Click to read the essay entitled Hitler as Artist

 

    On the morning of Saturday 19 September 1931, the body of Hitler's twenty-three year old half-niece, Geli Raubal, was found on the floor of her bedroom, in the Munich apartment she shared with Hitler, who was then aged forty-two.  She had been killed by a single shot from Hitler's pistol, a Walther 6.35.  Her beige (1) dress was soaked in blood. 

    For the best part of eighty years the world has, more or less unquestioningly, accepted that Geli took her own life.  Hitler, it is widely held, had an alibi.  There are, it seems to me, strong reasons to doubt both these assumptions.  But before examining them, let us set out the received-wisdom of Geli's death - the version that has gained such uncritical acceptance:   

    According to the initial report of the police doctor, Dr Müller, Geli shot herself  during the evening of Friday 18 September.  Rigor mortis had set in some hours later.

    At some time during the Friday afternoon, Hitler had left Munich for Nuremberg in the company of his close companion, the Nazi Party photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.  They were driven in Hitler's Mercedes by his chauffeur at the time, Julius Schreck.  Hitler, Hoffmann and Schreck spent the night at Nuremberg's Hotel Deutscher Hof.  

    The next morning, the Saturday, Hess telephoned the hotel from Hitler's Munich apartment to say that Georg Winter, Hitler's valet-cum-butler, had broken into Geli's locked room and found her dead on the floor.  Hitler's party had already left to continue their onward journey to Hamburg, where Hitler had a long-standing Party engagement. 

    A page was sent in a taxi by the hotel to pursue Hitler's Mercedes and give him the bad news.  The Mercedes headed back to Munich so quickly it was stopped by police and a speeding ticket was issued.  When he got back to Munich, on the afternoon of the Saturday, Hitler was interviewed by Kriminaloberkommissar Sauer from Munich Police Department 5.  His staff had been interviewed earlier that morning by Sauer and Kriminalkommissar Forster. 

    Dr Müller completed his examination of the body at around 11.30 on the Saturday morning.  It was then taken to Munich's East Cemetery.  On Monday 21 September, it was released for burial in Vienna, with no post-mortem being carried out.  Geli's body was accompanied back to her homeland by her mother, Hitler's half-sister Angela Raubal.  On 23 September, at three in the afternoon, Geli was buried at the Central Cemetery in Vienna. 

    On 24 September, Hitler spoke at a Party rally in Hamburg.  He then travelled to Vienna, and at ten o' clock on the morning of 26 September, he spent twenty-five minutes at Geli's grave. 

    Geli had been given a Catholic funeral and buried in consecrated ground because the officiating priest, Father Johann Pant, who knew both Hitler and the Raubal family, did not believe she had committed suicide.

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So, what, then, is suspicious about the apparent suicide of Geli Raubal?

 

THE LACK OF A POST-MORTEM

There was no post-mortem on Geli's body, let alone an inquest.  Even Nazi

commentators admitted that in a death by shooting this was 'highly improper.' (2)    According to Otto Strasser, a Hitler intimate at the time, though an enemy later, a Munich Public Prosecutor wanted Hitler charged with murder. (3)    Ronald Hayman gives the Prosecutor's name as 'Glaser' - no first name. (4)

    The man who had authorised the speedy release of Geli's unexamined body was the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner.  Gürtner lived down the road from Hitler, at 10 Äussere Prinzregentenstrasse.  He was a political ally -  a member of the far-right Nationalist Party.  Gürtner's previous service to the Nazi cause was to have the trial of those arrested for the Munich Putsch moved from the High Court in Leipzig to a lower State Court in Munich.  The Leipzig court handled treason trials and could issue death sentences.  In the lower, Munich, court the Nazis were among friends and the maximum sentences were lower.

    The putschists who benefited from the resulting light sentences included Hitler and his friend and chauffeur, in the early days, Emil Maurice, who is to play a leading role in this story. 

    The speedy transfer of Geli's body to Vienna was certainly a cover-up.  The question is, exactly what was being covered up?

   

THE WITNESS STATEMENTS

Statements were taken from Annie Winter, who ran the household;    her husband Georg Winter - Hitler's valet-cum-butler ;    Anna Kirmair, who did the cleaning ;  and Maria Reichert, a house servant.  No statements were taken from Reichert's mother, Gerda Dachs, who was also a live-in servant, or from Heinrich Hoffmann, who was sitting next to Hitler when he set off for Nuremberg in the Mercedes, or from Emil Maurice's successor as chauffeur, Julius Schreck. 

    The four statements are all brief, far briefer than most witness statements to a death by shooting, then and now.  The longest of them is from Georg Winter.  Here it is in full:

'I was employed to supervise the running of Hitler's household.  First thing this morning, at nine-thirty, my wife informed me that something must have happened to Raubal, because nobody could get into her room and Hitler's pistol, which was kept in an unlocked cupboard next door, was no longer there.  So I knocked on the door of her room again and again but got no answer.  It was looking suspicious to me, so I forced the locked double-doors, at ten o' clock, with a screwdriver. The doors were locked from the inside with the key still in the lock.  When I opened the door, my wife, Frau Reichert and Anna Kirmair were there.  As soon as I had got the door open, I went into the room and found Raubal lying on the floor dead.  She had shot herself.  I can give no reason why she should have shot herself.'    (5)

 

    Both Anni Winter and Maria Reichert's statements have Geli going into her room at three o' clock on the Friday afternoon.  Anni Winter has Geli coming out of Hitler's room - where she presumably fetched the pistol - and going into her own at that time.  Reichert says she heard a noise 'a short time after' three o' clock. (6)  -  a noise not inconsistent with a small-calibre gun firing. 

    But at what time did Hitler and his party leave the apartment for Nuremberg?    The police appear not to have put this crucial question to anybody.  In his account of these events in his 1955 autobiography, Hoffmann gives no time for the departure.  Hitler's statement to Sauer simply says he left on 'Friday afternoon'  and Geli said goodbye to him 'quite calmly'  - ganz ruhig. (7). 

    In their statements, all the servants refer to Geli as 'Raubal', not Fräulein Raubal or even Fräulein Geli.  In 1930s Munich this is more than rude, it is contemptuous.  It is explicable only if someone had given them permission to do it, or suggested or dictated it. 

    The suspicion of collusion, or the same outside influence on all the statements, is reinforced by the similarity of the phrasing, especially in refusing to even contemplate why Geli should have committed suicide:

    'Warum sich Raubal das Leben genommen hat, weiss ich nicht.'  (Why Raubal took her own life, I don't know - Annie Winter)

    'Irgendeinem Grund, warum sie sich erschossen hat, kann ich nicht angeben.'  (I can suggest no reason why she should have shot herself - Georg Winter.) 

    'Aus welchem Grund sich Raubal das Leben genommen hat, kann ich nicht sagen.'  (I cannot say for what reason Raubal took her (own) life.'  - Maria Reichert. (8)

   

    We do not have to look far for the source of this influence on the witnesses:    At some time on the morning of Saturday 19 September, a high level conference of Munich Nazis took place in Hitler's flat.  Present were Hess, Gregor Strasser, Max Amann, Franz Xaver Schwarz and Baldur von Schirach.  (9). 

    It is highly unlikely that Georg Winter would have phoned the police before phoning Hess, in particular:    Before working for Hitler, Georg Winter had been  a valet to Count von Epp.  Von Epp was the leader of a troop of heavily armed right-wing fighters which bore his name, the Freikorps von Epp. 

    At the end of the first world war, the Freikorps von Epp was instrumental in bloodily putting down the Räterepublik - a group of anarchists and then hardline communists who took over Munich and other parts of Bavaria for a few months.  Hess fought in the Freikorps von Epp against the anarchists and communists;    he was wounded.  So Georg Winter had known Hess as a comrade for at least thirteen years and probably longer.

    The 'witness statements' were co-ordinated, if not dictated, by Hess.  Emil Maurice, of whom more below, attested in 1966 that Georg Winter had phoned Hess first.  Only much later - 10.15 on the Saturday morning -  Maurice continued, did Winter telephone the police, by which time the servants were coached in the party line.  (10)  They were even introduced to the police - Sauer and Forster - by the Nazi Finance Director and eminence gris  Franz Xaver Schwarz.

    In September 1931, the Nazis had already just weathered one sex scandal, one of the many homosexual sex-orgies involving the SA head Ernst Röhm.  This had been seized on by the Social Democrat and Communist press, especially the Munich Post, the official Social Democrat newspaper.  The Nazis could ill-afford another sex-scandal, and one involving Hitler himself could have finished them. 

    So news-management was the priority of the gathering of the Munich Nazi hierarchy in Hitler's flat on the morning of Saturday 19 September 1931, with Geli lying dead in her bedroom. 

    Baldur von Schirach telephoned Adolf Dresler, head of the press department at the Brown House, Nazi Party headquarters.  He told Dresler to say that Hitler had gone into mourning after the suicide of his niece.  Twenty-five minutes later von Schirach phoned Dresler again.  This time he told him to release the story that Geli's death had been an accident.  'But by then it was too late.' (11)  The Brown House had already released the first, suicide, version. 

    If von Schirach's second call had been a few minutes earlier, the accident story may well have become the received wisdom that the suicide story is today    Intriguingly, Hitler was later furious that the suicide story, not the accident story, had been put out to the press:    'Hitler was apparently furious at Strasser for ...  publishing the fact that it was a suicide and had fallen on Goering's neck, weeping with gratitude, when Hermann suggested that it was just as likely  to have been an accident.'    (12)

    There can be no doubt at all that the four witness statements given to the police were part of this tightly controlled news management and that they are unreliable.  In particular, the two statements attesting that Geli was alive at three o' clock on the Friday afternoon are not to be trusted.

 

THE TIME OF GELI'S DEATH

The acceptance of Hitler's non-complicity in Geli's death rests on the received wisdom that 'he had an alibi.'    Apart from the witness statements, dealt with above, the alibi has been held to be proved by two factors:    One was the testament by Hitler and Hoffmann that Geli was alive when Hitler left for Nuremberg.  We shall return to that.  The other factor was the time of death. 

    Dr Müller arrived at Hitler's apartment on the Saturday morning, with, or shortly after, the police.  Eye witness reports say he gave Geli's clothed body a twenty minute examination at the scene.  He concluded that Geli died on the evening of Friday 18 September 1931 from inner bleeding following a bullet wound to the lung.  At this time he attested only that 'rigor mortis had set in several hours previously.' (13)

    However there was a further investigation.  This was a result of reports in the press, especially the Munich Post, which cast doubt on the suicide.  Unfortunately, this report, by brave reporters who had fought the Nazis for years, has deflected attention onto two side-issues - whether or not Geli wanted to leave Munich and train as a singer in Vienna, and whether her nose was broken, as one of a number of 'injuries to her body.'  (14)

    Geli's attempt to get away and train as a singer in Vienna is a red herring, as the idea that the possible thwarting of this plan would have caused her to kill herself is absurd. 

Geli's mother confirmed that to the Americans in her CIC hearing in May 1945. (15)

    On the other side-issue, damage to the nose and apparent bruising to Geli's body - the implication here is that Hitler had hit Geli.  It can be discounted.  She hurt her nose when she fell on the floor, mortally wounded, as Dr Müller's report confirms.  The  apparent bruising was post-mortem lividity - hypostasis. 

    But the report in the Munich Post, and another report in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, gave the Public Prosecutor's Office cause to open a further investigation - even without Geli's body.  Dr Müller made a second statement.  He now attested that Geli had been lying face down on the floor for seventeen to eighteen hours - in dieser Lage etwa 17-18 Stunden liegen blieb. (16)

    If the body had been lying on the floor for only seventeen or eighteen hours after death, Hitler is indeed in the clear, if he left the apartment on Friday afternoon.  But Dr Müller made this second report after Geli's body had been sent back to Vienna, on Monday 21 September.  It appears in a file containing all the papers from the investigation - M Inn 72443 at the Bayrisches Haupstadtsarchiv  -  which is dated 28 September 1931.  One wonders, then, at this degree of precision. 

    Even modern forensic science would struggle to distinguish between a time of death eighteen hours before the body was found, which puts Hitler in the clear, and, say, twenty-four hours before the body was found, which blows his alibi apart.  For example: 'It takes the body 18-36 hours to cool to the surrounding temperature.' (17)

    We do know, however, that 'after twenty-four hours the head and neck turn greenish blue.'  (Curzon).  As part of the second investigation, the women who had prepared Geli's body for burial  were interviewed.  Their statements focussed on wounds to Geli's nose and body because, taking his lead from the Munich Post article, that is what the Public Prosecutor - probably Glaser - asked them about. 

    But one of them, Maria Fischbauer, said Geli was very blue in the face.  'Sie war im Gesicht sehr blau.' (18)  This was between 11 and 12 on the Saturday, at the East Cemetery, when the body was washed and prepared for burial.  This suggests that Geli had died at least twenty-four hours before being prepared for burial - which takes us to twelve o' clock on Friday, before 'Friday afternoon'  when both Hitler and Hoffmann say Hitler's party  left for Nuremberg. 

    So, far from confirming Hitler's alibi, as is popularly believed, what medical  evidence there is contradicts it. 

    And we have two statements which allege that Geli had been dead for twenty-four hours or longer.  The first is from Hoffmann, in his autobiography.  On page 154 he says that 'Geli had already been dead for twenty-four hours' when Hess phoned with the news - which casts doubt on the alibi he had tried so hard to establish in the same book.

    Another statement has Geli lying dead even longer.  She was 'left lying in her (own) blood for three days.'  when she was found.  And that would account for the corpse's face being not just blue but 'very blue.'    The quotation about the three days is from Hitler's cook, Therese Linke.  (19)

    Linke was the cook at Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler's chocolate-box retreat in the Bavarian mountains.  Her boss there was Angela Raubal, Geli's mother.  It is surely reasonable to conclude that Linke's source for this information was Angela.  And look again at the phrasing:  Not 'she was left lying on the floor' but the more accurate 'lying in her (own) blood.'  - 3 Tage lag sie in ihrem Blut, bis man sie fand. 

    This description of Geli's death by the cook comes on page fifteen of a twenty-one page hand-written reminiscence of life with Hitler, written after the war.  It is parenthetical to pages of praise of Hitler, by an unreconstructed Nazi.  It is therefore highly unlikely that she is lying.  But could she have misremembered?  Even a slip of the pen?   

    Well, yes, possibly!  But given that this was the central event of Angela Raubal's life, it is likely that the distraught mother poured her heart out to her friend and colleague.  Angela Raubal would have been incensed that her daughter had been left bleeding to death for three days.  Linke knew Geli too, knew her well;  she often stayed at Haus Wachenfeld.  The young woman's death would have had a massive impact on the cook. 

    Therese Linke said something else of interest in her handwritten statement - which, by the way, does say that Geli took her own life, which only means that was what Angela believed.  Linke said that Geli was pregnant.  Hitler's close intimate and Foreign Press Chief, Ernst 'Putzi' Hanfstaengl thought so, too. 

    It would have been a disaster for the Nazis. 

 

THE UNLIKLIHOOD OF SUICIDE

On 8^th September 1931, Geli went walking in the mountains with her brother, Leo.  'My sister showed no sign of depression or being out of sorts (Verstimmung)' Leo said. (20)  When Geli died she was half-way through a cheerful letter to a friend in Vienna.  The suicide theory has her breaking off in the middle of the word und and shooting herself:

'When I come to Vienna - I hope very soon - we'll drive to Semmering an ...'  (21)

    Hayman has done some work on the trajectory of the bullet (page 193):    The bullet which killed Geli entered her body above the heart and ended up just above her hip. This meant that the barrel of the gun was pointing downwards and the hand holding the gun was above the heart.  The position is not impossible, but it is very uncomfortable and counter-intuitive, in the sense that you can't feel the heart beating at that spot.

    While discussing the trajectory of the bullet, it is worth making a brief digression to dispose of the 'accident' theory which several leading Nazis - Goering for example - subscribed to at the time.  The trajectory pretty much demolishes the 'accident' hypothesis, especially as Geli had been trained to use the Walther gun - to the extent that she could take it apart and clean it.  She would hardly take the safety catch off and stick it virtually under her armpit by accident.

    But to return to the suicide hypothesis:  Any discussion of a possible suicide, sooner or later, has to address the personality of the deceased person and those most closely involved.  The received wisdom, turbocharged by fictional accounts in film, television and novels, has Geli as a simple girl from Austria who was overawed by her uncle, who she fell in love with.  Hitler, we are told, was enchanted with her but grew possessive, restricting her freedom until, out of frustration at her limited life, and perhaps unhappy because of her beloved's interest in other women, she committed suicide. 

    Let's take the 'simple country girl' idea first:    In June 1927 Geli Raubal passed the Austrian Matura pre-university examination - one of the few females to do so.  She became a medical student at one of the leading universities in the world - the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.  Before moving to Munich she had lived in Linz and Vienna.  She was a gifted musician.  She was demonstrably not the country bumpkin and airhead that has been portrayed.

    Neither was she promiscuous, as some have suggested.  She was sexy.  She was also a warm, fun-loving, tactile person.  Such women are often traduced by certain types of men.  We can be near-certain that Geli had one sexual relationship only, and that with a man she loved deeply and wished to marry - Emil Maurice.  We will return to that part of her story later. 

    When Geli was eighteen, Hitler, then a still-rising but nationally-known politician, arranged for her and her classmates to visit Munich from Austria.  At that point she was certainly impressed by her famous uncle, and harmlessly enjoyed the kudos the visit brought her. 

    But by the time Hitler pressured her and her mother to allow her to move in with him, she was twenty-one and a young woman.  How did she perceive him?    She certainly loved the lazy lifestyle of lunches lasting all afternoon, hours drinking coffee in  Munich's bohemian suburb of Schwabing, picnics by the lake, theatre or music hall in the evening.  Not to mention a large dress and jewellery account. 

    She was grateful to Hitler for making all that possible and enjoyed twisting him round her little finger -  arms round his neck, Oh please Uncle Alf, big eyes wide.  The answer was always yes. 

    But there is absolutely no evidence that she was in love with Hitler.  The best witness to the relationship we have is Henrietta (Henni) Hoffmann - later von Schirach.  Henni was the Party photographer Hoffmann's daughter.  She had known Hitler since childhood, Geli since the age of fourteen, and she was Geli's closest girlfriend.  She was also a shrewd judge of character. 

    Henni said Hitler loved Geli.  But as she grew older, Geli outgrew him. (22)

Elsewhere she speculates that the life-loving Geli, who just wanted to have fun, found her uncle 'weird.'  (unheimlich).  (23)

 

HITLER'S ALIBI.

On the drive back to Munich, having been given the news of Geli's death, Hitler's Mercedes picked up a speeding ticket for doing 55.3 kilometres an hour.  This document has been held to substantiate Hitler's alibi.  (for example John Toland's 1976 biography of Hitler, which says that Hitler could not have killed Geli 'because he was in Nuremberg')  All the speeding ticket proves, of course, is that at 1.37 pm on  Saturday 19 September 1931, Hitler was in a car in Ebenhausen, between Nuremberg and Munich.  It does not tell us where he was when Geli died. 

    Anni Winter's various post-war statements on the subject were self-contradictory.  Anni Winter was a dedicated Nazi.  After the war, she made a living from a shop selling Nazi memorabilia.  She had been left 200 Marks a month for life in Hitler's will.  Hanfstaengl was among those who thought this was for services rendered in the Raubal case.(24)   

    What could these services have been?    Anni destested Geli.  She thought her a provincial parvenu who had aspirations to marry Hitler.  As the housekeeper, she was the person most likely to have noticed that Geli was pregnant, if Therese Linke and Hanfstaengl were right about that.  She would certainly have told Hess, when Geli's body was discovered.  And that would account for the unremarked oddity of the money in Hitler's will being left to Anni only, not to Herr and Frau Winter together. 

    The idea that Geli was alive when Hitler left the apartment to go to Nuremberg  comes mainly from the specious, plausible, garrulous, all-too charming drunkard that was Heinrich Hoffmann.  Biographies of Hitler all draw on Hoffmann's autobiography, if only because there is no other source for the events he describes. 

    But Heinrich Hoffmann is not a reliable witness.  He was imprisoned after the war, for being a Nazi - which he was.  He had known Hitler as a convert since the earliest days of the Nazi Party - 1920.  His party number was the very low 247.  His almost certainly inadvertent contradiction of Hitler's alibi by saying Geli had been lying dead for twenty-four hours has already been quoted, but here he is creating the myth in the first place:

 

  'On 17^th September Hitler had invited me to go on a fairly long tour with him up north.  When I got to his house, Geli was there, helping him to pack. As we left and were going down the stairs, Geli leaned over the banisters and called  "Au revoir, Herr Hoffmann."    Hitler stopped and looked up.  For a moment he paused, then he turned and mounted the staircase again, while I went on to wait for him at the front door. Very shortly, Hitler joined me.'   

Hoffmann  page 152

   

    Geli packing for Hitler paints an intimate portrait, but it doesn't ring true for either of them.  Hitler was rigid with tension about the physical side of life - he refused to wear a bathing costume, for example.  He would not have let Geli pack for him.  (What about his underwear?) And she would not have wanted to.  Georg Winter, his valet, would have done his packing.  Henni may have packed for Hoffmann, though - father and daughter were close since Frau Hoffmann died in the 1928 flu epidemic.  No doubt that was what gave him the idea.

    Hoffmann's unreliability as a witness is demonstrated again on page 154.  Describing the return to the Munich apartment on the Saturday he says 'Her mother met us with mutely streaming eyes.'    Geli's mother was at Haus Wachenfeld, in the Bavarian Alps. 

    I believe Hoffmann was serving his master after the master's death, as every other Nazi did.  What we can say for sure is that the received wisdom of Hitler's alibi, and with it the assumption that Geli killed herself, rests on the paragraph quoted above plus Hitler's statement to Oberkommissar Sauer that Geli was alive when his party left for Nuremberg. 

  There is no other evidence at all.

 

SO WHAT DID HAPPEN, THEN?

Emil Maurice is widely believed to have had 'an affair' with Geli.  There are good reasons to believe - not least from what they said about each other - that this was not an affair, but a life-long love on both sides.  'She was a princess, who everybody turned to look at.  Her large eyes were poems.'    That was Maurice talking about Geli in 1967, thirty-six years after her death. (25)

    Maurice was one of the founders of Hitler's 'Hall Guard'  (Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler) - the thugs who guarded the first NSDAP (Nazi Party) meetings from Communist attack, and led attacks on Communist and Social Democrat meetings.  His Party number was thirty-nine.  His SS number was two. (His successor as Hitler's chauffeur, Schreck, had the number one).

    He was imprisoned, along with Hitler, Hess and others, in Landsberg Fortress after the abortive Munich Putsch.  On 14^th July 1924, records at the fortress show that Geli, who had just turned sixteen, visited her Uncle Alf there.  She and Emil Maurice, then twenty-seven, fell for each other and started a correspondence, which both kept secret from Hitler.

    Geli was at an impressionable age and no doubt found Maurice attractive, with his tough physique and bandleader moustache.  He was not only a thug, he was a skilled craftsman - a watch and clock maker and repairer.  A likely point of contact was music. Emil Maurice played the mandolin and could sing.  Geli was a talented musician.  Henni Hoffmann, who knew him well, thought Maurice was 'a sensitive man'  who showed 'genuine tenderness.' (26)

    After their all-too-early release from Landsberg, Maurice became Hitler's chauffeur.

His clandestine relationship with Geli was nourished by frequent social contact.  There were picnics at Starnbergersee or Chiemsee, where a changing company of males and females would be driven in Hitler's Mercedes.  Hitler, Emil Maurice and Geli were the only ever-presents on these occasions. 

    Hitler regarded Maurice as a friend who did the driving, not as a servant.  He called Maurice Mauritzl - little Maurice.  Mauritzl was a  Duzfreund - addressed by the familiar Du form.  But that did not mean Hitler would allow him to get close to Geli.

    The couple 'went public' about their intended marriage in December 1927 at Hess's wedding to Ilse Prohl.  Hitler, who enjoyed playing matchmaker, had virtually commanded the union.  During the ceremony, he asked the now thirty-year-old Emil Maurice when he was going to follow Hess's lead and get married.  Maurice later stated that 'like everyone else' he was deeply in love with Geli.  (27)    He blurted this out to Hitler and, in the traditional manner, asked for Geli's hand. 

    It was a terrible mistake.  Hess's wedding ended in a blazing row.  The next day, at Hitler's apartment, Hitler threatened Emil Maurice with his pistol.  In view of Geli's later death from a bullet from Hitler's gun, it is worth emphasising this tendency of Hitler's to threaten even those close to him with the weapon.  He chased Maurice from the flat, brandishing the pistol. 

    Maurice was dismissed as chauffeur, without references (fristlos entlassen).  Hitler showed no mercy to the weeping Geli, using the interestingly bourgeois and completely untrue excuse that Maurice had no profession - in fact he had two, clockmaker and chauffeur. 

    Geli was watched even more closely than before.  Frau Hess, the former Isle Prohl, was ordered to watch over Geli, who early in 1928 had given up her studies at Munich University. 

    Angela Raubal sided with Geli.  She liked Emil Maurice and would have accepted him as a son-in-law.  She was horrified at her half-brother's behaviour, but Hitler was her employer and she was financially dependent on him.  Hitler threatened to leave her without a penny if Geli ever had any contact with Emil Maurice again.  He took Geli and Angela to Berlin with him in July 1928 -  a 'business' trip to sort out the restive Berlin SA - solely not to let either of them out of his sight.

    Emil Maurice, however, hit back.  He had been left with no job and no prospect of getting one.  He had been forcibly parted from the woman he loved.  In August 1928, he took Hitler to court for unfair dismissal. 

    He won.  Hitler was ordered to pay 800 Marks compensation.  With the Nazi Party in the doldrums before the financial crash of 1929, that was a massive sum.  (For 1926, Schwarz, the NSDP Finance Director had a total of 534 Marks at his disposal).  And with the Nazi Party share of the national vote down to 2.6% after the May 1928 elections, this was not some personal sideshow - the political implications could have finished the Nazis completely.

    Hitler's retaliation was characteristic.  He attacked Maurice at his weakest point, using information he known for years, but which had never bothered him  - Maurice's Jewish ancestry.  Emil Maurice's great-grandfather was Jewish.  For the Nazis that was enough to disqualify him as an 'aryan.'    Maurice was 'outed' as we would say today.  As a rabid anti-semite there are indications that the 'outing' hit him hard. 

    *********************

 Geli first moved to Munich in October 1927.  She lived in small flats near Hitler's own, which Hitler found for her.  She was closely chaperoned even then.  But after she moved into Hitler's luxurious Prinregentenplatz apartment in November 1929, one month after he did, she was followed, accompanied or chaperoned whenever she left the place. 

    Here is an example of how this worked:    Hitler allowed Geli to visit the famous Munich beer festival, the Oktoberfest, in 1930 only after a sustained campaign of persuasion on Geli's part.  But she was chaperoned by two of Hitler's intimates, Schwarz and Schaub, and their wives. 

    On occasion, when Geli went to her music lessons, Hitler followed her personally and waited outside in the Mercedes.  Whenever he had to be away from Munich, Hitler sent Geli to Haus Wachenfeld, so her mother, Angela, could keep an eye on her. 

    Under this close supervision, the idea of Geli having a sexual relationship with a man - an 'outsider' so to speak -  from November 1929 until her death in September 1931 is just not credible.  In Maurice's opinion, Hitler never had 'full' sex with Geli. (28) and she would hardly have been inclined to permit any physical contact after Hitler's treatment of the man she wished to marry. 

    Maurice, however, had used his 800 marks compensation for unfair dismissal to set up a watch and clock repair shop at  5 Schumannstrasse.  That is just round the corner from Hitler's apartment, in Prinzregentenplatz.  How much of a leap of faith does it take to imagine that Geli managed to sneak out, at least once, to walk round the corner and see the only man she had ever loved, Emil Maurice, at his shop?  And how much of a further leap of faith does it take to believe that they made love?

    So if, as Therese Linke attested, and Hanfstaengl also believed, Geli was pregnant when she died, the father was surely Emil Maurice. 

    What would Geli have done if she were pregnant?  This is 1931, she is a prisoner in the apartment, and she was a believing, church-going Roman Catholic.  Not an abortion, then.  Her only close girlfriend was Hoffmann's daughter.  She wouldn't have risked Henni telling the father she was so close to.  Geli would have run to Emil.  And Hitler would have stopped her.

    If Hitler shot Geli in her room at any time before he left for Nuremberg, he could have tossed the gun onto the sofa - which is where it was found -    locked her bedroom door from the inside, and walked back to his own room via the outside balcony.  He then left for Nuremberg as if nothing had happened.  This would be completely in character for Hitler.  Today we would call it being 'in denial.'   

    One contemporary accused Hitler of killing Geli.  Otto Strasser is hardly a neutral witness;  Hitler had his brother, Gregor, killed in the Night of the Long Knives.  However, writing in 1940, ten years after he had left the Nazi Party, he claimed that Gregor had told him that Hitler had shot Geli during a quarrel.  (29).  Hitler had been in such a demented state that he did not know what he was doing.  He had wanted to commit suicide afterwards but Gregor and Hess had restrained him.  Hanfstaengl's account has Gregor Strasser in Hitler's apartment, along with Schwarz, at the meeting of Nazi luminaries on the Saturday.  If that is true, rather more weight can be given to what Otto said. 

 

SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE MURDER THEORY   

    First and foremost, would Hitler have shot her?    I accept that he 'loved' Geli in a perverse and destructive way.  He could have been 'in a demented state' as Gregor Strasser is supposed to have said.  In my novel, The Crooked Cross, I have her packing to leave, because Hitler wanted to make more pornographic drawings of her and she knew she was pregnant.  The evidence for Hitler making pornographic drawings of Geli is from Hanfstaengl's detailed account (page 175) and from Strasser.  It is overwhelming.

    Hitler then threatened to commit suicide if she left.  He was always threatening to commit suicide (30) - before during and after the Munich Putsch for example.  She laughed at him.  This would have destroyed his inflated self-image as Der Führer and left him with the unhappy mess that was Adolf Hitler.  He shot her.  The shooting would have had to have been unpremeditated;    perhaps only semi-intentional.  The fact that he was always waving the pistol about is highly relevant. 

    The pregnancy gives Minister of Justice Gürtner a good reason to have the body sent back to Vienna before a proper post-mortem.  However, Dr Müller did not mention a pregnancy in his medical report, and neither did the two washerwomen who prepared Geli's body. 

    There are two possible reasons for this:    Geli could have been in the early stages of pregnancy.  We know Müller's examination was cursory and would have focussed on the thoracic area of a clothed, blood-soaked corpse.  He could have missed it.  Even the washerwomen, Maria Fischbauer and Rosina Zweckl, may not have spotted a pregnancy that had not began to 'show.'   

    Alternatively, Müller and even the washerwomen, could have been bribed.  In the novel, I have Anni Winter telling Hess that Geli was pregnant - Anni wouldn't have missed it!    Hess than bribes Müller, assuming (wrongly)  that the child was Hitler's.  That Hess then arranged a cover up of some sort has been dealt with earlier, and I regard that as established. 

    Another possible objection is that if Emile Maurice had made Geli pregnant, why didn't he say so, in his statements after the war?    The answer is that he may not have known.  Geli would have been in the early stages of pregnancy.  She died before she could tell him.  So why didn't he refer to seeing her?    Actually, he did.  He made one wistful reference to meeting her by chance in the street.  (31).  My theory is that he didn't boast about making love to her (again) because he loved her, and that is not how men in love talk about the woman they love. 

    What is definite is that, one way or another, Nazis killed Geli Raubal.  Geli was totally apolitical;  certainly not a Nazi herself.  She was bored stiff at major Nazi set pieces in the Circus Krone, among crowds of ten thousand, and bored stiff at intimate gatherings of the Nazi elite at the Bürgerbräukeller.  Her attitude to the Party - and to life - is encapsulated in her habitual greeting to Heinrich Hoffmann, which was 'Heil Hoffmann.'

    She was a lazy, charming, attractive, bright, flirty, warm, clever young woman. 

She deserved better than the short life she had.  And it is likely that she did not end that short life herself. 

 

References

1 Hanfstaengl p177 for the colour of the dress.

2  Hanfstaengl p179

3  Strasser p73

4  Hayman p188

5  Sigmund p171-2 My translations of Sigmund passim

6 Sigmund p172

7 Sigmund p 175

8 Simund p171-3

9 Hayman p162

10 Sigmund p170  Maurice was speaking to Nerin Gunn in 1966

11 Hanfstaengl p178

12  Hanfstaengl p179

13  Hayman p164

14 Hayman p165

15 Sigmund p184 

16 Sigmund p180

17 Curzon online

18 Sigmund p180

19 Linke p15

20 Sigmund p167

21 Hayman p160

22    aber Geli hatte sich von ihm fortentwickelt  - Geli had developed away from/ grown out of him.  von Shirach  (1) p62

23  Sie wollte leben und froh sein.  Vielleicht wurde ihr der Onkel unheimlich.  Von Schirach (2) p54

24    'I strongly suspect it was made worth her while for the rest of her life to keep to the official version of an inexplicable accident.'  Hanfstaengl p179

25    Sigmund p60  Sie war eine Prinzessin, nach der sich die Leute  ...umdrehen.  Ihre

grossen Augen waren Gedichte ...

26  Sigmund p115

27 Sigmund p124

28  Sigmund p94  It was Maurice's belief that Hitler did not have full sexual relations with any of the women he knew.

29  Strasser p201-2

30  Ludecke p448 . He interestingly adds that Hitler expected others to commit suicide when thwarted.  Rommel, much later, comes to mind. 

31  Sigmund p 135

Sources 

Curzon G, Establishing Time of Death in a Homicide, Socyberty crime online April 2008

Gunn, N  Hitler's Mistress Eva Braun Bantam 1969

Hanfstaengl, E  The Unknown Hitler:  Notes from the young Nazi party  Gibson Square 2005

Hayman, R  Hitler and Geli    Bloomsbury 1998

Hoffmann H, Hitler was my Friend  Burke, 1955

 

Linke, T  handwritten statement  Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich

Ludecke K, I Knew Hitler  Scribner, 1938

von Schirach H  (1)  Der Preis der Herrlichkeit:  Erinnerungen    Heyne 1978

von Schirach H  (2)  Frauen um Hitler Herbig 1985

Sigmund, A-M  Des Führers bester Freund  Heyne 2005

Strasser, O  Hitler and I  London 1940