Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Which still leaves the question: What lay beneath the counterfeit? Was there something human, and if so what sort of human? Is there anything retrievable and true to be said about Hitler’s human nature? I think that’s why the Geli Raubal episode still exerts a fascination. I was surprised at first to find Bullock, certainly one of the most sober and judicious of historians, expressing a fascination with the nature of Hitler’s “love” (Bullock’s word in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny) for Geli Raubal, a fascination with the nature of that passion, with the mystery surrounding Geli’s death.

  There is a forensic mystery at the heart of the Geli Raubal question—the circumstances of her death, Hitler’s role in the suicide or murder. But the larger mystery, the one that has made it such a contested site of Hitler-explanation debates, is whether it offers a window into Hitler’s inwardness, into the question of his humanness, of whether he was an utterly demonic aberration or whether—in some perhaps even more disturbing ways—Hitler could be considered “normal.” It raises the question as well of whether the evil in Hitler had been there always, intrinsically, from the time he entered politics. Or whether we can conceive of an evolution of Hitler’s evil, of a Hitler whose evil was at one time less absolute, more incomplete (as Bullock would have it) than its final form. And if so, what factors conspired to produce the final Hitler, the Hitler of the Final Solution?

  PART THREE

  GELI RAUBAL AND HITLER’S “SEXUAL SECRET”

  A skeptical investigation into a persistent tradition

  CHAPTER 6

  Was Hitler “Unnatural”?

  In which we meet Mimi Reiter, Hitler’s forgotten “first love,” glimpse Hitler attempting to explain himself to a homicide detective, and consider “Hitlerism as a sex problem”

  Chief Archivist Weber stops in the midst of reading the document he has dug up for me. “This is very strange,” he says. “Listen to what Hitler says here.”

  The document he’s been reading from, the fragile, yellowing six-decade-old six pages he’s unearthed from the basement of the Bavarian state archives in Munich, is a police report: the report prepared by Munich police detective Sauer on his investigation into the gunshot death of Geli Raubal, Hitler’s half-niece, who was found dead in a bedroom in Hitler’s apartment with Hitler’s gun by her side.

  Archivist Weber had been reading aloud to me from the document in his office on the third floor of the Bavarian state archives. The “strange” remark that stopped him dead came from Detective Sauer’s interview (“interrogation” would be too strong a word) with Hitler at the death scene several hours after the body was discovered. An interview in which Hitler was attempting to explain to the detective why the attractive twenty-three-year-old woman chose to blast a hole in her chest with his 6.5 caliber Mauser pistol.

  This police report has been much speculated upon but rarely seen in the decades that followed Geli Raubal’s death. And that “very strange” thing Hitler said—his bizarre remark to the detective about a fateful prophecy at a séance he claimed his young niece had attended—has escaped careful examination.

  The circumstances of the detective’s interview with Adolf Hitler couldn’t have been more highly strained. It was mid-September 1931, Hitler was on the verge of an electoral breakthrough that would bring him to the brink of power. In the legislative elections the previous year, the Nazi Party had leapt out of fringe status: Its representation in the Reichstag had risen from 12 to 107 seats, making it the second largest party in the 600-seat body. For years after the failed putsch of 1923, Hitler had been regarded as a kind of crank, far outside the mainstream, a figure of fun; now, building upon the economic collapse of the Depression and the Reichstag electoral surge, he was contemplating a run for the presidency against Hindenburg in the next national election in early 1932. Suddenly, he was a serious contender. And just as suddenly, the level of press scrutiny of him and his party had intensified. The death of Geli Raubal climaxed a summer of sexual scandals in the Munich Nazi Party. The opposition Munich Post had exposed a sordid nexus of prostitution, blackmail, and murder plots involving Ernst Roehm and other Hitler cronies.

  Now Hitler himself had a body on his hands, a body in a bedroom in his own apartment, a body whose identity raised the possibility of both a sexual and a murder scandal. Although the particulars differed, the parallels to an episode in American politics nearly forty years later may put the peril candidate Hitler faced in perspective: the suspicious death of a young unmarried woman; a presidential contender who’d been close to her; frantic advisers convening; inconsistent early statements about the circumstances of the death; police suspicion; press speculation about a cover-up. The death of Geli Raubal had the potential to become the death of Adolf Hitler’s political ambitions, to become—to employ a deliberate anachronism—Adolf Hitler’s Chappaquiddick. His entire career was riding on the outcome of Detective Sauer’s investigation.

  Of course, Detective Sauer’s career might have been in jeopardy as well. The police and prosecutorial bureaucracy in Munich was dominated by right-wing nationalists, such as Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, many of them Hitler sympathizers. Already, strings were being pulled behind the scenes to minimize Hitler’s embarrassment. Already, party officials were keeping a tight rein on Detective Sauer’s investigation.

  In fact, one very prominent party official was there on the scene Saturday morning, even before Detective Sauer arrived. His name was Franz Xaver Schwarz, the party treasurer and one of the closest confidants of Hitler among the old comrades from the party’s “struggle period” in the twenties. Schwarz had apparently been summoned to the death scene even before the police that morning. Schwarz made clear to Detective Sauer that Hitler had been far away from his apartment when his niece had taken Hitler’s gun and shot herself: He’d left on the previous afternoon for a campaign trip to the north; Hitler had no knowledge the tragedy had even occurred, although efforts were now under way to reach him and bring him the terrible news, Schwarz told the detective.

  Detective Sauer and his partner, Detective Forster, viewed the body along with the police doctor. They found the young woman in her bedroom with a large hole in her chest and a large gun by her side. The doctor estimated that the bullet had been fired at close range and that it had missed the heart but passed through a lung. The gun, they were told by the household staff, belonged to Hitler and had been kept in his bedroom, the one down the hall. There was no suicide note, just a half-finished letter to a friend in Vienna discussing an upcoming visit.

  In the absence of the master of the house, Detective Sauer began taking statements from the five members of the household staff. The story the staff told, under the vigilant supervision of Party Treasurer Schwarz, was that the previous afternoon, a Friday, about fifteen minutes after Hitler left for his campaign trip, Geli had been glimpsed rushing out of Hitler’s bedroom, looking agitated. That was the last they’d seen of her, they all said, until the following morning, when she didn’t respond to a knock on her bedroom door. The door was locked (it could be locked from either side), and the husband of the housekeeping woman had jimmied it open, revealing the dead body. She must have, they said, taken the gun Hitler kept in his bedroom and used it on herself.

  None of them had heard a shot, they said. The wife of the housekeeping couple thought she’d heard a thud, like the sound of something heavy falling or breaking, in Geli’s room shortly after Geli rushed out of Hitler’s bedroom and locked her door behind her. But the housekeeper hadn’t thought of that thud as a gunshot or a body falling at the time, she said.

  Detective Sauer took the statements and conferred with the police doctor. Neither the body itself nor the statements of the household staff gave an indication of foul play, but there was one factor missing from a suicide judgment; the motive. Here the household staff had been distinctly unhelpful. None of them would hazard a guess about why the vibrant, attractive young woman who lived such an enviable life at the side of her famous uncle would sudde
nly have stolen Hitler’s gun and fired a bullet into her chest. Indeed, they went out of their way to declare their helpless bafflement in almost identical terms.

  “She shot herself—why, I can’t say,” the husband of the housekeeping couple told Detective Sauer.

  “Why Geli Raubal took her life, I don’t know,” the cleaning woman told Detective Sauer.

  “Why she shot herself, I cannot say,” the wife of the housekeeping couple told Detective Sauer.

  That was why Detective Sauer needed to speak to the absent Adolf Hitler. If he was going to close down this investigation to the satisfaction of his superiors—and, more problematically, the press—with a suicide verdict, it would be helpful to have a motive.

  He was told Hitler was being notified and that undoubtedly he would race home to mourn his niece. Detective Sauer returned to Munich police headquarters to report to his superiors and await word from Hitler. At approximately 2 P.M. the call came. Adolf Hitler had arrived back at his home and was prepared to answer questions about his niece’s death.

  We cannot, of course, intuit what might have been going through Detective Sauer’s mind when he approached the princely residence that was home to Hitler and his half-niece. Perhaps he was already aware of the pressure being brought to bear by Bavarian Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner to limit the police investigation and of the decision of the police doctor that the body should be released without a formal autopsy for embalming and hasty shipment across the border to Vienna.

  Still, he knew he had to have some explanation from Adolf Hitler for the record. Perhaps if Detective Sauer was aware of the rumors already racing through Munich, rumors about the nature of the relationship between Hitler and the young woman, rumors about the nature of the quarrel between them, he might have wondered if Hitler was the explanation.

  In the decades since that day, tens of thousands of words have been devoted to that question, to the nature of Hitler’s role in the Geli Raubal tragedy, to the effect of that tragedy on Hitler’s future role in history. Buried beneath the layers of analysis are Hitler’s own words that day to Detective Sauer. According to the detective, this is what Hitler had to say:

  His niece was a student of medicine, then she didn’t like that anymore and she turned toward singing lessons. She should have been on the stage in a short time, but she didn’t feel able enough, that’s why she wanted further studies with a professor in Vienna. Hitler says that was okay with him but only under the condition that her mother from Berchtesgaden accompany her to Vienna. When she didn’t want this, he said he told her, “Then I’m against your Vienna plans.” She was angry about this, but she wasn’t very nervous or excited and she very calmly said good-bye to him when he went off on Friday afternoon.

  Then Hitler added the remark that struck Archivist Weber as so strange:

  She had previously belonged to a society that had séances where tables moved, and she had said to Hitler that she had learned that one day she would die an unnatural death. Hitler went on to add that she could have taken the pistol very easily because she knew where it was, where he kept his things. Her dying touches his emotions very deeply because she was the only one of his relatives who was close to him. And now this must happen to him.

  Setting aside for the moment the question of its truth, that strange séance story was a brilliant if somewhat desperate stroke on Hitler’s part. Flourished at the last moment like a magician’s cloak, it was clearly designed to obscure with a flash of fatalism what he must have known were the conspicuous inconsistencies and the overall inadequacy of the rest of his attempt to explain his half-niece’s death.

  Even the timid, closely supervised statements of the household staff seem to contradict Hitler’s statement on a key point: They report Geli looking agitated and excited, rushing from Hitler’s bedroom with a gun, scarcely a quarter hour after Hitler reportedly departed. Hitler, on the contrary, declares Geli was neither nervous nor excited but rather said good-bye to him “very calmly.”

  This appears, on the face of it, to be a feeble attempt to detach the quarrel he admits to having had with Geli—the dispute over whether she could travel to Vienna alone—from her decision to kill herself. As if, in the fewer than fifteen minutes between the time he left and the moment she raced into his room to steal his gun, something else had come up, something unrelated to Hitler, to cause Geli to decide to shoot herself.

  He’s trying unsuccessfully to have it both ways. He wants to minimize the importance of the quarrel between them, but in doing so he undercuts its potency as an explanation for her suicide, thus raising questions about what the real motive might be—or whether the death might not have been suicide at all.

  And Hitler’s account of the quarrel itself strains credibility, suggests darker possibilities. Perhaps a young woman of twenty-three would resent being told her mother had to accompany her on a trip to a voice-instruction lesson in Vienna. But would a young woman of twenty-three end her life over that issue? The disparity between the explanation and the act inevitably raised questions about whether there was something more to the Vienna trip than voice lessons, something that required close family supervision to forestall. The disparity gave rise to rumors that—as newspapers in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna would soon speculate—the trip to Vienna was for an elopement with a forbidden fiancé or an attempt to escape an intolerable relationship with Hitler.

  But Hitler was shrewd enough to realize that, on the face of it, his account of Geli’s purported motive for killing herself fell short of being compellingly convincing. Thus, the séance story: a masterful touch which seems to be a spontaneous emotional coda to his statement but which, in fact, when the whole statement is examined carefully, seems more like a capstone of what is a carefully calculated subtext of character assassination.

  Who is Geli in Hitler’s portrait for the detective? She’s someone who fatally, fickly abandoned serious plans for a medical career just because “she didn’t like that anymore.” Only to impulsively take up a singing career, where she displayed similarly fickle instability: “She should have been on the stage in a short time, but she didn’t feel able enough.” Always trouble with Geli!

  Then Hitler shamelessly depicts himself as the real victim of Geli’s act: “She was the only one of his relatives who was close to him. And now this must happen to him.” To him; not to her.

  And, finally, there is the most ingenious and insidious touch: the séance. Characterizing her as the type who attends “table-moving” sessions serves to portray her as unstable, emotionally immature. If she’s impulsive enough to have been influenced by some mountebank posing as a departed soul who declares she would die an unnatural death, she might well have been motivated by the “prophecy” to give in to the impulse to kill herself at the slightest, most trivial provocation. After all, it was—or she believed it to be—her fate. Perhaps Hitler hoped to strike a respondent chord of superstition in Detective Sauer so that he would shift his focus from the gaps, the absences in Hitler’s story and write Geli’s death off to fate, the invisible working of the Other World, a matter of karma, not homicide.

  Before proceeding further with the problems with Hitler’s explanation, with the questions that have been raised about the degree of his responsibility for her death, it is worth lingering over the phrase Hitler used to describe the purported séance prophecy about Geli: She would die a death that was “keines natürlich.”

  “Keines natürlich”: Conjoined with the word for death, the literal meaning is “unnatural,” as in an “unnatural death.” The implication in context is murder or suicide as opposed to a “natural” death from old age or disease. But the phrase “nicht natürlich” has been used to characterize not just Geli Raubal’s death but her relationship to Hitler. And it evokes the truly troubling question raised by the whole Geli Raubal affair: how natural or unnatural, how normal or abnormal, Hitler himself was.

  It’s troubling because the temptation in sifting the evidence for what really we
nt on between Hitler and Geli Raubal is to believe the darkest rumors—and some of them are extremely dark—because it is somehow more comforting to view Hitler as a monstrous pervert in his private life. Then his public crimes can be explained away as arising from private pathology, from his unnaturalness, from a psyche that isn’t in any way “normal,” that isn’t in any way akin to ours, one whose darkness we don’t have to acknowledge as in any way related to ours. Paradoxically, it may be far more disturbing to find Hitler “normal”—capable of “normal” love, for instance—because it would in some way make it seem that there was something of us in him. Or worse: something of him in us. But a whole explanatory industry has arisen—and not just among Freudian “psychohistorians”—predicated on the assumption that with Geli Raubal, Hitler was most “himself” and most psychosexually “unnatural.”

  There are those who believe that with Geli Raubal, Hitler experienced the closest he came to real love, the closest he came to the emotional life of a normal person. But there are also those who believe that in his relationship with Geli Raubal, Hitler expressed the true, profound deformity of his moral nature in perverse sexual practices (we call them paraphilia these days) that either drove Geli to suicide or led to her murder to prevent her from talking about them.

  Rumors of some deep-rooted psychosexual unnaturalness shadowed Hitler long before they crept into print at the time of the Geli Raubal affair. The pioneering photojournalist Nachum Tim Gidal, who covered Hitler for the Munich Illustrated News in the 1920s (and who claims to have taken the only unguarded, unauthorized intimate photograph of Hitler in the Munich period) before barely escaping with his life in 1933, told me offhandedly in his Jerusalem apartment sixty years later that “everybody in Munich knew” that Hitler was “some kind of sexual pervert.”