Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  But before I could focus on further details in the Selbstmörder register, Archivist Weber directed my attention to the final entry on the far right-hand side of the page, in the column devoted to the disposition of the police investigation into the death. Weber points to the second of two numerical entries in the column. “This shows the investigation was reopened by someone in the public prosecutor’s office,” he tells me. “When I saw that, I looked for the file in the archives of the public prosecutor’s records. It was not there. I believe it has been removed.”

  While Weber had initially been skeptical about my inquiries into the Geli Raubal case, his conviction that a file has been removed has made him less so. It’s an old story, he says, but one he can still summon fresh bitterness about. When the Hitler Party took over in Munich, one of the first things they tried to do was erase history, remove and destroy the records in the Munich archives of a number of embarrassing police investigations and prosecutions against party leaders.

  Archivist Weber has a touchingly proprietary devotion to the integrity of the archival history of the period. He regards gaps in the records almost like wounds in his own body. Particularly, the criminal-justice archives. He feels that a neglected explanation for Hitler’s success can be found in fragmented form in the police-blotter history of the Nazi Party: the way the right-wing nationalists who dominated the criminal-justice system in Bavaria and Munich allowed the Hitler Party to get away literally with murder—the murder, beating, and terrorizing of political opponents. Time after time, perfunctory arrests would be made by the police, he says, only to see the cases dismissed by Nazi-sympathizing judges or disposed of with laughably light sentences. A system of justice that allowed the Hitler Party to murder their way to power with impunity.

  In pursuit of restoring this mutilated history, he’s been working on a biography of one of the heroes of the legal history of the time, Klaus Hirschberg, the embattled lawyer for the Munich Post, the point man for the Post’s running legal battles with Hitler and the Hitler Party.

  I believe one of the reasons Weber was so helpful to me was our mutual interest in what was one of the most gaping wounds in the archival record until Weber restored it: the transcript of the stab-in-the-back trial of 1924. I’d spent the previous afternoon in the basement of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, scrolling through the microfilm transcript of that epic courtroom war, one in which the reporters and editors of the Post fought a libel action against them for their devastating exposure of the lie behind Hitler’s version of history.

  As soon as I mentioned that I’d followed Hirschberg’s embroilment in the stab-in-the-back battle, Weber’s intense, saturnine demeanor softened into a pleased grin.

  “I found that,” he said of the trial transcript. He’d located the long-missing transcript himself and restored it to its rightful place in the archives—and in history. With so many German historians and political thinkers arguing over the importance of “restoring Hitler to history,” of “normalizing” him as part of history, I found myself more impressed by Archivist Weber’s mission, his conviction that what should come first is the restoration of the history of Hitler, the history Hitler erased.

  Thus, his interest in evidence of what he believes is the missing public prosecutor’s investigation of Geli Raubal’s death. I pressed him on the issue: Detective Sauer’s police report indicated that he had reopened his investigation. The Munich Post forced him to: the Monday following the Saturday discovery of the body, the Post came out with a report that there had been signs of violence on Geli Raubal’s dead body, including a broken nose. Signs of violence and reports of a violent quarrel preceding the suicide—the clear implication being that Hitler had beaten her, thus driving her to suicide, or that a struggle between them had led to her murder.

  All the witnesses Detective Sauer had interviewed that Saturday, including Hitler, had denied any violence or signs of violence. With public attention now focused on him by the Munich Post, Detective Sauer reopened the case by interviewing several more witnesses, including the woman at the mortuary who had cleaned and prepared the now-departed body of Geli Raubal for its hasty shipment across the border to Vienna, where it was then out of reach of a detailed autopsy.

  The funeral-home woman and the police doctor who’d made the initial snap judgment that it was a suicide and not murder insisted that Geli’s nose was not broken, that what appeared to be bruises from violence were the result of postmortem lividity due to the body lying nose down on the floor. Detective Sauer closed this brief “reopened” investigation with his conclusion on the cause of death unchanged. Was this what the inscriptions on the Selbstmörder register were referring to?

  No, Archivist Weber insisted to me, the letters and numerals scrawled on the very edge of the page in the Selbstmörder register indicated a public prosecutor, not a policeman, had reopened the case.

  I must admit I was surprised to find apparent archival confirmation of the existence of a document I’d consigned in my mind to the limbo of the lost and the legendary—one of those Swiss safe-deposit-box stories I spoke of in the Introduction. You might recall that the son of a colleague of crusading Munich newspaper editor Fritz Gerlich recalled that his father had actually seen a copy of “a state’s attorney inquiry into the matter of Geli Raubal” in Gerlich’s office, one that purportedly “showed that Geli was killed by order of Hitler.” A document that was said to have been deposited for safekeeping in a Swiss safe-deposit box, the account number for which was lost during the war. The lost-safe-deposit-box twist to the story had left me thinking the whole account of a lost Geli Raubal murder investigation must also have been apocryphal, despite or because of a variant appearing in the not always reliable memoirs of Otto Strasser: “an inquest [into Geli’s death] was opened in Munich,” according to Strasser. “The public prosecutor, who has lived abroad since Hitler’s accession to power, wished to charge him with murder, but Gürtner, the Bavarian minister of justice, stopped the case.”

  When I read that passage to Weber, he scowled. Gürtner is his bête noire, one of the men he believes most responsible—but held least accountable—for Hitler’s success. The degree to which Gürtner’s solicitude for Hitler and his henchmen kept them out of jail—and helps explain Hitler’s ultimate accession to power—has been hard to measure, Weber believes, because so much of the crucial evidence of complicity has been removed from the archives. The entry in the Selbstmörder register discloses further evidence of Gürtner’s handiwork, he now believes.

  Archivist Weber leads me down to the musty basement storage room where the registries of the public prosecutor’s office are kept, shows me where the missing file should have been. Tells me he believes Gürtner may have had it removed. Was there a lost file? Proof by absence wasn’t enough to satisfy me completely. It was another one of those frustrating moments in the search for Hitler where one is forced to acknowledge an investigative dead end, yet another of those gaps that deepen cumulatively into an abyss that may never be fathomed.

  Before getting deeper into the terra incognita of Hitler’s role in Geli Raubal’s death, it might be useful to attempt to restore her to life—to flesh out a figure who has become ever more mythical in the decades succeeding her death. The last image of Geli Raubal in Konrad Heiden’s account of her final hours is a striking and memorable one. Heiden, you’ll recall, was the Munich-based reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung whose inside sources in the Hitler entourage make his 1944 biography, Der Fuehrer, a still-valuable source of Suetonian detail about that Caligula’s court. Heiden sets the scene for his final image of Geli Raubal’s life on the Friday afternoon, just sixteen to eighteen hours before the official discovery of her body. There had been a quarrel between Hitler and Geli over the issue of the planned trip to Vienna, Heiden says. In the aftermath, Heiden depicts Geli disconsolately wandering, Ophelia-like, around the Hitler apartment, “with a little box bearing a dead canary bedded in cotton; she sang to herself and wept a littl
e and said she meant to bury poor dead ‘Hansi’ [the canary] near the house on the Obersalzberg. . . . Next morning she was found shot to death.”

  That sense of Geli, too, as a songbird freed from her cage only by death seems a bit too sentimental, perhaps the product of those who—like Hitler—wanted to depict her as a suicide-prone sentimentalist about death. But the image of Geli as a songbird of one sort or another is a persistent one. Indeed, the very earliest eyewitness description of Geli I’ve been able to discover, from perhaps the last living witnesses to her childhood, was one of Geli as a kind of songbird, singing to herself. The source was the Braun sisters. Sixty-five years later they still remembered their first vision of Geli Raubal singing. The Braun sisters (no relation to Eva) lived in the same apartment building as Geli’s family in the early 1920s; the apartment building still existed when I visited it, a solid, dignified five-story walk-up not far from Vienna’s West-bahnhof railway station. I was introduced to the Braun sisters, who were living in a senior-citizens’ pension, by Hans Horvath, a Viennese amateur historian who is obsessed with Hitler artifacts—and with Geli as perhaps the most exquisite artifact of them all.

  The eyes of the elder Frau Braun lit up when she recalled that first encounter with Geli: “I was walking down the street outside our apartment building, and I heard her singing. I saw her, and I just stopped dead. She was just so tall and beautiful that I was speechless. And she saw me standing frozen and said, ‘Are you frightened of me?’ And I said, ‘No, I was just admiring you.’ She was just so tall and beautiful, I’d never seen anyone like that.”

  Are you frightened of me? Geli’s near-terrifying beauty has become a kind of fetish for those who were exposed to it firsthand and for many who have written about it. And yet, when one looks at the photographic record of her brief four-year span in the limelight, her image doesn’t correspond to classical notions of beauty, nor does she seem to have the intimidating, “frightening” beauty those who saw her face-to-face often report. An appealing vitality radiates from certain images, but the round-faced, chubby-cheeked, heavy-limbed, mousy-haired figure in many of the photographs seems to fall mystifyingly short of the supernaturally seductive loveliness attributed to her by much of the literature of the period. There is little hint in the photographs of a sirenlike ability to freeze in their tracks with one glance those she cast her spell upon.

  Perhaps whatever mesmerizing power Geli had that so affected Hitler did not express itself in the stasis of silver-nitrate still life. But after reading repeated rhapsodic descriptions by those contemporaries who’d come under her spell, I came to feel they were, in effect, displaced meditations—displaced from the political to the erotic realm—upon the power and mystery of the Hitler spell. About the pronounced disparity between the paltry physical being of the person and the absurd and terrifying—Are you frightened of me?—mystery of the magnified persona.

  “One has to take on trust the astonishing oratorical power Hitler was supposed to possess,” the writer Jenny Diski remarked in an essay in the London Review of Books. “Such film as remains of his speeches leaves you shrugging.” While I’m not sure that’s entirely true of all film footage of Hitler (the later newsreels that don’t suffer from Chaplinesque sped-up jerkiness convey a sense of brute gestural power), the remark reemphasized for me that maddening disparity between person and persona echoed in descriptions of Geli Raubal’s spell—and impelled me to proceed with what might seem a quixotic pursuit: the attempt to track down the only woman alive who embodied in one person both Hitler and Raubal genes. To see if there might be something about her, perhaps some family secret she knew, that might offer a clue to the idiosyncratic appeal of her two mysterious progenitors.

  Well, not exactly progenitors: Hitler has no direct descendants, despite Werner Maser’s exploded claim two decades ago that he had located a Hitler son alive and living in France, a claim which caused the poor fellow, supposedly the result of a World War I liaison between Hitler and a French girl, considerable embarrassment and discomfort. But the woman I found was a descendant of Hitler’s father. Geli, you’ll recall, was Hitler’s half-niece. This woman is Geli’s niece, the daughter of Geli’s younger sister Friedl. One of her great-grandfathers was Hitler’s father. I’d come upon “Anna,” as I’ll call her (since she is understandably not eager to call attention to the Hitler side of her lineage), in the course of trying to track down her mother, Friedl. The last address I had for Geli’s sister placed her in a tiny Austrian hamlet not far from Hitler’s birthplace at Braunau, on the German border. I’d gotten the address from an amateur historian in Munich, Anton Joachimsthaler, author of an opinionated, disputatious study of the biographical data on Hitler’s life up until 1920, which is largely an attack on Werner Maser’s Hitler biography and which is, in fact, entitled Hitler: Correction of a Biography. This cranky but useful volume demonstrates how slippery some of the most basic information about Hitler is. It was Joachimsthaler who helped uncover the still puzzling fact of Hitler’s participation as a designated mourner in a funeral parade for a murdered Jewish socialist in Munich in February 1919, just a few short months before he joined the Nazi Party. Joachimsthaler’s dogged research figures as well in the investigation of the Geli Raubal case, since he is the one who unearthed the one document that substantiates Hitler’s alibi: a speeding ticket Hitler received on Saturday, September 19, while racing back to Munich to deal with Geli’s death. A speeding ticket that places him two hours north of Munich and to some degree corroborates his story that he’d spent the night Geli died in a hotel in Nuremberg.

  In pursuing the Geli case further, Joachimsthaler told me, when we met in Munich, that he’d written, asked for, and been refused an interview by Geli’s sister Friedl several years ago. I’d thought there was enough of a chance, however slight, that a visit to Friedl in person might provoke some final thoughts on the fate of her sister—and perhaps a clue to, or echo of, Geli’s charisma—to seek her out at her last known Austrian address.

  I was too late for that. When I arrived at the little collection of cottages just south of the German border (feeling a bit like the obsessed detective in Laura) and found the correct house, I learned from a woman leaning out her window that Friedl had died several years previously. Still, she had a surprise for me: She was Friedl’s daughter, Geli’s niece—and even more surprisingly, an absolute dead ringer for Geli herself.

  She was nearly two decades older than Geli was when she died, but the resemblance to the Geli of photographs was uncanny. And so was the hint, the echo of what had eluded capture in the photographs of Geli: an irresistible glint of mischief, an extraordinary animation which—almost from the first moment of our conversation—her husband tried to mute or repress (a benign version of the same problem her great-uncle Adolf had with Geli?).

  I’d explained to Anna I was interested in unresolved questions about the circumstances in which Geli had been shot. She picked up immediately on the mild ambiguity in the way I’d phrased the question. “I’m glad you said she had been shot,” she said defiantly, meaning shot by someone else.

  She seemed eager to expand upon her beliefs right then, but at this point her husband reached out, pressed his hand down on hers to halt, at least temporarily, the expression of what were obviously strong feelings on the question.

  First, the husband felt the need to put me through a test, a kind of catechism on the cruxes of the case, which he, too, seemed extremely familiar with; they were Geli buffs who wanted to test my knowledge and point of view. After quizzing me carefully on the variant descriptions reported of Geli’s Viennese lover—the one she seemed to be seeking to escape to at the end but who has been described variously as a music teacher, a voice instructor, a drawing master, a Jew, and a violinist—the husband permitted his Geli-look-alike wife to reveal two important pieces of previously unknown Raubal-family information.

  First, there were letters, letters never seen before, perhaps the last letters Geli Raubal finished (the
one found in her room ended in the middle of a sentence), letters mailed to Friedl in Vienna shortly before Geli’s death. Anna’s husband would not let her read them to me, but she described them as letters from “someone excited about her life, not someone who wanted to end it.”

  And, second, she insisted she knew the truth about another matter of dispute in the case: the attitude of the two women closest to Geli, her mother and sister. She had heard, Anna told me, from Friedl’s own lips that Geli’s sister did not believe Geli’s death a suicide. And, she told me, Friedl had heard the same from Geli’s mother, Angela.

  The visit with Geli’s look-alike niece left one seemingly trivial but perhaps symbolic mystery in the literature on the case unresolved: how so many chroniclers came to call Geli Raubal blond. Most of the photographs show a woman who, though fair of skin, is definitely brown-haired. And yet, even among those contemporaries who could have seen her face-to-face, there is a tropism of error that turns her brown hair blond.

  The usually reliable Heiden, for instance, conjures up a Geli with “an immense crown of blonde hair.” His description of Geli as a blonde is picked up by a number of postwar writers; as late as 1989, Louis Snyder’s Encyclopedia of the Third Reich gives us a Geli with the “immense crown of blond hair” of Aryan royalty. But Werner Maser, though he never saw her, insists she had “black hair and a distinctly Slavonic appearance.” The evidence of the photographers seems to favor Maser over Heiden; the appearance of the dead-ringer niece makes it clear: Blond would be all wrong.

  That there should even be a controversy on this question is perhaps testament to the power of the aura Hitler bestowed upon Geli, to the way his spell clouded the minds of those in his orbit. Hitler endowed Geli with the image of perfect Aryan maidenhood that transmuted her brown locks to gold in the minds of some. It’s an example of how uncertain, in an almost Heisenbergian sense, any observation made within the orbit of the Hitler spell can be.