The relationship between Adolf Hitler and his half-niece, Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal, remains one of the darkest and most closely guarded chapters of his personal life. Geli was born on June 4, 1908, in Linz, then part of Austria-Hungary. Her father, Leo Raubal, was a tax officer, and her mother, Angela, was a half-sister of Adolf Hitler.
Geli had two siblings: a brother, Leo, who was two years older, and a sister, Alfreda, who was two years younger. When Geli was only two years old, her father died at the age of 31. The family later moved to Vienna, where during World War One her mother Angela worked as a cook at a Jewish academic institute. Angela was described as a tall, rustic, and energetic woman who would rigorously defend Jewish students against attacks by so-called Aryan fellow students, sometimes with a trench in her hand.
Years later, Geli attended secondary school in Linz, where she was one of the first girls to graduate in 1927. Four years earlier, in 1923, Adolf Hitler had been appointed her custodian. It was not until 1924 that she met him for the first time, during a visit to Landsberg Prison, where he was serving his sentence for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8 and 9, 1923. During that attempt, Hitler and the Nazi Party led a coalition group in an effort to overthrow the German government. It was at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria that Hitler began working on his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, outlining his beliefs, political views, and plans for Germany.
Geli and her sister Alfreda accompanied their mother when she became Hitler's housekeeper in 1925. Geli was then 17 years old, and for the next six years she would remain in close contact with her half-uncle, who was 19 years her senior. Hitler was immediately taken with Geli, who was described as an unusual beauty, and from the moment she arrived he never let her out of his sight.
In 1927, Geli started studying medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and moved into a boarding house not far from Hitler's flat. Soon after enrolling, she interrupted her medical studies to train as a singer, and Hitler financed her singing lessons. After two years of housekeeping, Hitler asked his half-sister Angela to move to his larger home in the Bavarian Alps. For Geli, however, he had a different plan and asked her to stay behind and remain in his Munich apartment with him.
Geli agreed, and for the next several years it would be her and Hitler alone in the nine-bedroom Munich apartment on Prinzregentenplatz 16, not far from the Munich opera house. They maintained separate bedrooms, but those bedrooms were on the same floor. It was during this time that Geli entered Hitler's inner circle and began to socialize with many of his friends and colleagues.
The couple spent more and more time together, and some party officials began to criticize the Nazi Party leader for spending too much time with his niece and neglecting political matters. Hitler was very attracted to his half-niece, and Geli returned at least some of the affection. Many who knew the pair claimed that a constant sense of jealousy surrounded them. Hitler was jealous of Geli's beauty and the men she flirted with, and Geli was jealous of Eva Braun, a young model employed by Hitler's photographer who idolized her charismatic uncle.
While Hitler was one of Germany's top political leaders at the time, he was increasingly domineering and possessive of Geli, maintaining strict control over her personal life. He controlled her social life, dictating whom she could see and when, and prevented her from applying to music school in Vienna. In December 1927, Emil Maurice, co-founder of the SS and Hitler's chauffeur, informed his boss of his intention to marry Geli. Hitler was so infuriated when he heard the news that he dismissed Maurice from his service and forced Geli to end the relationship.
After this incident, Hitler would not allow her to go out freely with friends again and made sure that he himself or someone he trusted was always at Geli's side, whether accompanying her on shopping trips, to the cinema, or to the opera. Otto Strasser, a prominent figure in the early days of the Nazi Party, later recalled that Geli told him during a conversation in 1931 that Hitler asked her to do simply disgusting things. He added that Geli was fed up with her uncle's enormous possessive jealousy of her and complained that she was subjected to sexual perversions for Hitler's satisfaction. Strasser recalled a tearful Geli telling him that when night came, Hitler made her undress and demanded things that were extremely disgusting to her.
Not everyone, however, considered Geli to be a victim left at the mercy of her powerful uncle. Ernst Hanfstaengl, a close associate of Adolf Hitler during the early years of the Nazi Party, considered Geli a calculating opportunist who manipulated Hitler. According to Hanfstaengl, despite Hitler's obsession with his niece, she cheated on him with close members of his inner circle. Henriette von Schirach, a daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer, and wife of Baldur von Schirach, who served as head of the Hitler Youth, described Geli as rude, provocative, and rather confrontational, but of irresistible charm to Hitler, a quality that his niece took advantage of.
Because of Hitler's possessiveness and control, the couple argued all the time. On one such occasion, on September 18, 1931, they had a fierce argument as Hitler refused to allow her to go to Vienna that evening. Adolf Hitler left for Nuremberg to attend a meeting, and that was the last time he saw his beloved niece.
Geli Raubal was 23 years old when, on the morning of Saturday, September 19, 1931, her body was found on the floor of her room in the apartment by Georg Winter, the husband of Hitler's housekeeper. Geli had allegedly committed suicide and shot herself with her uncle's pistol. Rumors immediately began to circulate in the media about physical abuse, a possible sexual relationship, an infatuation by Raubal for her uncle, and even murder. The Munich Post, a socialist newspaper known for its decade-long campaign against Hitler and the Nazi Party before their ascension to power, even reported that the dead woman had a fractured nose.
Geli was not the only woman who had intimate relations with Hitler and consequently committed suicide. Mimi Reiter had tried to hang herself in 1928. Eva Braun attempted suicide in 1932 and again in 1935. Perhaps the most dramatic of these was the mysterious death of Berlin film actress Renate Müller. According to the exiled German director Adolf Tyler, Müller confessed to him that she had had a disastrous one-night stand with Hitler in which the German Chancellor rolled around on the floor begging her to fulfill his deviant sexual lust. Soon after revealing this to Tyler, Renate Müller flew out the window of a room on an upper floor of a Berlin hotel, and the death was ruled a suicide. In total, of the seven women believed to have had intimate relations with Hitler, six committed suicide or seriously attempted to do so.
After Geli's death, no autopsy was performed, and decades later, in 1985, an exhumation request to clarify the exact cause of death was rejected by the authorities. Hitler stated on the record that his niece had wanted to perform as a singer but had not been able to withstand the pressure. However, her brother Leo, who had been hiking in the mountains with Geli just a week earlier, testified that he had not noticed any signs of suicidal behavior.
According to Nazi leader Rudolf Hess, who broke the news, Hitler was devastated and fell into a deep depression. He took refuge in a house on the shores of Lake Königssee in southern Germany. Geli was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery on September 23, 1931, and Hitler did not even attend the funeral. He did, however, visit the grave three days later with a special permit from the Austrian government, as he had been denied entry to his native Austria since the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hitler kept Geli's bloodstained room as a shrine to her, filling it twice a year with flowers to commemorate her birth and her death.
The death of Geli Raubal remains one of the darkest points in Hitler's past. In life, he would later tell friends that Geli had been the only woman he had ever loved and that he wanted to marry her. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. On September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, he started the Second World War, the deadliest conflict in human history. By the end of World War II, the Nazi German regime, its allies, and collaborators had murdered six million European Jews.
Angela continued to work for her half-brother Adolf Hitler following her daughter Geli's death, but she strongly disapproved of Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun. She eventually left Berchtesgaden as a result and moved to Dresden. In spring 1945, after the destruction of Dresden in the massive air raid of February 13 to 14, Hitler moved Angela to Berchtesgaden to avoid her being captured by the Soviets. Hitler apparently had a low opinion of the intelligence of both of his sisters, calling them "stupid geese." Nevertheless, Angela spoke very highly of him even after the war and claimed that neither her brother nor she had known anything about the Holocaust.