire binding the notebook. ‘It seems to me that if Hitler’s prints were on the gun, then you have a case.’
‘And Frau Winter’s, and Geli’s. Remember we had an official suicide. So far nothing unusual in that.’ Then he smiles at her, taking pity on her frustration. He had felt the same. ‘No gun, no suspect, and a lot of motives. It would have been easier for all of us if her death had remained a suicide.’