Newly discovered archival documents have raised questions about whether Adolf Hitler may have murdered his half-niece, whose death in a Munich apartment in 1931 has been officially ruled a suicide.
In September 1931, 23-year-old Angela Geli Raubal was found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest in Hitler’s Munich apartment. The murder weapon was a pistol owned by Hitler, who is believed to have had an unusually close and controlling relationship with his younger relatives.
For 95 years, it has been accepted that Raubal’s body was discovered on September 19, the date recorded in the Munich police investigation into her death. According to Munich police records, that morning Hitler’s personal servant Georg Winter broke open Raubal’s room, which had been locked from the inside, and discovered her body on the floor.
According to official documents, Hitler, who was gaining fame but had not yet seized power in Germany, had already left Munich the previous afternoon for Nuremberg, which would prove that he could not have been involved in her death.
However, German historian Harold Sandner said he found an entry in Munich’s official death register stating that Raubal’s body was found at 10:15 a.m. on September 18, 1931. That date was also written on two death notices found in the archives.
If these records are true, Raubal’s death would have occurred about 24 hours earlier than previously thought, and Hitler would have been sent to Munich by the time her body was discovered. According to official records, he did not depart for Nuremberg until the afternoon of September 18th.
Sandner suggested that the conflicting records could point to a possible cover-up of the murder by law enforcement officials sympathetic to the Nazi party. His findings were first published in the German news magazine Der Spiegel and will be detailed in his forthcoming book, The Death of Angela “Geri” Raubal: Suicide or Foul? Scheduled to be published next month.
Thomas Weber, an expert on Nazi Germany and a history lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, said he believed the documents were reliable because Sandner, a longtime acquaintance, presented his findings.
Webber told CNN that he initially approached the meeting with skepticism, describing Sandner as “very methodical and difficult,” but concluded that the new documents appeared to shake up the established chronology of Raubal’s death.
“Assuming that the copy of the document that Sandner shared with me is authentic, and I have no reason to doubt it, it is clear that Raubal died one day earlier than we have all assumed for the past almost 100 years, and therefore Hitler was still in Munich when she died,” he said. He added that there are three newly unearthed documents that date her death on September 18, making it unlikely there was some sort of clerical error.
However, Weber was reluctant to conclude that this meant that Hitler had murdered his niece.
He said the Nazis may have had other reasons for wanting to cover up what happened. At the time, the party sought mainstream right-wing support, while Hitler sought to present himself “for electoral reasons as the embodiment of trust and virtue,” Weber said. “Any scandal” could have jeopardized it, he said.
Raubal was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister Angela Hamitzsch (née Hitler). She lived near her half-uncle for many years while her mother worked as a housekeeper, but finally moved to an apartment in Munich in 1929.
Many historians believe that Hitler was infatuated with Raubal and his behavior towards her became very controlling and possessive in nature. Some have suggested that their relationship became sexual, but this is disputed. It is believed that he had considerable control over her life.
“There was speculation that Hitler had an unhealthy obsession with Raubal, that he loved Raubal, that his interest was incestuous in nature, and that he murdered her out of jealousy because she wanted to leave him, or that he realized that she loved someone else,” Weber said, adding that there are many variations on this speculation.
Weber said that although he personally finds it difficult to believe that Hitler’s relationship with Raubal was incestuous, his pattern of behavior certainly suggests that he felt a “deep bond” with her.
Shortly before her death, Hitler and Raubal are thought to have argued over her desire to leave Munich and go to Vienna to study music.
The newly discovered records do not solve the mystery of how Raubal died. But questions that have persisted for almost 100 years about what exactly happened in her Munich home on the day of her death have come to light once again.
