On September 19, 1931, police were called to an apartment in Munich owned by Adolf Hitler. Inside, they found the body of his niece, Angela “Geli” Raubal, dead from a gunshot wound to the lung. She was twenty-three years old. Lying nearby was Hitler’s own Walther pistol.
Within hours, Hitler’s political allies moved to control the story, and within days, the official explanation was settled: suicide, caused by nerves over an upcoming music recital. The investigation was quietly closed, and the body was sent to Vienna for burial. No autopsy was ever performed. No serious inquiry ever took place.
The circumstances of Geli Raubal’s death remain one of the most contested and unresolved personal episodes in the life of the man who would soon become the dictator of Germany. Geli Raubal was born on June 4, 1908, in Linz, then part of Austria-Hungary. Her father died when she was two, and after the First World War, her mother, Angela, moved the family to Vienna. Angela was Hitler’s half-sister, and a 1943 report by the U.
S. Office of Strategic Services described her as “rather a decent and industrious person. ” In Vienna, she managed a boarding house for Jewish students and was known to defend them during anti-Semitic student riots, on occasion beating Aryan students away from the dining hall with a club. Hitler, who had not contacted his sister for years, reached out in 1919.
In 1925, Angela and her teenage daughter moved to Berchtesgaden to work as his housekeeper. By all accounts, Hitler quickly became fascinated with the seventeen-year-old Geli, despite the nineteen-year age gap and their close blood relationship. Hitler’s own parents had been first cousins, and he was known to favor very young women, describing them, according to witnesses, as being “malleable as wax” so that a man could stamp his own imprint on her. Geli was striking.
A neighbor from the 1920s recalled stopping dead in the street upon seeing her, so tall and beautiful that she was momentarily speechless. Hitler, known to Geli as “Uncle Alf,” spoke openly of his attachment. He told his chief economic adviser that a girl like Geli made him “cheerful and bright” and that an hour of her chatter freed him from all weariness. To his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, he said, “I love Geli and could marry her.
But I want to remain single. I want to stop her from falling into the hands of someone unsuitable. ” Witnesses said the interest was mutual. One housekeeper claimed, “Geli loved Hitler.
She was always running after him. ”
Hitler took Geli to restaurants, theaters, and even party meetings, apparently believing she impressed other Nazi members. But he had no intention of marrying her. He believed that appearing single boosted his popularity among women.
In 1928, he installed Geli’s mother as housekeeper at the Berghof, and in 1929, Geli moved into Hitler’s Munich apartment, enrolling at the university to study medicine. Whether she had a real choice in the arrangement is unclear. What is clear is that her life under his roof became increasingly controlled. Their relationship was turbulent, marked by jealousy on both sides.
Geli resented Hitler’s attention to a seventeen-year-old Eva Braun, whom he took for rides in his car. Hitler, in turn, took great issue with Geli’s flirtatious nature. When he discovered that Geli had become romantically involved with his chauffeur, Emil Maurice, he forced them to end the relationship and fired the chauffeur. Geli had already agreed to marry Maurice.
After that, her social life was drastically reduced. She was rarely allowed out except in Hitler’s company or that of his most trusted confidants. What exactly happened behind the closed doors of that Munich apartment has been debated ever since. Many who knew Hitler believed his obsession with Geli was sexual.
Ernst Hanfstaengl, a businessman and close friend of Hitler, claimed Geli was the one woman in his life who “went some ways towards curing his impotence. ” Others who had been close to Hitler offered a darker picture. A film actress who had been intimate with Hitler later told her director, before reportedly taking her own life, that she had been distressed by the things he required of her, including begging her to kick him. Otto Strasser, an early Nazi Party member who later became Hitler’s political opponent, described Geli’s account of Hitler’s demands as “disgusting” and said she described things he had previously encountered only in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.
A police official named Wilhelm Stöckler said Geli admitted that Hitler made her do things in the privacy of her room that sickened her. When asked why she did not refuse, she replied that she did not want to lose him to some woman who would do what he wanted. Historian Ian Kershaw later concluded that, sexual or not, Hitler’s behavior toward Geli bore all the traits of a strong sexual dependence. By 1931, Geli had become, in effect, a prisoner.
She had been taking singing lessons in Vienna, and Hitler had given her permission to return there to continue them. Then he changed his mind and forbade the trip. Several of Hitler’s relatives later claimed that the family was aware the two had long been intimate and that Geli was pregnant at the time of her death. One nephew said a housekeeper told him that Hitler and Geli argued about the Vienna trip shortly before she died, and that when pressed for a reason, Geli told her uncle she was pregnant.
No autopsy was ever performed, so the claim was never confirmed. Hitler last spoke to Geli on September 18, 1931, when he told her she could not go to Vienna. He then left for a meeting in Nuremberg. The next day, Geli was found dead.
Hitler was on the brink of political power, and the news of a woman found dead in his home, shot with his own gun, could have been disastrous. His team moved quickly. They claimed Geli had taken her own life due to nerves about an upcoming music recital. But rumors spread, including reports that the young woman had been beaten and that her nose had been shattered before death.
A brief examination by a police doctor hastily concluded suicide. The investigation was then suppressed. Nazi Party officials threatened to sue one newspaper into silence. Within weeks, most of the press had dropped the story.
Only one journalist, Fritz Gerlich, refused to let it go. He spent two years investigating Geli’s death. In March 1933, members of the SA broke into his office, assaulted him, and burned his work. He was imprisoned and executed in the summer of 1934.
Theories about what really happened have persisted for decades. Some believe Geli was killed because she knew too much about Hitler’s private sexual interests and had already confided in several people. Others believe prominent party members eliminated her as a potential problem. Many believe Hitler himself murdered her after an argument.
Hitler had an alibi, but it came from people in his own employment, and it is reasonable to consider whether they were coerced. Witnesses claimed the door to Geli’s room was locked from the inside, but the door and lock were never examined, so that detail was never verified. Geli’s sister later said she did not believe Geli had taken her own life, and neither did her mother, especially after unfinished letters were found in her room indicating she was looking forward to the future. Others still believe Geli killed herself out of jealousy over Eva Braun, or because she was pregnant either by Hitler or by her Jewish singing teacher.
In the months after Geli’s death, Hitler reportedly fell into a deep depression. He spoke of ending his own life. A confidant remarked that her death had such a devastating effect on Hitler that it changed his relationship with other people. Historian Robert Waite later wrote that, with the single exception of his mother’s death, no other event in Hitler’s personal life had hit him so hard.
Hitler did not attend Geli’s funeral. Instead, he hid away in a house on the shores of the Tegernsee, a lake in southern Germany. Her room in the Munich apartment was left untouched as a shrine, and portraits of Geli were hung in his room. Geli’s mother, Angela, stopped working for Hitler.
Many family members declined to maintain any relationship with him. William Shirer, the historian, later wrote that Hitler declared Geli the only woman he ever loved. But the questions surrounding her death have never been answered. No autopsy was performed, no crime scene was properly examined, and the investigation was shut down within days.
In the end, the only certainty is that a twenty-three-year-old woman died in Hitler’s apartment, with his gun at the scene, and that the machinery of his rising political movement ensured that the truth, whatever it was, would never fully come to light.