When in 1931 Geli Raubal, Hitler's niece, committed suicide, the future dictator stayed at home for a week. Gossip has raged in Germany. It was said that the girl was pregnant with her uncle and that he had ordered her killed. How was it really? And did they really have an incestuous bond?
Angela "Geli" Raubal was born in 1908 in Linz. She was the second child of Leon Raubal and Hitler's half-sister Angela. She first met her uncle in the early 1920s, and had been seeing him regularly since 1927, when she became a medical student at the Ludwig and Maximilian University in Munich.
Two years later, she quit studying and decided to become a singer. Soon moved into an empty room in Hitler's apartment at Prinzregentenplatz, and her mother became the housekeeper of her brother's house in Obersalzberg. The older relative became more and more important in the life of the 21-year-old.
An ambiguous acquaintance with a tragic ending
Their relationship was not kept secret and it seems - contrary to countless rumors - that it was completely platonic, based on the family bond. Geli called Hitler "Uncle Alf" and became an inseparable part of his close circle. She accompanied him regularly during cultural and political events, including even the party congress in Nuremberg in 1927 (...).
The bond between her uncle and niece was put to the test when Geli began courting Nazi leader Emil Maurice's chauffeur. The future dictator has become overly protective and domineering towards his ward . He insisted that she should concentrate on her studies and eventually dismissed the driver.
After the death of his niece, Hitler commissioned her to make a bust. He kept them in a place of honor in his Munich apartment.
Until now, the carefree girl became more and more depressed and closed in on herself. She asked to be allowed to go to Vienna, where she wanted to continue her singing studies, which was refused.
Geli Raubal shot herself on the afternoon of September 18, 1931 in Hitler's Munich apartment. The autopsy showed that she aimed for the heart, but hit the lung and consequently suffocated after she passed out . She didn't leave a farewell letter, so it remains unclear why she took her own life. She was 23 years old.
The news of this misfortune found Hitler in Nuremberg and clearly shocked him. He hurried back to Munich (he received a speeding ticket on the way) but missed the funeral five days later in Vienna.
Is there a grain of truth in the accusations of incest?
Soon the nature of his relationship with his niece and the circumstances of her death became the subject of sensational rumors spread by Nazi political opponents. The tabloids reported that the NSDAP leader was a masochist with an incestuous relationship with a relative, that she was pregnant or that she was murdered on the orders of her uncle. No credible evidence supports these crazy theories.
An interesting fact is a fragment of Roger Moorhouse's book "The Third Reich in 100 Objects", published by the Znak Horyzont publishing house.
In the conditions of fierce political struggles in the early 1930s, Gela's suicide forced the Nazis to take feverish steps to limit the negative image-related effects of this event. Hitler officially denied the rumors and demanded correction from the press. (...) Politician condemned in the newspapers as a pervert and political extremist with questionable morals he was portrayed by his followers as a virtuous man, enlightened esthete, and future statesman.
Hitler himself was inconsolable and locked himself for a week in his niece's room at Haus Wachenfeld in Obersalzberg, where he allegedly contemplated suicide. When he regained his mental balance, he ordered Gela's two bedrooms to be kept intact in order to make them sanctuaries in memory of the deceased. In addition, people in his immediate vicinity were instructed never to say her name in front of him.
We may never know the true nature of the relationship between the future dictator and his niece, but they must have had an extraordinary bond . By creating a sanctuary dedicated to the deceased and commissioning her bust, Hitler gave a testimony of a devotion that he hardly showed to Eva Braun, his later wife. Führer's contemporaries were perhaps right to call Geli his only love.
Source:
The above text originally appeared in Roger Moorhouse's book The Third Reich in 100 Objects , which was published by Znak Horyzont.
The title, illustrations with captions, boldface text, explanations in square brackets and subheadings come from the editors. The text has undergone some basic editing to introduce more frequent paragraph breaks.