For 95 years, one detail has stood between Adolf Hitler and suspicion of murder: the date. Angela “Geli” Raubal, his 23-year-old half-niece, was found dead with a gunshot wound to the chest in his Munich apartment in September 1931, shot with a pistol belonging to Hitler; her death was officially ruled a suicide. Official documents showed that Hitler—then gaining prominence but not yet in power—had left Munich for Nuremberg the afternoon before the body was discovered. He could not, therefore, have done it. Newly uncovered archival documents now threaten that tidy alibi, CNN reports.
The accepted chronology runs through the Munich police investigation. Raubal’s body was recorded as discovered on September 19th, when Georg Winter, Hitler’s personal servant, forced open her room—which was locked from the inside—and found her on the floor. Since official records placed Hitler’s departure for Nuremberg on the afternoon of September 18th, the timeline absorbed the question before it could be asked.
Harold Sandner, a German historian, says he has found an entry in Munich’s official death register giving the date and time of the discovery of Raubal’s body as 10.15am on September 18th 1931. Two death notices found in the archives carry that date too. If those records are authentic, Raubal died around 24 hours earlier than previously believed—and Hitler was still in Munich when her body was found, since official records show he did not leave for Nuremberg until the afternoon of September 18th.
Mr Sandner has suggested the conflicting records could point to a possible murder cover-up by police officials sympathetic to the Nazi Party. His findings were first published by Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, and will be set out in his book, The Death of Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal: Suicide or Foul Play?, due for publication next month.
Thomas Weber, an expert on Nazi Germany and a history lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, knows Mr Sandner’s work well and has examined the material. He approached their meeting with scepticism, he told CNN, but concluded that the documents appear to seriously undermine the established chronology. He describes Mr Sandner as “extremely meticulous and fastidious” and believes the papers credible.
Assuming that the photocopies of the documents that Sandner shared with me are authentic – and I have no reason to doubt that – it seems clear that Raubal died a day earlier than we all have assumed over the last almost one hundred years, and thus that Hitler was still in Munich when she died.
With three newly unearthed documents all putting the death on September 18th, Mr Weber added, some sort of clerical error seems unlikely. That is a long way from proof of murder, and he is reluctant to make the leap. The Nazis could have had other reasons for concealing what happened: at the time the party was courting mainstream right-wing support, and Hitler was attempting to present himself “for electoral reasons as the embodiment of trust and virtue”—an image that “any scandal” could have put at risk, Mr Weber said.
An unhealthy obsession
The relationship at the centre of the mystery was already disturbing. Raubal was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Hammitzsch (née Hitler). She lived in her half-uncle’s close proximity for years while her mother served as his housekeeper, before moving into his Munich apartment in 1929. Many historians believe Hitler was infatuated with her and that his behaviour became intensely controlling and possessive; some have suggested the relationship turned sexual, though this is disputed. He is understood to have exercised considerable control over her life.
“The speculation has been that Hitler had an unhealthy obsession with Raubal, that he loved her, and 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,” Mr Weber said, adding that there were many variations of this speculation. He personally finds it difficult to believe the relationship was incestuous, he said, but Hitler’s patterns of behaviour certainly suggest he felt a “deep bond” with her.
Shortly before her death, Hitler and Raubal are believed to have argued over her desire to leave Munich for Vienna to pursue musical studies. That quarrel has long fed the darker theories. If the new documents stand up, they remove the one hard fact that had always answered them: that he was somewhere else.
The records do not settle how Raubal died, and may never. A locked room and a suicide ruling are not swept away by a redated register entry; a cover-up of a scandal would look much like a cover-up of a killing. But questions that have persisted for nearly a century about what happened inside Hitler’s Munich home have now been reopened—and the alibi, once the sturdiest part of the official story, is suddenly the most fragile.