Hitler

she is reported as saying. ‘No one can imagine what he demands of me.’
    By mid-September 1931 she had had enough. She planned to return to Vienna. It was later rumoured that she had a new boyfriend there, even that he was a Jewish artist whose child she was expecting. Geli’s mother, Angela Raubal, told American interrogators after the war that her daughter had wanted to marry a violinist from Linz, but that she and her half-brother, Adolf, had forbidden her to see the man. At any rate it seems certain that Geli was desperate to get away from her uncle’s clutches. Whether he had been physically maltreating her is again impossible to ascertain. It was said that her nose was broken and there were other indications of physical violence, when her body was found. Once more the evidence is too flimsy to be certain, and the story was one put out by Hitler’s political enemies. The police doctor who examined the body, and two women who laid out the corpse, found no wounds or bleeding on the face. But that Hitler was at the very least subjecting his niece to intense psychological pressure cannot be doubted. According to the version put out a few days later by the Socialist
Münchener Post
– vehemently denied in a public statement by Hitler – during a heated argument on Friday 18 September he refused to let her go to Vienna. Later that day, Hitler and his entourage departed for Nuremberg. He had already left his hotel the next morning when he was urgently recalled to be told the news that Geli had been found dead in his apartment, shot with his revolver. He immediately raced back to Munich – in such a rush that his car was reported by the police for speeding about halfway between Nuremberg and Munich.
    Hitler’s political enemies had a field day. There were no holds barred on the newspaper reports. Stories of violent rows and physical mistreatmentmingled with sexual innuendo and even the allegation that Hitler had either killed Geli himself or had had her murdered to prevent scandal. Hitler himself was not in Munich when his niece died. And it is not easy to see the reasoning for a commissioned murder to prevent a scandal being carried out in his own flat. As it was, the scandal was enormous. The party’s own line that the killing had been an accident, which had occurred when Geli was playing with Hitler’s gun, also lacked all conviction. The truth will never be known. But suicide – possibly intended as a
cri de coeur
that went wrong – driven by the need to escape from the vice of her uncle’s clammy possessiveness and – perhaps violent – jealousy, seems the most likely explanation.
    To go from later, perhaps exaggerated, reports, Hitler appears to have been near-hysterical, then fallen into an intense depression. Those close to him had never seen him in such a state. He seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He allegedly spoke of giving up politics and finishing it all. There were fears that he might be suicidal. Hans Frank’s account implies, however, that his despair at the scandal and press campaign against him outweighed any personal grief during these days. He took refuge in the house of his publisher, Adolf Müller, on the shores of the Tegernsee. Frank used legal means to block the press attacks.
    Whatever the depth of Hitler’s grief, politics came first. He did not attend Geli’s funeral in Vienna on 24 September. He was speaking that evening before a crowd of thousands in Hamburg, where he received an even more rapturous reception than usual. According to one person who was there, he looked ‘very strained’ but spoke well. He was back in business. More than ever, the orgiastic frenzy he worked himself up into during his big public addresses, and the response he encountered in what he saw as the ‘feminine mass’, provided a substitute for the emptiness and lack of emotional bonds in his private life.
    Two days later, with permission of the Austrian authorities, he visited Geli’s grave in Vienna’s sprawling Central Cemetery. Thereafter, he was suddenly able to snap out of his depression. All at once, the crisis was over.
    Some who saw Hitler at close quarters were convinced that Geli could have exerted a restraining influence upon him. It is a highly dubious theory. His emotional involvement with Geli, whatever its precise nature, was – everything points to this – more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after. There was something