by Ron Hansen
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.
She always maintained that her friend had committed suicide. “H
itler fenced in her life so tightly,” she said, “confined her in such a narrow space, that she saw no other way out. Finally she hated her uncle, she really wanted to kill him. She couldn’t do that. So she killed herself, to hurt him deeply enough, to disturb him. She knew that nothing else would wound him so badly. And because he knew, too, he had to blame himself.”
She noted that “there were no more happy picnics” after Geli died, and no one felt free to mention her name. Hitler never again played the piano, he was more slovenly in his grooming, he gave up all forms of alcohol, the anarchy of his allocation of time just got worse, and on September 18th and Christmas Eve each year until 1939, he would keep a self-pitying all-night vigil in his niece’s room.
In a face-to-face confrontation with Hitler at the Berghof in 1943, Henny von Schirach criticized the harsh treatment of the Jews in Austria, and she fell foul of the führer. A few months before the end of the war, she and her husband were divorced. She’d had four children with Baldur von Schirach, and had named the first one Angela.
In 1933 Chancellor Hitler made Baldur von Schirach, then twenty-six, his Reich youth leader and offered him to the public as an Adonis who embodied all that was fine and glorious in the young. Soon his picture was nearly as widely displayed throughout Germany as Adolf Hitler’s. Jealousy led to vilification from other Nazis and jokes about his effeminacy, and in 1941 he was ousted from the hierarchy and sent to Wien as Gauleiter and Reich governor. Schirach defended the eastward deportation of nearly two hundred thousand Austrian Jews as “a contribution to European culture,” but later, in the Nürnberg trials, he denied he knew of their extermination and called the annihilation of European Jewry “the greatest and most satanic murder in world history.” Sentenced to twenty years in prison for crimes against humanity, he was released in 1966 and died twelve years later.
Julius Schaub became an SS Obersturmführer, or first lieutenant, and Hitler’s aide-de-camp throughout the war, and as the führer’s health faded, his crutch. While in prison he wrote his unpublishable memoirs, then fell into the obscurity that his character warranted.
In 1935 Emil Maurice was condemned by the Gestapo for having Jewish ancestry, but the führer intervened for the Old Combatant, and in 1937 even made Emil the head of the Landeshandwerksmeis-ter, a society of professional handicrafts workers, a job for which he was particularly unsuited. In the war he became an SS Oberführer, or brigadier general, and he survived it. Eva Braun’s biographer interviewed him in 1968, and found that thirty-seven years after her death, he was still in love with Geli Raubal.
As minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels once cynically admitted that the way to attract new members to the party was to excite the most primitive instincts of “the stupid, the lazy, and the cowardly,” that hatred was his primary trade; but by 1945 it was he who was hated and ridiculed throughout Germany as “the malicious dwarf” and “Wotan’s Mickey Mouse.” A friendless man all his life, he still venerated Adolf Hitler as a Teutonic god, and held him in such unfathomable awe that he felt priv-iliged to have his wife and six young children invited to suffer the grim final days in the bunker below the Reich’s chancellery in Berlin.
Magda Goebbels had long been so strangely in love with Hitler that she’d agreed to marry the faithless Doktor Goebbels just to be closer to him, and frequently thought of herself as “First Lady of the Reich.” She, like her husband, could not conceive of life without the führer. Within hours of Hitler’s suicide, Magda had her one son and five daughters injected with morphine to calm them, then fed them poisoned chocolate and watched them die. Then Doktor and Frau Goebbels walked up the four flights of stairs to the night of the chancellery garden where Magda bit into an ampule of potassium cyanide as her husband stood behind her and fired a bullet into her brain. Doktor Goebbels then chewed an ampule as he fired his Walther P-38 pistol into his right temple. An SS guard fired twice into the fallen bodies to make sure they were dead. Imitating Hitler in all things, Doktor Goebbels had left instructions for SS orderlies to douse their bodies in four jerry cans of gasoline before setting them aflame, but the job was incomplete and their faces were skinless but still recognizable when the invading Russians found and photographed them.
On May 21, 1945, British soliders at a checkpoint between Hamburg and Bremerhaven halted a car in which was cowering a man who seemed familiar. Crazed with failure and in ill health, his gray mustache shaved off, his pince-nez forsaken for a fake eye patch, his clothing that of a janitor, he was still unmistakably Heinrich Himmler, minister of the interior; Reich commissar for the consolidation of German nationhood; Reichsführer of the SS, the security service, three million policemen, the prisoners of war camps and the extermination camps at Kulmhof, Belzec, Sobibór, Maidanek, Birkenau, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. In jail a doctor examined him and saw in his mouth what seemed to be a black and carious molar. It was, in fact, a vial of cyanide. Immediately Himmler bit down on it, swallowed the poison, and writhed on the floor in agony for twelve minutes—many would say not long enough—until he was finally dead.
Collecting offices and titles just as he collected looted masterpieces, Hermann Wilhelm Göring was, before he fell out of favor with Hitler, Prussian minister of the interior, president of the Reichstag, chief of the Luftwaffe, head of the Gestapo, and Reichsmarschall of greater Germany, the fat Falstaff in many malicious jokes. Combining flamboyance, greed, hedonism, joviality, cruelty, and misanthropy with a love of deer hunting and the shrewd eye for art and jewelry of a connoisseur, Göring was thought of, in Nazi circles, as a Renaissance man; but with no education, no ethics, no second thoughts, no skill in administration, no understanding of technology, no perseverance, and with frequent miscalculations of Allied strength, his many organizations faltered and failed in the war, and on May 9, 1945, he was taken prisoner by soldiers of the United States Seventh Army. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international military tribunal in Nürnberg, he was sentenced to death by hanging in 1946, but instead, as the scaffold was readied in the jail yard at Spandau, he managed to commit suicide with the help of a hidden poison. In his death photograph he is winking.
Alfred Rosenberg, who was called “the intellectual high priest of the master race,” continued to publish widely in the thirties on racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic themes, and was rewarded with the title of “Deputy for the Entire Spiritual Development and Ideology of the NSDAP,” and then Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories, jobs that allowed him to liquidate the Jewish ghettos, to plunder fine art from Jewish collections, and to write memoranda that no one read. At the Nürnberg trials he claimed his writings had been shamefully misused, that he’d wanted a “chivalrous solution” to the Jewish question, that concentration camps and gas chambers were inconceivable to him and to Hitler, who’d only intended to give the Jews “harsh warnings.” Rosenberg was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed by hanging in 1946.
Rudolf Hess was deputy führer and Reich minister without portfolio when, in 1941, he crazily flew a Messerschmitt over the North Sea and parachuted into Scotland in order to independently negotiate peace with Great Britain and demand that Winston Churchill resign. Jailed in the Tower of London until 1945, he feigned insanity, amnesia, and sheer disinterest at the Nürnberg trials, whined continually about his health, and was shunned by the other prisoners, who called him “Fräulein Anni.” Claiming he’d worked “under the greatest son Germany had brought forth in its thousand-year history,” he once wrote that, “Even if I could, I would not want to erase this Nazi period of time from my existence. I do not regret anything.” When eleven of his codefendants were executed, Hess was amused. Even after the war he was still insisting that the Jews in Germany should be imprisoned “for their own protection.” Only when he was seventy-five years old did he allow his wife Ilse to visit him. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Hesserl, his Rudi, was the sole prisoner in Spandau jail when he died in 1987 at the age of ninety-three,
and after that the jail was destroyed.
On April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in a confining and unfinished concrete bunker of thirty rooms far below the garden of the Reichs chancellery in Berlin. Walls sweated, old food littered the hallways, floors were tangled with electric cables, the Red Army’s shelling of the city was a worrying noise overhead, and with seventy people crowded underground and too few lavatories, the smell was so foul that a staff member later said “it was like working in a public urinal.”
A flighty and lovesick Eva Braun joined Adolf down there and found a screeching, hysterical, stooped, and prematurely senile old man whose once stunning eyes were now teary and shot with red veins, whose skin was sallow, whose hair had turned suddenly gray, whose hands trembled, who stank, who shuddered, who could no longer even hold a rifle, who lost his balance when he walked, whose feet had to be lifted onto his bed by his valet. The front of his brown uniform jacket was stained with soup and mustard. Spittle was often on his lips and he drooled or whistled through his false teeth when he talked. Imaginary armies ignored his commands; treachery was everywhere; his dearest friends had failed and undermined him.
Eva Braun had been his secret mistress for thirteen years; she was his “girl at my disposal in München.” Even as late as April 1st he’d confessed to his secretary, “Eva is very nice, but only Geli could have inspired in me genuine passion. Marrying Eva is out of the question. The only woman I would ever have tied myself to for life was my niece.”