Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (51 page)

At the time, Reiter was 16, Hitler 37 years old. Like his father, Hitler preferred younger women, and he made no secret of it: “There is nothing better than educating a young thing,” he would declare in 1942. “A girl of 18, 19, 20 years is as malleable as wax. A man needs to be able to put his stamp on a girl. Women themselves want nothing different!”
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That was obviously Hitler’s rationalisation for the problem he had with women of his own age, who displayed self-confidence, were well educated and let him know that they saw through his charming but artificial poses. Encounters with such women stirred feelings of inferiority, as he had displayed by his nonplussed behaviour when interviewed by Dorothy Thompson in 1931.
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With “Mimi,” “Mizzi” or “Mitzerl,” as he soon called his new acquaintance, Hitler could play the role of the vastly superior, paternal friend. He courted her, inviting her and her sister to an NSDAP event in the Deutsches Haus and devoting his entire attention to her at the subsequent private reception. In response to the hotel owner’s daughter’s somewhat indiscreet question as to why he was not married, Hitler declared that he “first had to rescue the German people lying on the ground.” Reiter remembered Hitler touching her legs with his knee and stepping firmly on her toes with his foot as he said this. Such rather crude advances continued later in her sister’s apartment, when Hitler suddenly placed himself in front of her with a penetrating glare and asked: “Don’t you want to give me a kiss goodnight?” When Reiter resisted, protesting that she had never kissed a man, the change in Hitler’s manner was instantaneous: “He pursed his lips, and his gaze lost the warmth it had just had,” Reiter reported.

There is some evidence that Reiter’s story was genuine. Henriette Hoffmann—the young daughter of Hitler’s court photographer Heinrich and later wife of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach—described a similar incident. Hoffmann claimed that one evening in her father’s apartment Hitler approached her after the other guests had left: “Herr Hitler wore an English trench coat, holding a grey velour hat in his hand, and said something that wasn’t like him at all. He asked very seriously: ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ ” Henriette Hoffmann, too, rejected this advance: “No please, Herr Hitler, I really can’t.” In response, “He said absolutely nothing, rapped the palm of his hand with his riding crop and slowly descended the stairs to the front door.”
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How should we interpret this type of behaviour? Apparently, despite all his charm, Hitler was unable to approach women confidently in any way that went beyond the mere exchange of pleasantries. His lack of experience may have played a role in this, but it may also have been an inability or unwillingness to empathise with the wishes and needs of the women he fancied. Thus Hitler launched sudden advances and then turned his back equally abruptly, if his clumsy forays did not meet with approval. He seemed to have lacked an internal emotional compass.

Despite being rejected, Hitler did not end his relationship with Maria Reiter. He accompanied her to her mother’s grave, suggested that they use the informal “du” form of address and asked her to call him “Wolf”—a privilege enjoyed by few women other than Winifred Wagner. They did eventually kiss, although if we believe Reiter’s account, it came about under strange circumstances. Maurice had chauffeured the couple to a forest behind the Bischofswiesen area of Berchtesgaden. He remained in the car, while Hitler led the 16-year-old girl into a clearing, placed her in front of a tall fir tree and stared at her “as a painter does at a model.” Then, according to Reiter, Hitler pulled her close: “He took a firm hold of my neck and kissed me. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Lothar Machtan has interpreted this scene as proof of Hitler’s homosexuality, asking, “How could he know what he was doing if desire did not show him the way?”
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Another interpretation is more plausible: Hitler may have felt desire but was uncertain how far he should take it. Perhaps he feared that his new girlfriend, if things went beyond one kiss, would make demands on him. In January 1942, he recalled the incident: “Miezel was pretty as a picture. I knew a great many women back then, and many of them liked me a lot. But why should I get married and leave behind a wife?…Back then, this thought led me to pass up on several chances. I forcibly restrained myself.”
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Maria Reiter seems to have believed that Hitler’s intentions were serious. After he left Berchtesgaden, she wrote him long letters. Most of the time, he responded with brief postcards with basically the same message: “My dear child! Receive my most heartfelt greetings. I think of you all the time. Yours, Wolf.”
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In the few letters he wrote to her, he complained about being overworked and having too little time for his private life while pledging his enduring affection: “Yes, child, you truly don’t know what you mean to me and how fond I am of you.”
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When Reiter turned 17 on 23 December 1926, Hitler visited her and stayed for Christmas. She gave him two sofa cushions embroidered with swastikas; he gave her a leather-bound two-volume edition of
Mein Kampf
. In late 1927, she visited him in Munich, but nothing came of it aside from an innocent tête-à-tête in his apartment on Thierschstrasse. Then, in the summer, Hitler abruptly ended their romance after party headquarters received anonymous letters accusing him of rape. In 1930, Reiter married a hotelier and moved to Seefeld in Tyrol. She later said she visited Hitler in Munich in the summer of 1931, claiming to have spent the night in his apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse, but this story should be viewed sceptically. By that point, there was a new woman in Hitler’s life: his niece Geli Raubal.

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None of the women in Hitler’s life fired the imaginations of both contemporaries and later historians as much as Raubal. Konrad Heiden called her “Hitler’s great lover,” and most other commentators shared the view that Hitler’s niece was the only woman, other than his mother, for whom he developed deeper feelings.
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The speculations and rumours surrounding Hitler and Raubal make it difficult to view the subject objectively. What kind of relationship did they have, and was it really so central in Hitler’s biography?

Angela (Geli) Raubal was born on 4 June 1908 in Linz, a few months after the 19-year-old Hitler had moved to Vienna.
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She was the second of three children from the marriage of Hitler’s half-sister Angela with the tax official Leo Raubal. Leo died in 1910, leaving the family, which at times included Hitler’s sister Paula, in difficult financial straits. The situation only improved when Angela Raubal took up the position of director at a home for female apprentices in Vienna in October 1915. Her ambition was to ensure that her children got a good education. After primary school, Geli became one of the first girls to get a degree from Linz’s prestigious, university-track
Akademisches Gymnasium
in June 1927. Three years previously, she and her older brother Leo had visited their now-famous uncle in Landsberg. There, prison guard Franz Hemmrich related, Hitler had greeted her with a hug and given her a “hearty kiss on the lips.”
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After she graduated, Hitler invited her entire class to Munich. Geli stayed at the Bruckmanns’ villa, and she and her class were treated to an appearance by the NSDAP chairman at afternoon tea. “We stood in rows before him,” recalled Geli’s classmate Alfred Maleta, who would go on to become the president of the Austrian National Council after the war. “He greeted every one of us with a firm handshake, an audible click of his heels and a penetrating stare with his watery blue eyes, which was obviously meant to be enthralling.”
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In August 1927, Geli Raubal took part in the Nuremberg rally, and afterwards Hitler went on tour through Germany with her, her mother Angela and Rudolf Hess. “The Tribune’s young niece is a tallish, attractive teenager, always cheerful and as clever with words as her uncle,” Hess wrote. “Even he can hardly compete with her quick-witted mouth.” Hitler wanted her to attend university in Germany, but was convinced that “she would barely get past the second semester before someone would marry her.”
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Henriette Hoffmann also described Geli as “tall, cheerful and self-confident,” adding: “Photos didn’t do justice to her charm. None of the pictures my father took captured her.”
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In the autumn of 1927, she moved to Munich, where she began studying medicine.

In no time, the attractive young woman was the much-admired centre of attention among the regulars at Café Heck. Her “tomboyish, easy-going manner” captivated the men, Heinrich Hoffmann recalled. “When Geli was at the table, everything revolved around her,” Hoffmann wrote, “and Hitler never tried to dominate the conversation. Geli was a magician. Thanks to her natural ways, entirely free of flirtatiousness, her mere presence put everyone present in the best of spirits. Everyone rhapsodised about her, most of all her uncle, Adolf Hitler.”
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The same was true of Emil Maurice. The chauffeur always hovered around Geli whenever he drove Hitler’s entourage to a picnic on Chiemsee Lake in the big black Mercedes. Maurice would get his mandolin out of the trunk and sing Irish folk songs. Hitler never went swimming. At most, he would remove his shoes and socks and carefully bathe his pale feet in the shallow water. Geli and Henriette Hoffmann, whom she befriended, would seek out a spot concealed behind bushes and go skinny-dipping. “We swam naked and let the sun dry us off,” Hoffmann recalled. “We wanted to get a complete tan.”
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Shortly before Christmas 1927, Maurice told his boss about his feelings for Geli, which she apparently reciprocated, effectively asking Hitler for her hand in marriage. Hitler reacted with a fit of rage. He had never seen his boss so angry, Maurice later recalled: “I seriously think he would have liked to shoot me dead at that moment.”
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Hitler threatened to send Geli back to her mother in Vienna, if a number of conditions were not met. Maurice and Geli, who had secretly got engaged, were to submit to a two-year trial phase. “Remember, Maurice,” Geli wrote in her Christmas letter to her fiancé, “we have two full years in which we can only kiss now and then under the watchful eye of U[ncle] A[dolf].” But they submitted to Hitler’s will, with Geli writing, “I’m so happy I can stay with you.”
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Hitler, however, had no intention of permitting her any further contact with his chauffeur. In January 1928, Maurice was fired without notice and quickly became a
persona non grata
.
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We can only speculate about the reason for Hitler’s furious reaction. Maurice believed it was jealousy. Hitler, he thought, had fallen in love with his niece, “but it was a strange, unacknowledged love.”
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By contrast, Hitler’s long-time housekeeper Anni Winter thought that Hitler was only trying to live up to his role as Geli’s guardian: “He only wanted the best for her. She was a foolish girl.”
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Whatever the case may have been, from the spring of 1928, Geli was an integral part of Hitler’s entourage. She accompanied her uncle to the cinema, the theatre and the opera, and even when she went shopping, he trotted behind her “like a patient lamb.”
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In July, the two spent several days on holiday with Goebbels and Angela Raubal, on the island of Heligoland.
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It went without saying that Geli was in attendance in November 1928, when Hitler made his first appearance in Berlin’s Sportpalast. “The boss is here,” noted Goebbels. “Energised as ever. With his pretty niece you’d almost want to fall in love with.”
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Geli spent Christmas 1928 with Hitler on the Obersalzberg at Haus Wachenfeld, which her mother now ran. There they also celebrated her twenty-first birthday in June 1929.
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In early August she was seen again at Hitler’s side at the Nuremberg rally. Goebbels was happy: “Geli Raubal. A beautiful child. Had dinner with her, her mother and the boss in his room. We laughed a lot.”
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Without doubt, Geli Raubal enjoyed being the centre of attention and having the men in Hitler’s circle compete for her favour. She would have been flattered that “Uncle Alf,” as she called Hitler, was so fond of her and allowed her to participate in his breathtaking rise in 1929–30 and the aura of power and success it brought. Hitler loved appearing in public at her side. As Maurice put it, Hitler was “proud of being seen with such an enchanting person.”
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But as much as Hitler enjoyed the company of this young woman, he avoided any displays of intimacy even in his innermost circle. “Never did Hitler reveal his feelings in society,” Heinrich Hoffmann observed. “He always behaved completely correctly towards Geli. It was only his gaze and his warm tone that betrayed his affection.”
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Nonetheless, Geli Raubal’s constant presence at Hitler’s side gave rise early on to rumours within the Nazi Party. In October 1928, Goebbels wrote in his diary that soon-to-be Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann had told him “crazy things” about Hitler: “He and his niece Geli and Maurice. The tragedy that is woman. It’s enough to make you desperate. Why do we all have to suffer so because of this woman? I have complete faith in Hitler. I understand everything. The true and the untrue.”
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But Goebbels himself repeatedly complained that Hitler got distracted from serious business by “too many stories with women.”
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There is no way of settling whether Hitler had intimate relations with his niece. Opinion was divided within his circle. Hanfstaengl was convinced of the “incestuous character” of the relationship, writing that Hitler’s “inhibited sex drive found willing fulfilment and completion” in Geli’s “directionless libidinousness.”
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By contrast, on the basis of conversations with Anni Winter, Christa Schroeder felt confident that Hitler had loved Geli without ever having had sex with her.
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