by Michael Dean
On the other side-issue, damage to the nose and apparent bruising to Geli’s body – the implication here is that Hitler had hit Geli. It can be discounted. She hurt her nose when she fell on the floor, mortally wounded, as Dr Müller’s report confirms. The apparent bruising was post-mortem lividity – hypostasis.
But the report in the Munich Post, and another report in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, gave the Public Prosecutor’s Office cause to open a further investigation – even without Geli’s body. Dr Müller made a second statement. He now attested that Geli had been lying face down on the floor for seventeen to eighteen hours – in dieser Lage etwa 17-18 Stunden liegen blieb.[14]
If the body had been lying on the floor for only seventeen or eighteen hours after death, Hitler is indeed in the clear, if he left the apartment on Friday afternoon. But Dr Müller made this second report after Geli’s body had been sent back to Vienna, on Monday 21 September. It appears in a file containing all the papers from the investigation – M Inn 72443 at the Bayrisches Haupstadtsarchiv - which is dated 28 September 1931. One wonders, then, at this degree of precision.
Even modern forensic science would struggle to distinguish between a time of death eighteen hours before the body was found, which puts Hitler in the clear, and, say, twenty-four hours before the body was found, which blows his alibi apart. For example: ‘It takes the body 18-36 hours to cool to the surrounding temperature.’[15]
We do know, however, that ‘after twenty-four hours the head and neck turn greenish blue.’ (Curzon). As part of the second investigation, the women who had prepared Geli’s body for burial were interviewed. Their statements focussed on wounds to Geli’s nose and body because, taking his lead from the Munich Post article, that is what the Public Prosecutor – probably Glaser - asked them about.
But one of them, Maria Fischbauer, said Geli was very blue in the face. ‘Sie war im Gesicht sehr blau.’[16] This was between 11 and 12 on the Saturday, at the East Cemetery, when the body was washed and prepared for burial. This suggests that Geli had died at least twenty-four hours before being prepared for burial – which takes us to twelve o’ clock on Friday, before ‘Friday afternoon’ when both Hitler and Hoffmann say Hitler’s party left for Nuremberg.
So, far from confirming Hitler’s alibi, as is popularly believed, what medical evidence there is contradicts it.
And we have two statements which allege that Geli had been dead for twenty-four hours or longer. The first is from Hoffmann, in his autobiography. On page 154 he says that ‘Geli had already been dead for twenty-four hours’ when Hess phoned with the news – which casts doubt on the alibi he had tried so hard to establish in the same book.
Another statement has Geli lying dead even longer. She was ‘left lying in her (own) blood for three days.’ when she was found. And that would account for the corpse’s face being not just blue but ‘very blue.’ The quotation about the three days is from Hitler’s cook, Therese Linke.[17]
Linke was the cook at Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler’s chocolate-box retreat in the Bavarian mountains. Her boss there was Angela Raubal, Geli’s mother. It is surely reasonable to conclude that Linke’s source for this information was Angela. And look again at the phrasing: Not ‘she was left lying on the floor’ but the more accurate ‘lying in her (own) blood.’ - 3 Tage lag sie in ihrem Blut, bis man sie fand.
This description of Geli’s death by the cook comes on page fifteen of a twenty-one page hand-written reminiscence of life with Hitler, written after the war. It is parenthetical to pages of praise of Hitler, by an unreconstructed Nazi.
Therese Linke said something else of interest in her handwritten statement: Linke said that Geli was pregnant. Hitler’s close intimate and Foreign Press Chief, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaeng thought so, too.
It would have been a disaster for the Nazis.
THE UNLIKELIHOOD OF SUICIDE
On 8th September 1931, Geli went walking in the mountains with her brother, Leo. ‘My sister showed no sign of depression or being out of sorts (Verstimmung)’ Leo said.[18] When Geli died she was half-way through a cheerful letter to a friend in Vienna. The suicide theory has her breaking off in the middle of the word und and shooting herself:
‘When I come to Vienna – I hope very soon – we’ll drive to Semmering an …’[19]
Hayman has done some work on the trajectory of the bullet (page 193): The bullet which killed Geli entered her body above the heart and ended up just above her hip. This meant that the barrel of the gun was pointing downwards and the hand holding the gun was above the heart. The position is not impossible, but it is very uncomfortable and counter-intuitive, in the sense that you can’t feel the heart beating at that spot.
Any discussion of a possible suicide, sooner or later, has to address the personality of the deceased person and those most closely involved. There is absolutely no evidence for the received wisdom that Geli was in love with Hitler. The best witness to the relationship we have is Henrietta (Henni) Hoffmann - later von Schirach. Henni was the Party photographer Hoffmann’s daughter. She had known Hitler since childhood, Geli since the age of fourteen, and she was Geli’s closest girlfriend.
Henni said Hitler loved Geli. But as she grew older, Geli outgrew him.[20]
Elsewhere she speculates that the life-loving Geli, who just wanted to have fun, found
her uncle ‘weird.’ (unheimlich).[21]
HITLER’S ALIBI.
On the drive back to Munich, having been given the news of Geli’s death, Hitler’s Mercedes picked up a speeding ticket for doing 55.3 kilometres an hour. This document has been held to substantiate Hitler’s alibi (for example John Toland’s 1976 biography of Hitler, which says that Hitler could not have killed Geli ‘because he was in Nuremberg’). All the speeding ticket proves, of course, is that at 1.37 pm on Saturday 19 September 1931, Hitler was in a car in Ebenhausen, between Nuremberg and Munich. It does not tell us where he was when Geli died.
Anni Winter’s various post-war statements on the subject were self-contradictory. Anni Winter was a dedicated Nazi. After the war, she made a living from a shop selling Nazi memorabilia. She had been left 200 Marks a month for life in Hitler’s will. Hanfstaengl was among those who thought this was for services rendered in the Raubal case.[22]
What could these services have been? Anni destested Geli. She thought her a provincial parvenu who had aspirations to marry Hitler. As the housekeeper, she was the person most likely to have noticed that Geli was pregnant, if Therese Linke and Hanfstaengl were right about that. She would certainly have told Hess, when Geli’s body was discovered. And that would account for the unremarked oddity of the money in Hitler’s will being left to Anni only, not to Herr and Frau Winter together.
The idea that Geli was alive when Hitler left the apartment to go to Nuremberg comes mainly from the specious, plausible, garrulous, all-too charming drunkard that was Heinrich Hoffmann. Biographies of Hitler all draw on Hoffmann’s autobiography, if only because there is no other source for the events he describes.
But Heinrich Hoffmann is not a reliable witness. He was imprisoned after the war, for being a Nazi – which he was. He had known Hitler as a convert since the earliest days of the Nazi Party - 1920. His party number was the very low 247. His almost certainly inadvertent contradiction of Hitler’s alibi by saying Geli had been lying dead for twenty-four hours has already been quoted, but here he is creating the myth in the first place:
‘On 17th September Hitler had invited me to go on a fairly long tour with him up north. When I got to his house, Geli was there, helping him to pack. As we left and were going down the stairs, Geli leaned over the banisters and called “Au revoir, Herr Hoffmann.” Hitler stopped and looked up. For a moment he paused, then he turned and mounted the staircase again, while I went on to wait for him at the front door. Very shortly, Hitler joined me.’[23]
Geli packing for Hitler paints an intimate portrait, but it doesn’t ring true for either of them. Hitler was rigid with tension a
bout the physical side of life – he refused to wear a bathing costume, for example. He would not have let Geli pack for him. (What about his underwear?) And she would not have wanted to. Georg Winter, his valet, would have done his packing. Henni may have packed for Hoffmann, though – father and daughter were close since Frau Hoffmann died in the 1928 flu epidemic. No doubt that was what gave him the idea.
Hoffmann’s unreliability as a witness is demonstrated again on page 154. Describing the return to the Munich apartment on the Saturday he says ‘Her mother met us with mutely streaming eyes.’ Geli’s mother was at Haus Wachenfeld, in the Bavarian Alps.
I believe Hoffmann was serving his master after the master’s death, as every other Nazi did. What we can say for sure is that the received wisdom of Hitler’s alibi, and with it the assumption that Geli killed herself, rests on the paragraph quoted above plus Hitler’s statement to Oberkommissar Sauer that Geli was alive when his party left for Nuremberg.
There is no other evidence at all.
*
SO WHAT DID HAPPEN, THEN?
Emil Maurice is widely believed to have had ‘an affair’ with Geli. There are good reasons to believe – not least from what they said about each other – that this was not an affair, but a life-long love on both sides. ‘She was a princess, who everybody turned to look at. Her large eyes were poems.’ That was Maurice talking about Geli in 1967, thirty-six years after her death.[24]
Maurice was one of the founders of Hitler’s ‘Hall Guard’ (Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler) – the thugs who guarded the first NSDAP (Nazi Party) meetings from Communist attack, and led attacks on Communist and Social Democrat meetings. His Party number was thirty-nine. His SS number was two. (His successor as Hitler’s chauffeur, Schreck, had the number one).
He was imprisoned, along with Hitler, Hess and others, in Landsberg Fortress after the abortive Munich Putsch. On 14th July 1924, records at the fortress show that Geli, who had just turned sixteen, visited her Uncle Alf there. She and Emil Maurice, then twenty-seven, fell for each other and started a correspondence, which both kept secret from Hitler.
Geli was at an impressionable age and no doubt found Maurice attractive, with his tough physique and bandleader moustache. He was not only a thug, he was a skilled craftsman – a watch and clock maker and repairer. A likely point of contact was music. Emil Maurice played the mandolin and could sing. Geli was a talented musician. Henni Hoffmann, who knew him well, thought Maurice was ‘a sensitive man’ who showed ‘genuine tenderness.’[25]
After their all-too-early release from Landsberg, Maurice became Hitler’s chauffeur.
His clandestine relationship with Geli was nourished by frequent social contact. There were picnics at Starnbergersee or Chiemsee, where a changing company of males and females would be driven in Hitler’s Mercedes. Hitler, Emil Maurice and Geli were the only ever-presents on these occasions.
Hitler regarded Maurice as a friend who did the driving, not as a servant. He called Maurice Mauritzl – little Maurice. Mauritzl was a Duzfreund – addressed by the familiar Du form. But that did not mean Hitler would allow him to get close to Geli.
The couple ‘went public’ about their intended marriage in December 1927 at Hess’s wedding to Ilse Prohl. Hitler, who enjoyed playing matchmaker, had virtually commanded the union. During the ceremony, he asked the now thirty-year-old Emil Maurice when he was going to follow Hess’s lead and get married. Maurice later stated that ‘like everyone else’ he was deeply in love with Geli.[26] He blurted this out to Hitler and, in the traditional manner, asked for Geli’s hand.
It was a terrible mistake. Hess’s wedding ended in a blazing row. The next day, at Hitler’s apartment, Hitler threatened Emil Maurice with his pistol. In view of Geli’s later death from a bullet from Hitler’s gun, it is worth emphasising this tendency of Hitler’s to threaten even those close to him with the weapon. He chased Maurice from the flat, brandishing the pistol.
Maurice was dismissed as chauffeur, without references (fristlos entlassen). Hitler showed no mercy to the weeping Geli, using the interestingly bourgeois and completely untrue excuse that Maurice had no profession – in fact he had two, clockmaker and chauffeur.
Emil Maurice hit back. He had been left with no job and no prospect of getting one. He had been forcibly parted from the woman he loved. In August 1928, he took Hitler to court for unfair dismissal.
He won. Hitler was ordered to pay 800 Marks compensation. With the Nazi Party in the doldrums before the financial crash of 1929, that was a massive sum. (For 1926, Schwarz, the NSDP Finance Director had a total of 534 Marks at his disposal). And with the Nazi Party share of the national vote down to 2.6% after the May 1928 elections, this was not some personal sideshow – the political implications could have finished the Nazis completely.
Hitler’s retaliation was characteristic. He attacked Maurice at his weakest point, using information he known for years, but which had never bothered him – Maurice’s Jewish ancestry. Emil Maurice’s great-grandfather was Jewish. For the Nazis that was enough to disqualify him as an ‘aryan.’ Maurice was ‘outed’ as we would say today. As a rabid anti-semite there are indications that the ‘outing’ hit him hard.
Maurice used his 800 marks compensation for unfair dismissal to set up a watch and clock repair shop at 5 Schumannstrasse. That is just round the corner from Hitler’s apartment, in Prinzregentenplatz. How much of a leap of faith does it take to imagine that Geli managed to sneak out, at least once, to walk round the corner and see the only man she had ever loved, Emil Maurice, at his shop? And how much of a further leap of faith does it take to believe that they made love?
So if, as Therese Linke attested, and Hanfstaengl also believed, Geli was pregnant when she died, the father was surely Emil Maurice.
What would Geli have done if she were pregnant? This is 1931, she is a prisoner in the apartment, and she was a believing, church-going Roman Catholic. Not an abortion, then. Her only close girlfriend was Hoffmann’s daughter. She wouldn’t have risked Henni telling the father she was so close to. Geli would have run to Emil. And Hitler would have stopped her – in my view he would have shot her if necessary, especially in the heat of a row, to save the Nazi party which was all he lived for.
The pregnancy gives Minister of Justice Gürtner a good reason to have the body sent back to Vienna before a proper post-mortem. However, Dr Müller did not mention a pregnancy in his medical report, and neither did the two washerwomen who prepared Geli’s body.
But Geli was likely to have been in the early stages of pregnancy. We know Müller’s examination was cursory and would have focussed on the thoracic area of a clothed, blood-soaked corpse. He could have missed it. Even the washerwomen, Maria Fischbauer and Rosina Zweckl, may not have spotted a pregnancy that had not began to ‘show.’
If Hitler shot the possibly pregnant Geli in her room at any time before he left for Nuremberg, he could have tossed the gun onto the sofa – which is where it was found - locked her bedroom door from the inside, and walked back to his own room via the outside balcony. He then left for Nuremberg as if nothing had happened. This would be completely in character for Hitler. Today we would call it being ‘in denial.’
One contemporary accused Hitler of killing Geli. Otto Strasser is hardly a neutral witness; Hitler had his brother, Gregor, killed in the Night of the Long Knives. However, writing in 1940, ten years after he had left the Nazi Party, he claimed that Gregor had told him that Hitler had shot Geli during a quarrel.[27] Hitler had been in such a demented state that he did not know what he was doing. He had wanted to commit suicide afterwards but Gregor and Hess had restrained him.
***
Geli Raubal was given a Catholic funeral and buried in consecrated ground. The officiating priest, Father Johann Pant, who knew Hitler and the Raubal family well, insisted on both because he did not believe she had committed suicide.
Sources
Curzon G, Establishing Time of Death in a Homicide, Socyberty crime online
April 2008
Gunn, N Hitler’s Mistress Eva Braun Bantam 1969
Hanfstaengl, E The Unknown Hitler: Notes from the young Nazi party Gibson Square 2005
Hayman, R Hitler and Geli Bloomsbury 1998
Hoffmann H, Hitler was my Friend Burke, 1955
Linke, T handwritten statement Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich
von Schirach H (1) Der Preis der Herrlichkeit: Erinnerungen Heyne 1978
von Schirach H (2) Frauen um Hitler Herbig 1985
Sigmund, A-M Des Führers bester Freund Heyne 2005
Strasser, O Hitler and I London 1940
Hitler as Artist
Michael Dean
First published autumn 2010 in The Copperfield Review
The German term Bildende Kunst makes no distinction between architecture, design and art, and neither did Hitler. Art, in that wider sense, could hardly have been more central to Hitler’s world-view:
‘Just as we see in Christian art, the herald of the age … expressed in its churches, its sculptures, its art works, its music and so on … so today art will be the herald, and pave the way for the whole spiritual development and way of life, which will shape and dominate our present time.’[28]
Between 1933 and 1939, Hitler made thirteen major public speeches solely or mainly about art. These were at the Nuremberg Party Rallies in 1933-38, as well as the laying of the foundation stone of the House of German Art, 1933, and the opening of various exhibitions.
In painting, the longed-for, racially determined, National Socialist art was to be embodied in the idea of Blut and Boden – the mystic union of blood and soil. The minor Bavarian and pan-German painters who realized Blut und Boden had been threatened, as Hitler saw it, by the creation of Expressionism, in 1910, a date Hitler referred to as the end of true art.[29]
This Manichean view of art, as of other issues, notably race, found its apotheosis in the simultaneous Munich art exhibitions of 1937: The Great German Art Exhibition was supposed to show the Reich re-creating Greek eternal greatness, except that Hitler couldn’t find the painters to do it. The so-called Degenerate Art Exhibition, on the other hand, was intended to attack and humiliate the Expressionists, mainly, with one or two modernists from other genres.