Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, pg.131-133As to women and marriage, there was also some truth in what Hitler related that evening of 1942. Contrary to the general opinion, he liked the company of women, especially if they were beautiful. He returns to the subject time and again in his table talk at Supreme Headquarters during the war. "What lovely women there are in the world!" he exclaims to his cronies on the night of January 25-26, 1942, and he gives several examples in his personal experience, adding the boast, "In my youth in Vienna, I knew a lot of lovely women!" Heiden has recounted some of his romantic yearnings of the early days: for Jenny Haug, whose brother was Hitler's chauffeur and who passed as his sweetheart in 1923; for the tall and stately Erna Hanfstaengl, sister of Putzi; for Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. But it was with his niece that Adolf Hitler had, so far is known, the only deep love affair of his life.
In the summer of 1928 Hitler rented a villa Wachenfeld on the Oberssalzberg above Berchtesgaden for a hundred marks a month ($25) from the widow of a Hamburg industrialist and induced his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to come from Vienna to keep house for him in the first home which he could call his own. Frau Raubal brought along her two daughters, Geli and Friedl. Geli was twenty, with flowing blond hair, handsome features, a pleasant voice and a sunny disposition which made her attractive to men.
Hitler soon fell in love with her. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to cafes and theaters in Munich. When in 1929 he rented a luxurious nine-room apartment in the Prinzeregententstrasse, one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in Munich, Geli was given her own room in it. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munich and through Nazi circles in southern Germany. Some of the more prim-- or envious-- leaders suggested that Hitler cease showing off his youthful sweetheart in public, or that he marry her. Hitler was furious at such talk and in one quarrel over the matter fired the Gauleiter of Wuerttemberg.
It was probable that Hitler intended to marry his niece. Early party comrades who were close to him at that time subsequently told this author that a marriage seemed inevitable. That Hitler was deeply in love with her they had no doubt. Her own feelings are a matter of conjecture. That she was flattered by the attentions of a man now becoming famousm and indeed she enjoyed them, is obvious. Whether she reciprocated her uncle's love is not known; probably not, and in the end certainly not. Some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them. There has been much speculation but little evidence. Each was apparently jealous of the other. She resented his attentions to other women-- to Winifred Wagner, among others. He suspected she had a clandestine affair with Emil Maurice, the ex-convict who had been his bodyguard. She objected too to her uncle's tyranny over her. He did not want her to be seen in the company of any man but himself. He forbade her to go to Vienna to continue her singing lessons, squelching her ambition for a career on the operatic stage. He wanted her for himself alone.
There are dark hints too that she was repelled by the masochistic inclinations of her lover, that this brutal tyrant in politics yearned to be enslaved by the woman he loved-- a not uncommon urge in such men, according to the sexologists. Heiden tells of a letter which Hitler wrote to his niece in 1929 confessing his deepest feelings in this regard. It fell into the hands of his landlady's son-- with consequences which were tragic to more than one life.
Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and his niece, their quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summer of 1931 Geli announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume her voice studies. Hitler forbade her to go. There was a scene between the two, witnessed by neighbors, when Hitler left his Munich apartment to go to Hamburg on September 17, 1931. The young girl was heard to cry to him from the window as her uncle was getting into his car, "Then you won't let me go to Vienna?" and he was heard to respond, "No!"
The next morning Geli Raubal was found shot dead in her room. The state's attorney, after a through investigation, found that it was a suicide. The coroner reported that a bullet had gone through her chest below the left shoulder and penetrated the heart; it seemed beyond a doubt that the shot was self-inflicted.
Yet for years afterward in Munich there was murky gossip that Geli Raubal had been murdered-- by Hitler in a rage, by Himmler to eliminate a situation that had become embarrassing to the party. But no credible evidence ever turned up to substantiate such rumors.
Hitler himself was struck down by grief. Gregor Strasser later recounted that he had had to remain for the following two days and nights at Hitler's side to prevent him from taking his own life. A week after Geli's burial in Vienna, Hitler obtained special premission from the Austrian government to go there; he spent an evening weeping at the grave. For months he was inconsolable.
Three weeks after the death of Geli, Hitler had his first interview with Hindenburg. It was his first bid for the big stakes, for the chancellorship of the Reich. His distraction on the momentous occasion-- some of his friends said he did not seem to be in full possession of his faculties during the conversation, which went badly for the Nazi leader-- was put down by those who knew him as due to the shock of the loss of his beloved niece.
From this personal blow stemmed, I believe, an act of renunciation, his decision to abstain from meat; ar least, some of his closest henchmen seemed to think so. To them he declared forever afterwards that Geli Raubal was the only woman he ever loved, and he always spoke of her with the deepest reverence-- and often tears. Servants said that her room in the villa of Obersalzberg, even after it was rebuilt and enlarged in the days of Hitler's chancellorship, remained as she had left it. In his own room there, and in rge Chancellery in Berlin, portraits of the young woman always hung and when the anniversaries of her birth and death came around each year flowers were placed around them.
For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed incapable of love of any other human being, this passion of Hitler's for the youthful Geli Raubal stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life. As with all mysteries, it cannot be rationally explained. merely recounted. Thereafter, it is almost certain, Adolf Hitler never seriously contemplated marriage until the day before he took his own life fourteen yeards later.
What do you think of their relationship? Sounds like a tragedy that deeply scarred Hitler.
