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One by one they were joined in the flat by Heinrich Himmler, Max Amann, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Baldur von Schirach. The führer was still not himself, so Himmler took him to his office in the party headquarters as the other gentlemen from the Brown House got together in the library to figure out a story.
Anni and Georg Winter and Anna Kirmair, the day maid, walked into the flat about fifteen minutes later, at nine, and found the four high-ranking Nazis in a heated argument. Georg asked Max Amann, “What’s happened?”
And he was told, “We haven’t decided yet.”
Within a few minutes they had decided, and Baldur von Schirach telephoned Adolf Dresler in the Brown House and extemporized a press release stating that Adolf Hitler had canceled his speech in Hamburg and was in deep mourning over the suicide of Angelika Raubal, his niece, who had been living in a furnished room in a building in Bogenhausen where Hitler owned a flat.
Meanwhile, Rudolf Hess was instructing the staff that a scandal would wreck the party, and if they had faith in Hitler, and hated Communists and Jews like he did, and hoped for a glorious Germany, free of want, they ought to put aside their niggling qualms and give the police analogous statements. Each agreed to do that, but they were schooled at some speed and their stories either did not match or matched so well they seemed memorized.
And then Amann handed Hess the telephone and he heard Himmler screaming that Göring, Goebbels, and he were in agreement that calling the unfortunate occurrence that befell Hitler’s niece a suicide might wreak nearly as much havoc for the party as calling it a murder. Would she, who knew her uncle so well, prefer to end it all? Wouldn’t the proximity of the führer make her happy and optimistic?
Schirach called Adolf Dresler again to change the press release to say that it was “a lamentable accident” and that she’d killed herself while handling the gun; but he was too late, the first press release had been issued. With regret Schirach told Hess that the story could not be changed and they discussed a suicide motive that would not involve the führer. She’d discovered, they decided, that she wasn’t a good enough singer. She was humiliated and ashamed.
Max Amann called the Deutscher Hof Hotel and was informed that the Hitler group had just checked out. A pageboy was sent in a taxi to flag them down.
Rudolf Hess handed Anni Winter the führer’s teacup and saucer for washing, then rushed down the hallway and rammed into Geli’s locked bedroom door, but it held fast. According to Ilse Hess, Georg Winter got a screwdriver and wedged it between the doorjamb and the lock as Hess flung himself at the door again. And this time it gave way, though he injured his right shoulder.
Franz Xaver Schwarz was a city councilor as well as the party treasurer, so it was he who was chosen to telephone the police and be in the flat when they came. Maria Reichert walked her mother down to the flat of friends on the first floor, so she was never questioned about September 18th though she’d been there the whole night.
And finally Heinrich Hoffmann called Rudolf Hess from the hotel in Nürnberg, about two hours to the north by car. Told of the murder, he was ordered to say Hitler had stayed with them in the hotel that night, and he and Schaub were to race back to München as if the führer were with them.
“And how is he?” Hoffmann asked.
“Stricken with grief, of course.”
“I mean really.”
“We’ll be fine,” Hess said, and hung up. He handed the telephone to Schwarz as he, Amann, and Schirach went to the Brown House for a conference with the führer.
Schwarz called Franz Gürtner, the Bavarian minister of justice who’d called the Nazis “flesh of our flesh,” and he also called Ernst Pöhner, a former police commissioner and a patriotic nationalist who’d persistently excused the violence of the SA so long as it was directed against Communists. Many things went unspoken.
Doktor Müller, the coroner, and two criminal police inspectors from the Polizeidirektion München arrived at the flat shortly after eleven that morning and were politely escorted to the crime scene by Schwarz, who claimed he’d been called to the flat by Maria Reichert just as soon as she’d seen the body.
There were no photographs taken. There was no autopsy. Kriminal Kommissar Forster wandered around the room, pursuing evidence, but only collected the Walther 6.35, the brass bullet casing, and Geli’s unfinished letter. Doktor Müller unfolded an oilcloth over the blood and crouched on it to examine the body, indicating to the police inspectors that the fatal shot had entered the female victim’s chest just above the heart, which it had missed, and had penetrated vertically through the left lung and kidney before halting, wide left of the spine, just above the pelvic girdle, where the bullet could be felt beneath the skin. There was some tattooing near the entrance wound, meaning the Walther had been fired from a few inches away. The signs of rigidity in her face, trunk, and extremities would seem to indicate that she’d died between four and forty hours earlier. Rigor mortis, he said, was too variable to provide greater accuracy about the time of death. While he found some purplish bruising on her neck and thighs, he felt that was just postmortem lividity. Doktor Müller thought the grayish discoloration of the skin was probably due to the fact that death was primarily consequent to suffocation following the shot in the lung. A few days later, when there was a further investigation, he seemed to recall an injury to the nose, but insisted it was flattened by lying face downward for many hours. On Saturday, Doktor Müller got up from beside Geli and snagged off his rubber gloves as he told the policemen, “Suicide or homicide. Who knows?”
Kriminal Kommissar Sauer asked his partner to hold the Walther in a way that would produce such a bullet trajectory, and he finally did by facing the ridge of the barrel and inserting his thumbs in the trigger guard while gripping the gun butt with his fingers. Sauer asked, “And how does that feel?”
“Clumsy,” Forster said.
“But it’s possible?”
“If she wanted to kill herself, why would she want to do it that way?”
Sauer and Forster went out to interview the household staff as Franz Xaver Schwarz silently watched. Georg Winter offered little, only saying that he’d forced open the door with a screwdriver “and found Raubal lying on the floor as a corpse. She’d shot herself. I can’t give any reason why she should have shot herself.”
Maria Reichert would later assert that she’d been i
n the flat when the shot was fired around eight in the evening, but she’d thought the noise had come from partygoers in the street. She’d also maintain that in the morning she’d called Schwarz and he in turn had called a locksmith named Hatzk to open the locked door. With Sauer, on Saturday, however, she got Hess’s instructions right, saying that soon after the spaghetti lunch, when the führer was gone, she’d heard a noise like a gunshot from Geli’s room, but thought the fräulein had taken a perfume bottle from the dresser and furiously smashed it to the floor. “She was a wild one,” she said. She hadn’t seen Geli after that. At nine on Saturday morning, she’d knocked on the door to wake Geli and, hearing no answer, had called for Anni Winter, who in turn had called her husband. Georg Winter had broken the door down, and she’d screamed when she’d seen the corpse. “I can’t explain why Raubal killed herself,” she said, adding, “She was very agitated recently.”
According to the police summary, Anni Winter testified that, “Raubal did not want to spend the weekend in Obersalzberg, as had been arranged, because she had no suitable dress to wear. She told me that her Uncle Adolf had refused to buy her a new dress, which also meant paying her fare to Wien, for she only bought her fancy clothes in Wien or Salzburg. But she did not seem unduly disappointed. Her moods changed so quickly. About three in the afternoon yesterday, I saw Raubal, very flustered, go into Hitler’s office and then hurry back into her own room. This seemed to me rather extraordinary. I now presume that she was fetching his pistol. At about nine this morning I was trying to take the newspaper into her room as I usually did, but I couldn’t get in, and no one answered when I knocked. I started to suspect that Raubal had been out overnight, but then realized the door was locked from the inside with the key stuck in it. I was present when my husband forced the door open. I don’t know why Raubal shot herself.”
Anna Kirmair only confirmed that the skeleton key was still in the door, which had been locked from the inside. “Why Raubal took her life, I don’t know.”
There would also be many and varying accounts of a savage argument between Hitler and his niece on the afternoon of September 18th—because she was pregnant with Adolf’s child, with the child of a pianist, she was jealous of Eva Braun, she had a Jewish lover in Linz, a Jewish lover in Wien, she wanted desperately to see her Aunt Paula—but those were fictions and phantoms calculated to create the impression of a dispirited and disintegrating young woman, and the sheer variety of the stories illustrated how little anyone believed them.
At two in the afternoon Maria Fischbauer, a paid preparer of corpses, got to the flat with a tin pail, hard bar soap, and a hand mitt. She washed Geli’s body without stripping off her clothes, and with the help of Anna Kirmair laid the body into a wooden coffin that three men from the East Cemetery had hauled up the stairs. And then they were permitted to quietly bear her away. Questioned later, Frau Fischbauer said, “Apart from the entry wound on the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I did not notice that the bridge of the nose was broken or that the nose was injured in any other way.”
Rosina Zweckl worked in the East Cemetery where she shifted Geli’s body to a finer zinc coffin furnished by the party. She said she’d carefully scrutinized the body because she’d heard the woman was Hitler’s niece. She’d been told she was a virgin—possibly to quell the gossip of a pregnancy. “She was very blue in the face,” Zweckl told investigators, but she could say little more. Then, as if prompted, she oddly paraphrased Maria Fischbauer, saying, “Apart from the entry wound in the breast, I noticed no injuries and in particular I saw nothing suspicious about the nose.”
