Did Hitler kill his niece?

By Sophie Tanno, CNN

(CNN) — Newly uncovered archival documents have raised questions over whether Adolf Hitler could have murdered his half-niece, whose death in his Munich apartment in 1931 was officially ruled a suicide.

Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, 23, was found dead with a gunshot wound to her chest in Hitler’s Munich apartment in September 1931. The weapon was a pistol belonging to Hitler, who is understood to have had an unusually tight-knit and controlling relationship with his young relative.

For 95 years, the accepted account has been that Raubal’s body was discovered on September 19, the date recorded in the Munich police investigation into her death. That morning Georg Winter, Hitler’s personal servant, is understood to have forced open Raubal’s room, which was locked from the inside, and found her body on the floor, according to Munich police records.

Official documents show Hitler – who was gaining prominence but had not yet seized power in Germany – had already left Munich for Nuremberg the previous afternoon, a timeline that would prove that he could not have been involved in her death.

But German historian Harold Sandner says he has uncovered an entry in Munich’s official death register giving the date and time of the discovery of Raubal’s body as 10.15 a.m. on September 18, 1931. Two death notices found in the archives also carried that date.

If those records are authentic, they would place Raubal’s death around 24 hours earlier than previously believed, and put Hitler in Munich when her body was discovered. Official records show he did not leave for Nuremberg until the afternoon of September 18.

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 German news magazine Der Spiegel and will be detailed in his upcoming book, “The Death of Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal: Suicide or Foul Play?” due for publication next month.

Thomas Weber, an expert on Nazi Germany and history lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, said Sandner, who he has known for many years, presented his findings to him and that he believes the documents are credible.

Describing Sandner as “extremely meticulous and fastidious,” Weber told CNN he initially approached their meeting with skepticism but concluded that the new documents appear to seriously undermine the established chronology of Raubal’s death.

“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,” he said. As there are three newly-unearthed documents that put her death as September 18, some sort of clerical error seems unlikely, he added.

However, Weber was reluctant to conclude that meant Hitler therefore murdered his niece.

He said the Nazis could have had other reasons for wanting to conceal what happened. At the time, the party was seeking mainstream right-wing support, while Hitler was attempting to present himself “for electoral reasons as the embodiment of trust and virtue,” Weber said — something that “any scandal” could have put at risk.

A death shrouded in legend

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 eventually moving into his Munich apartment in 1929.

Many historians believe Hitler was infatuated with Raubal and that his behaviour towards her became intensely controlling and possessive in nature. Some have suggested their relationship turned sexual, although 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,” Weber said, adding that there were many variations of this speculation.

Weber said that while he personally finds it difficult to believe Hitler’s relationship with Raubal was incestuous, his 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.

The newly uncovered records do not settle the mystery of how Raubal died. They do, however, reopen questions that have persisted for nearly 100 years about what exactly happened inside his Munich home on the day of her death.

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