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“Around three.”
“And you went less than one third of the way?”
“We had plenty of time. My speech was to have been at eight o’clock this evening.”
“Are you aware of anything that may have driven your niece to suicide?”
“She may have felt she’d disappointed me. She’d begged for singing lessons, and out of generosity I’d paid for them, but she was discovering she was not talented enough. To be frank, I think she was frightened of going onstage. Or there may have been a conflict over love. One hears so many rumors. And yet as her uncle I felt constrained by propriety from a natural curiosity about my niece’s private affairs. In fact, I was forced to be rather more aloof than I wished, and I was not always privy to intimate details of her life.”
“Anything else?”
Scanning the gray skies through his office window, Hitler sucked thoughtfully on his right little finger and said, “It occurs to me now that she’d once taken part in a séance where tables moved and there she’d been told she certainly wouldn’t die a natural death. And she was always afraid of guns, possibly out of foreboding.”
Sauer asked, “She knew where your pistol was kept?”
“Oh yes.” And then he held his famous mesmerizing stare on Sauer, a film of tears welling up on cue. “You must understand Geli’s death has affected me very deeply. She was the only relation with whom I was ever close. We were inseparable. And now this has to happen to me.”
Frau Angela Raubal was summoned from Obersalzberg on Saturday and her train was met by Rudolf Hess, Franz Xaver Schwarz, and Anni Winter. She fainted when she viewed Geli’s body in the East Cemetery. When she awoke she was in a parlor and Rudolf Hess was watching her with overdone worry and sympathy. She was told that the police and the coroner had just completed their investigation. All agreed that it had been a suicide, so Angelika Raubal, medical student, was listed as number 193 in the München Selbstmörder register for 1931. Angela was not told that a public prosecutor named Gläser had been offended by the hastiness of the judgment and had urged a further inquest, but he had been overruled by Franz Gürtner, who would become Reich minister of justice when Adolf Hitler came to power.
The Völkischer Beobachter failed to mention Geli’s death, but on Monday, September 21st, the Münchener Post carried news of what they called “A Mysterious Affair: Suicide of Hitler’s Niece.” Their journalist was factually wrong in thinking Geli lived in a flat on Prinzregentenplatz that was other than her uncle’s, and he fell for the gossip that she wanted to go to Wien in order to become engaged, but he seemed to have been informed of the quarreling between Hitler and his niece, and he hinted at manslaughter rather than suicide in writing that “Fräulein Geli had been found shot in the flat with Hitler’s gun in her hand. The bridge of the nose was shattered, and there were other serious injuries on the body.” And he knew that on Saturday morning “gentlemen from the Brown House conferred on what should be announced as the motive for the suicide. It was agreed that Geli’s death should be explained in terms of frustrated artistic ambitions.”
The Monday story by the Münchener Post forced the police to order a further investigation, but nothing would change. The Walther pistol was returned to Hitler on September 21st, and by then the zinc coffin containing Geli’s body was being shipped by railway from the East Cemetery in München to the Central Cemetery in Wien.
Leo Raubal got on the train in Linz and found that his mother had been joined in the funeral journey by Captain Ernst Röhm and Heinrich Himmler, who’d offensively presumed to act as old family friends. Owing to his revolutionary putsch in 1923, Hitler had lost his Austrian citizenship and was forbidden to enter the country, hence Leo thought it strange that his sister wasn’t being buried in München or Berchtesgaden; but when he asked his mother why, she vaguely said, “Oh, I don’t know,” and whenever Angela talked about the suicide later, it seemed to him that she was concealing.
She’d chosen Pater Johann Pant as the officiating priest for the funeral in Wien, for he’d met Adolf thirty years before when he’d been a hostel chaplain and young Adolf was selling hand-painted postcards, and he’d hunted down funds for Geli’s education when Angela couldn’t afford tuition. The priest confided to Leo that there was an official difficulty, for the Church considered any suicide a grave offense against God; he would have to deny Geli a Catholic funeral service and burial in consecrated ground.
Heinrich Himmler had grown up as a pious Catholic, but he’d fallen as far away from the Church as Hitler had. And yet, hearing about the obstacle, and confident that the priest could reveal nothing that was said in the confessional, Himmler chose, in a spasm of decency, to help out the Raubal family by secretly visiting the rectory and asking Pater Johann Pant for the sacrament of penance. That night the priest told Leo that his sister would be buried with the full funeral rites of the Catholic Church, and “from this fact you may draw conclusions which I cannot communicate to you.”
She was buried grandly in a shrine at Arkadengruft 9, facing the Lüger Church. Aunt Paula Hitler was there with the Raubals, Ernst Röhm, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Müller, the Völkischer Beobachter’s printer, and the self-appointed National Socialist Gauleiter of Wien, Alfred Frauenfeld. A fine, inscribed marble slab would later be sited there:
HERE SLEEPS OUR BELOVED CHILD
GELI
IN ETERNAL SLUMBER
SHE WAS OUR RAY OF SUNSHINE
BORN 4 JUNE 1908 DIED 18 SEPTEMBER 1931
THE RAUBAL FAMILY
Angela Raubal would continue to be a faithful member of the National Socialist German Workers Party and would stay on as chatelaine of the chalet in Obersalzberg, which would be grandly remodeled as the Berghof, but she would quit the job in 1935 because she so disliked Eva Braun, whom she called “the stupid cow,” and she would marry a Professor Martin Hammitzsch, who was the sixty-year-old director of a school of construction engineering in Dresden. Citing pressing affairs of state, Adolf failed to attend the wedding. When the führer committed suicide with Eva Braun in 1945, Angela found that the wealthiest man in Europe had left to the party the Berghof, his furniture, his pictures, and some personal items, but that she and Paula were to be given only twelve thousand reichsmarks per year for life. She received none of it. Interrogated by the American OSS in the aftermath of the war, Angela still exonerated Hitler for the death of her daughter and said she’d been murdered by Himmler. Frau Hammitzsch also felt Hitler had intended to marry his niece, but had delayed, she said, because Geli was in love with a violinist in Linz. Angela died in 1949 at the age of sixty-six.
Alois Hitler Jr. had little further contact with his half-brother after 1933, was never even mentioned by Adolf to his friends, and never once was seen in the chancellery in Berlin. Alois lost his son Heinz in the war, and lost his restaurant in the Wittenbergplatz afterward. In his half-brother’s last will and testament, he was given sixty thousand marks but at the time of his death in 1956 had received none of it.
Paula Hitler stayed on in Wien, living shyly and worriedly in a shade-drawn flat under the name of Wolf. She died in 1960. She never married.
William Patrick Hitler emigrated to America, changed his last name, and served in the United States Navy, informing on his family for the OSS. After the war he settled just outside New York City. He named his son Adolf.
While teaching in a Realschule in Linz, Leo Raubal married his fiancée, Anne, fathered two children, and graduated from a reserve officer candidate school. Called into the Luftwaffe in 1939, less than a month after the onset of war, he served as a lieutenant and adjutant to the regimental commander. At the seige of Stalingrad in January 1943, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians, and an offer was made to his uncle that Leo would be released in exchange for the son of Josef Stalin. Hitler refused, saying, “War is war,” and then so did Stalin. Sentenced to twenty-five years in prison—for execution was officially forbidden in Soviet Russia—Leo was one of the few to survive the Russian gulag and was released in 1955, his faith in Adolf Hitler perversely unshaken and, in spite of all the damning evidence, firmly persuaded that his uncle was innocent of his sister’s murder.
Putzi Hanfstaengl fell out of favor with the party for his insistence that the führer ought to soften his religious and racial views, and found the temerity to publicly call Doktor Goebbels a swine. Convinced that he was about to be “neutralized,” he fled to England in 1937, and then, under the name of Dr. Sedgwick, he served in the American White House, furnishing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his old Harvard classmate, with information on the Nazi hierarchy as an adviser on psychological warfare. After the war, he was repatriated to Germany and died there in 1975.
Heinrich Hoffmann took more than two and a half million photographs of Adolf Hitler between their first meeting in 1919 and the führer’s suicide in 1945. When the Reich chancellor’s face was put on postage stamps, royalties were paid to them both, and Hoffmann became a far wealthier man, though he was already rich because of best-selling picture books such as Germany, Awake!; Hitler Conquers the German Heart; Hitler As No One Knows Him; Youth Around Hitler; Hitler in His Mountains; and Hitler Liberates the Sudetenland. Hitler named him a professor in 1938, and in 1940 he was elected as a Reichstag deputy. After the war he was judged a “beneficiary” of the Third Reich and was sentenced to hard labor and loss of property. He died in München in 1957 at the age of seventy-two.
With Hitler’s blessing, Henrietta Hoffmann married Baldur von Schirach in March 1932, and the wedding reception was held in the flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16. She changed clothes in Geli’s perpetually locked bedroom and found it had been turned into a shrine or, as she put it, “an Egyptian burial place,” with Geli’s pullovers and pleated skirts still in the wardrobe, the sheet music and librettos of operas just where they’d been when she died, and an affecting full-length portrait of Geli by Adolf Ziegler hanging on the wall. The bloodstains had been washed away, and the air was perfumed with fresh freesias that Anni Winter put there when she cleaned. She heard that there were paintings or sculptures of Geli in all Hitler’s offices.
