The place is Munich, the capital city of Bavaria in southern Germany. Inside a luxury nine-room
apartment in Prinzregentenplatz 16, a 23-year-old woman is found dead.
The date is September 18th, 1931 - six months before the presidential election. The dead
woman is Geli Raubal. The apartment is not hers - it belongs to her uncle. He happens
to be one of the men running for president, the leader of the second-largest political
party in the country: Adolf Hitler.
Angela Raubal, affectionately known to her friends and family as Geli, was born on the
4th June, 1908, in the city of Linz in northern Austria. Her father died when she was just
two years old, leaving her mother to support the family on her own.
At the end of the First World War, Geli moved with her mother and sister to a fairly plain
flat in Vienna, where her mother ran a boarding house for Jewish students. Once, during student
riots in the city, Mrs Raubal wielded a club to defend her Jewish boarders from anti-Semitic
rioters.
In 1919, Mrs Raubal unexpectedly heard from a man she’d not spoken to in a decade: her
younger half-brother, Adolf Hitler. Out of touch with his entire family, Hitler wanted
to reconnect with his half-sister, whom he remembered fondly from their childhood.
At this time, Hitler was working in Munich for German military intelligence, with particular
orders --to infiltrate the German Workers’ Party, a nationalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist
and anti-capitalist political group with barely 50 members. Following orders from army intelligence,
Hitler joined the party in September 1919 - and quickly rose to prominence, designing
the swastika banner and leaving the army in March 1920 to become a full-time Party worker.
That year, the Party rebranded itself as the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(Nazi) - the Nazi Party.
Through the 1920s, Hitler would secretly visit the Raubals in Vienna, and he developed a
close relationship with Geli, whom he invited to call him “Uncle Alf”. In 1923, Hitler
led a failed coup d’etat in Munich. He was arrested and tried for treason, and sent to
Landsberg prison in 1924, where he wrote the first part of Mein Kampf. His half-sister
made the 500 kilometre journey all the way from Vienna to visit him in jail.
Perhaps in gratitude for this support, in August 1928 Hitler hired Mrs Raubal to be
his housekeeper; Geli accompanied her mother when they left Vienna.
In Munich, Geli made quite the impression on all who met her. A deeply religious person,
she was full of life and expression. People who met her described her as tall and beautiful.
They recalled how she would stride down the street singing pleasantly and excitedly enjoy
the company of others. To the more self-guarded society of Munich, Geli was surprisingly simple
and straight-forward in her emotions and opinions. Uncle Alf took her everywhere with him, even
into political meetings, and she would enchant the men around her. And Hitler would spoil
her rotten in return, indulging her desire to become a professional singer by paying
for the finest music teachers, buying her the finest clothes and escorting her to cafés
and the cinema. He rarely left her side. To him, “[Geli was] irresistibly charming:
if Geli wanted to go swimming... it was more important to Hitler than the most important
conference.” - Henrietta Hoffman
In 1929, Hitler took a lush apartment in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse. It had nine rooms including
two kitchens and two bathrooms. He sent Geli’s mother to look after his rented mountain villa
in Obersalzberg, the Berghof near Berchtesgaden on the Austrian border. Meanwhile, 20-year-old
Geli lived alone with 40-year-old Uncle Alf - in the apartment in Munich.
It was here that her body was found on Saturday 19th September.
The details of that day are unclear, but here is the most likely version of events.
The married housekeeper couple who lived in the building thought it was odd that they
heard no movement in the apartment all morning. They knew Geli was at home, but when they
knocked on the door there was no reply. They thought they had heard a small cry from inside
the apartment, but they didn’t hear anything else to arouse their suspicions. In fact,
no witnesses reported hearing a gunshot.
The housekeepers used their key to get into the apartment but found Geli’s room locked
from the inside. Hitler was out of town on his way to an election rally in Hamburg, so
they called Nazi party officials, possibly Hitler’s right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, and
a locksmith. Hess may have been the first person to see Geli’s corpse.
Wearing a beige dress and lying in a pool of her own blood, Geli was on or by her sofa,
with a bullet through her chest and a 6.35 millimetre Walther pistol by her side. The
pistol belonged to Adolf Hitler - and he always kept it hidden in his bedroom.
Hess and the Nazi party spin doctors had to act fast. Hitler was the party leader, and
a scandal like this could desperately damage his chances in the upcoming election. They
had less than 48 hours before the Monday morning newspapers reported Geli’s death.
Hess immediately contacted Hitler, who was a two hour drive away in the Deutscher Hof
hotel in Nuremberg. Hitler hurried back so fast, he even got a speeding ticket.
According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, the Nazi party’s press liason officer, “[Hitler] was in a
state of hysteria, and left the same day” to an isolated lakeside cottage 54 kilometres
away, on the Tegernsee. Hitler ranted to Rudolf Hess about how his political career, his very
life, was all over.
Meanwhile, the Nazi Party launched the cover up.
They issued a communiqué that Hitler had gone into deep mourning after the suicide
of his niece. Twenty-five minutes later, they tried to stop the communiqué going out so
that they could change the wording from “suicide” to “a lamentable accident”. It was too
late.
Next, they contacted the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner. Years prior, he
had secured Hitler’s early release from Landsberg prison and had prevented the Nazi
party from being outlawed.
When Geli Raubal was found dead, Gürtner allowed the police doctor only a hasty look
at her body, enough to officially declare a suicide, before letting the Nazis ship the
corpse to Vienna to be buried before an autopsy could be performed by Bavarian authorities.
Later, when a public prosecutor began his own inquiry, Gürtner stopped it.
Put simply, there was never a thorough police investigation.
On Monday 21st September, the first reports appeared in the newspapers. They raised many
questions. The Müncher Post wondered why Geli had not left a suicide note. It also
asked why her nose was broken, along with other injuries that were denied by the police
doctor. As the Fränkische Tagespost reported, “[The death of this] unusual beauty [is
surrounded by] “a mysterious darkness”. Very quickly, the press speculated on the
real nature of Hitler’s relationship with Geli Raubal. The Regensburger Echo suggested
that Geli’s suicide was a result of their relationship going “beyond her strength”
to endure. Die Fanfare noted that Geli was not the first woman to commit or attempt suicide
after having intimacy with the future Führer.
Needless to say, the damage this might do to Hitler’s reputation was nigh incalculable.
Nazi Party leadership even went so far as to discuss who should replace Hitler in the
upcoming election. In court, their lawyers argued that Hitler himself “[Hitler] could
not look at the papers anymore for fear the terrible smear campaign would kill him.”
The lawyers’ argument is worth mentioning because, within days, the press stopped reporting
on the brewing scandal. Thanks to Minister Gürtner and the Nazis’ threat of lawsuits,
the newspapers went silent.
So what happened on that fateful Friday, the 18th September 1931?
Witnesses describe that the day was marked by a fierce row between Geli and Hitler - not
the first time they’d argued that week.
Geli was now 23 years old and, with Hitler’s help, studying music. One of the best places
in the world to study music was Vienna, where she had grown up. Simply put, she wanted to
return there.
Uncle Alf, however, would not have it. He had prevented her from leaving Munich before,
and there was no way he’d let her go back to Vienna of all places - the nest of Jews,
Marxists and journalists, his sworn enemies. The only thing we know for sure is a letter
to a friend she started writing that final day, after her uncle had stormed out in anger.
A letter she started but never finished.
“When I come to Vienna, hopefully very soon—we’ll drive together to Semmering an—”
That final word, “und” in German, was never completed. Geli didn’t even get so
far as the last letter before something interrupted her.
But like the Müncher Post asked, why would an apparently suicidal young woman start writing
such an optimistic, forward-looking letter to a friend?
The newspaper’s speculation was answered by none other than Hitler himself. He wrote
a statement which the Post was compelled by law to print:
“It is not true that I was having fights again and again with my niece [Geli] Raubal
and that we had a substantial quarrel on Friday or anytime before that.
It is not true that I was decidedly against her going to Vienna. I was never against her
planned trip to Vienna. She wanted to go to Vienna to have her voice
checked once again by a voice teacher. It is not true that I left my apartment on
September 18th after a fierce row. There was no row, no excitement, when I left my apartment
on that day.”
In all the varying accounts of what happened that day, Hitler is the only person who claimed
he and Geli did not quarrel. Furthermore, the reason he provides for Geli’s trip to
Vienna seems to undermine the Nazi Party’s official reason for her suicide. They said
she killed herself because she had stage fright regarding her upcoming musical debut. But
Hitler says she was going to Vienna to get practical help for that very performance.
Considering this, and the lack of a suicide note, and the existence of the unfinished
letter, it seems that Geli did not kill herself for the reason the Nazis claimed.
Historians and biographers have suggested several different reasons for Geli’s suicide
- from an illicit engagement to a Jewish music teacher, to the discovery of political corruption.
They’re all unprovable. Inevitably, therefore, we must come back to the most plausible and
the most disturbing possible reason of all: her relationship with Hitler.
During the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Göring said, “Geli’s death had such a devastating
effect on Hitler that it… changed his relationship to all other people.”
After her death, Hitler locked the door to her room and let no-one in to touch or change
anything about it. He commissioned busts and portraits of Geli, one to place in each of
his bedrooms in all of his properties. He paid for a huge plot in Vienna’s Central
Cemetery for her grave, which he paid someone to look after. If this all sounds very romantic,
it probably was. Historian William Shirer says she was “[Geli
was] the only truly deep love affair of his life.”
Joachim Fest, who wrote an early biography of Hitler, says “[Geli was] his great love.”
In her lifetime, many people - including her own mother - thought Hitler would marry his
half-niece (though he would have to obtain papal dispensation to do so). Ernst Hanfstaengl
said that “[Geli] had the effect of making [Hitler] behave like a man in love... [like
an] adolescent infatuation… [But Geli] certainly never gave any impression of reciprocating
Hitler’s twisted tendernesses.”
The “twisted tenderness” Hanfstaengl refers to was Hitler’s possessive jealousy. She
was not allowed to go out without him, and certainly could not see other men unless she
kept it a total secret from him. Any romantic encounters were quickly quashed by Hitler;
his violent self-expression often scared her.
But there may be more to their relationship. Otto Strasser, the leader of the Nazi Party’s
left wing who fled to Canada and became the Third Reich’s “Enemy Number One”, according
to Josef Goebbels, claimed that:
“[Geli] told me that Hitler loved her but that she couldn’t stand it anymore. His
jealousy was not the worst of it. He demanded things of her that were simply repulsive…
Hitler made her undress [while] he would lie down on the floor. Then she would have to
squat down over his face where he could examine her at close range, and this made him very
excited. When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded that she urinate on him and that
gave him his sexual pleasure... Geli said that the whole performance was extremely disgusting
to her.”
Historian Robert Waite said, “The idea that Hitler had a sexual perversion particularly
abhorrent to women is further supported by a statistic: of the seven women who, we can
be reasonably sure, had intimate relations with Hitler, six committed suicide or seriously
attempted to do so.”
There were also rumours that Geli was at the centre of pornographic material that was almost
made public before Hitler suppressed it. The pornographic material in question was supposedly
made by Hitler himself. Unfortunately, as tempting as it is to believe
Hitler was sexually perverted, we only have the word of his opponents, who either made
these claims after World War Two or, in the case of Otto Strasser, told them to American
Intelligence to aid his defection.
Nevertheless, in the 2008 edition of his biography of Hitler, historian Ian Kershaw argues that
although there is insufficient evidence to ever know whether or not Geli and Adolf’s
relationship was sexual in nature, Adolf’s behaviour towards Geli bore all the hallmarks
of a latent sexual dependence.
We may never know why she committed suicide. And there may be a good reason for that, because
she might not have committed suicide at all.
Fritz Gerlich was an influential right-wing journalist, a nationalist who founded Der
Gerade Weg in 1930 to oppose the Nazi party. He made his own investigation into Geli Raubal’s
death. In March 1933, he was ready to publish his findings. But before he did, on the 9th
March, a squad of fifty storm-troopers burst into the office of Der Gerade Weg, seized
all the documents they could find, and set upon Gerlich. They sent his broken spectacles,
spattered with his blood, to his wife.
The documents they seized were destroyed. Gerlich was sent to Dachau concentration camp
and kept in “protective custody”. A month later, the man who was the primary source
for Gerlich’s investigation was murdered. Two other men - a Nazi politician and a priest
- were also murdered, purportedly for talking too much about Geli Raubal’s death. Fritz
Gerlich himself was killed in prison in 1934, during the Night Of the Long Knives.
Gerlich’s colleague and biographer, Baron Erwein von Aretin, said Gerlich was killed
for one simple reason: he had discovered that Hitler murdered Geli.
We can’t know what Gerlich had uncovered, because both he and his papers were destroyed.
But it may be significant that Otto Strasser separately claimed that the Catholic priest
who helped bury Geli Raubal told him, “I never would have permitted a suicide to be
buried in consecrated ground.”
Ultimately, however, Hitler had an alibi. His household staff confirmed he left Munich
sometime after lunch on Friday 18th, and his chauffeur confirmed he drove him to the Deutscher
Hof that night and back again the next day - in the process getting a speeding ticket,
which places him in the town of Baar-Ebenhausen, about 70 kilometres north of Munich, at about
1.30pm.
But since no witness reported hearing a gunshot, we don’t know exactly when Geli died. The
question is, do we accept the official version of events put forward by the Nazis and their
collaborators, that a nervous debutante caved under performance pressure? Or do we accept
the rumours from Hitler’s opponents that his sexual proclivities drove Geli to take
her own life? Or do we infer that Geli tried to escape her life with Uncle Alf, and paid
the ultimate price?
If you asked Geli’s mother, she’d say her daughter was murdered. But, she would
insist, not by Hitler.