Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (52 page)

In October 1929, Geli gave up her room in a boarding house and moved into Hitler’s Prinzregentenstrasse apartment—a sign of just how close their relationship had become. She was given a cheery corner room which she could decorate as she pleased. Hitler’s household personnel—Anni and Georg Winter, his former landlady Maria Reichert and his cleaning woman, Anna Kirmair—were not exactly thrilled about their new flatmate. They thought Geli was exploiting her uncle’s generosity, and that he was spoiling her. Geli had quit studying medicine to train, in accordance with her uncle’s wishes, as a singer. To that end, Hitler hired the bandleader Adolf Vogl, whom he had known since May 1919, and paid for private lessons at a singing school.
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In July 1930, Hitler and Geli travelled together with the Bechsteins to the Bayreuth Wagner Festival and then visited the Passion Play in Oberammergau.
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But Geli does not seem to have taken her singing career very seriously. She preferred to amuse herself in the company of others and read the serialised novels in the newspapers—something Hitler often complained about.
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As far as we can tell, Geli Raubal increasingly came to view life on Prinzregentenstrasse as a burden. Here she was entirely subjected to her uncle’s control. His solicitousness shaded over into rules and coercion. Hitler continued to buy her fashionable clothing and shoes without complaint,
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but when the amateur photographer wanted to buy herself an expensive Leica camera to replace her Rolleiflex, Hitler refused. “Geli sulked and they finished the walk without her saying a word,” reported Julius Schaub, who had served as Hitler’s “constant companion” since 1925 and who would be promoted to his personal assistant in 1933.
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Hitler jealously watched over his niece’s every step and increasingly sought to restrict her freedom. She enjoyed going out, but when she wanted to attend a carnival ball in 1931, Hitler only gave in after Heinrich Hoffmann and Max Amann agreed to serve as chaperones. When Hoffmann reproached him, Hitler answered: “What Geli sees as coercion is simply caution. I want to prevent her from falling into the hands of someone unworthy.”
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That was no doubt an excuse: Hitler did not want to share Geli with anyone else.

Thus, as Henriette Hoffmann observed, the carefree young thing gradually became melancholic and introverted,
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and quarrels erupted with increasing frequency on Prinzregentenstrasse. In mid-September 1931, Hitler forbade his niece from making a trip to Vienna, which she probably intended as a way of escaping her uncle’s watchful eye for a time. On the evening of 17 September, Julius Schaub’s wife, who went with her to a theatre production, described her as “absent, disconsolate, almost tear-stained.”
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The following day, before Hitler left for a campaign trip to northern Germany, the two butted heads again, and after Hitler’s departure, Geli locked herself in her room. When she failed to appear for breakfast on 19 September and did not respond to knocks at her door, Anni Winter summoned her husband. Together they broke down the door and were greeted by a terrible sight. Geli lay sprawled on the floor, her nightgown covered in blood. Her head rested on one arm; the other was outstretched towards the sofa, where they found a 6.35-millimetre Walther pistol.
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The Winters immediately notified Hess, who hurried to the apartment with Nazi Party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz. Hess then returned to the Brown House, where he tried to telephone Hitler.

As was his wont, Hitler had spent the previous night at the Deutscher Hof hotel in Nuremberg and continued his journey north that morning. Shortly after he had set off, his car was overtaken by a taxi. A bellboy told Hitler that a Mr. Hess from Munich urgently needed to speak with him. Hitler’s entourage turned around, and Hitler rushed to a phone booth. Heinrich Hoffmann, who had followed him, listened in. “Hitler exclaimed hoarsely, ‘That’s terrible,’ ” Hoffmann recalled after the war. “He then screamed down the phone line: ‘Hess, give me a clear answer yes or no—is she still alive? Hess, on your honour as an officer, don’t lie to me. Hess! Hess!’ Hitler stumbled out of the telephone booth. His hair hung down, dishevelled, in his face. His gaze was unsteady. I only saw him like that on one other occasion: in the Reich Chancellery bunker in April 1945.”
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Even if we assume that Hoffmann wanted to make his account as dramatic as possible, the news of Geli Raubal’s death no doubt shook Hitler to the core. He raced back to Munich. His car was pulled over by the police in the town of Ebenhausen—the speeding ticket was preserved.
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Hitler arrived back on Prinzregentenstrasse at 2:30 p.m. and was able to see the body before it was taken to the viewing hall at Munich’s Eastern Cemetery. By that time the police investigation had already been concluded.
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Only after Hess and Schwarz had left the apartment at around 10:15 a.m. did Georg Winter call the police. Two detective superintendents and a police doctor were sent to investigate. Their report concluded that “death was caused by a gunshot wound to the lung and rigor mortis indicated that it had occurred many hours (17–18) previously.” All the evidence, as the officers saw it, pointed to suicide, even though there was no note or anything expressing suicidal intentions in Raubal’s room. “There was only a partially completed letter to a female friend in Vienna on the table, which contained no indication of extreme world-weariness,” the report noted.
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When questioned, Hitler’s servants could think of no reasons why Raubal might have killed herself, although Maria Reichert did say that she had been “very emotional of late.”
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That afternoon, after arriving at his apartment, Hitler had already overcome the initial shock, making a composed impression on the police officers who interviewed him. While he admitted quarrelling with his niece about her future, he played down the significance of the fight. Geli, he said, had wanted to continue her education in Vienna since she did not feel up to being a singer. “I agreed on the condition that her mother, who lives in Berchtesgaden, accompanied her,” Hitler said. “When she said she didn’t want that, I came out against the plan. She must have been very angry about it, but she did not get particularly upset and said goodbye to me quite calmly when I left on Friday afternoon.” His niece had been “the only relative he was close to,” Hitler told the police, and her death had shaken him badly. The police report then recorded a remark which suggested that he was already thinking about the political fallout of Raubal’s death: “And now this had to happen to
him
.”
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Hitler’s political adversaries were not above making use of the scandal. In an article entitled “A Mysterious Affair,” the Social Democratic
Münchener Post
tried to sow doubt that Raubal’s death had been a suicide. The newspaper reported that a massive row had broken out in Hitler’s apartment because his niece had announced her engagement. The
Post
also claimed that Raubal had been found with a broken nose and other serious injuries.
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The article prompted the state prosecutor to order the police doctor to re-examine the body. His conclusions were unambiguous: aside from the gunshot wound to Raubal’s chest, the body revealed no signs of violence—to the nose or anywhere else. The two women employed by the city to take care of bodies in the morgue confirmed these findings.
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In a denial written on the evening of 21 September and published by the
Post
the following day, Hitler rejected such speculations as falsehoods. His niece had wanted to travel to Vienna “to have a vocal coach reassess her voice.” There had been “no scene” and “no excitement,” Hitler attested, when he left the apartment on 18 September.
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Still, rumours about the causes of Raubal’s death persisted. According to one, Hitler had his niece murdered by the SS because she had got pregnant by a Jewish university student. Another held that Hitler had killed Raubal himself in a fit of rage—an equally absurd idea since he was in Nuremberg at the time.
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The idea that Raubal’s death had been an accident—that she had been playing around with Hitler’s pistol and unintentionally pulled the trigger—also enjoyed currency. Winifred Wagner believed in this story, and Hitler himself appears to have found some consolation in it. When she was interviewed by American investigators in Berchtesgaden in May 1945, Angela Raubal told them that an accident was the most likely explanation for her daughter’s death because Geli had had no reason to commit suicide.
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The accident thesis is hardly plausible, however, since we know from Henriette Hoffmann that Geli Raubal was well acquainted with Hitler’s pistol. The two women had even done target practice with it near Munich.
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If all the signs point towards a suicide, why did Raubal kill herself? Contemporaries and historians have racked their brains over this question. Some have tried to establish a connection between Raubal’s death and Hitler’s allegedly abnormal sexual proclivities. One key witness for this theory is Otto Strasser, who told representatives of the American Office of Strategic Studies in 1943 that Hitler had compelled Raubal to engage in perverse sexual practices and spiced up his tale with a series of disgusting details.
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In his memoirs, Hanfstaengl also contended that Raubal had told him: “My uncle is a monster. No one can imagine the things he expects of me.” Hanfstaengl illuminated this somewhat cryptic statement with an anecdote. On the way home after an evening the three of them had spent together, Hanfstaengl wrote, Hitler had issued wild threats against his enemies and underscored his words with a resounding crack of his riding crop. Hanfstaengl happened to be watching Raubal’s face and was shocked to see an “expression of fear and disgust…that distorted her face at this whistling sound.”
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This was Hanfstaengl’s none-too-subtle way of insinuating that Geli Raubal was the victim of Hitler’s sado-masochistic lust. But Hanfstaengl also invented pornographic drawings by Hitler that allegedly showed Raubal in poses “that every professional model would have refused [to adopt].”
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Other observers have speculated that Raubal might have been jealous because Hitler had been courting other women and she feared that she was “beginning to lose her power over ‘Uncle Alf.’ ”
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But that would only be plausible if we assume that Geli Raubal had developed a deeper, romantic affection for Hitler—of which there is no evidence. It seems that the question of Raubal’s motives will never be definitively answered. Most likely, Raubal felt unable to live up to the expectation of becoming a singer and was worn down by Hitler’s need to control her, which restricted her freedom and hemmed in her own initiative. She may have felt that Prinzregentenstrasse was her “golden cage.”
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Perhaps, in an increasingly intolerable situation, she saw no other way out than to take her own life. At her mother’s request, her body was taken to Vienna and buried on 23 September in the city’s central cemetery.

—

Hitler did not attend the funeral, retreating instead for several days to the house of the
Völkischer Beobachter
publisher, Adolf Müller, on Tegernsee Lake. In his memoirs, his companion Heinrich Hoffmann remembered Hitler as seeming like a “totally broken man.” There were even fears that Hitler might harm himself, and his chauffeur Julius Schreck confiscated his pistol. For a time Hitler was said to have even considered giving up his political career.
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That, at least, was the story, which also found its way into serious literature on Hitler. Joachim Fest wrote that “for weeks Hitler seemed close to a nervous breakdown and repeatedly decided to withdraw from politics.”
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But that idea does not accord with the fact that by 24 September, Hitler was already meeting with Goebbels and Göring in Berlin. Reportedly he was more withdrawn than usual but seemed fully in control of himself. And that evening he spoke in top form to 10,000 supporters in Hamburg.
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Two days later, he travelled to Vienna incognito and laid flowers on Geli Raubal’s grave.

His niece’s death no doubt affected Hitler deeply, and his grief was real, not put on for show. He kept her room in Prinzregentenstrasse unchanged, and his servants were required to keep a fresh bouquet of flowers there at all times. Later, Hitler commissioned Munich sculptor Ferdinand Liebermann to create a bronze bust of Raubal. On the first anniversary of her death, Hitler visited her grave, accompanied by his half-sister and Goebbels. But after that, his period of mourning was over. The whole affair was never again directly mentioned in his entourage.
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