...In 1931, (click here) Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal, then 23 years old, was found dead in his Munich apartment, where she lived, from a gunshot wound to her lungs. According to official accounts, Hitler’s servant discovered her body sometime on September 19. Hitler was a leading suspect, not least because his own Walther pistol was the murder weapon, but he had a strong alibi: The ascendant far-right extremist was away that day in Nuremberg. For decades, the police report’s classification of Raubal’s death as a suicide—though questioned even at the time—has stood unchallenged in the absence of any other plausible explanation.
Now, recent research, first reported by the German outlet Der Spiegel, appears to shed new light on the case. Harald Sandner, a German historian, tells the Telegraph’s Jörg Luyken that he has found a “crushing mass” of evidentiary details that “completely contradict the official, 95-year-old narrative put forward by the Bavarian judiciary” and the Nazi Party.
In Munich’s archives, Sandner found two death notices and an official entry in the local death register that change the timeline of Rabaul’s death. They show that her body was recovered by police on the morning of September 18, when Hitler was known to still be in Munich.
The discrepancies may have been deliberate. In the days following Raubal’s death, a Munich newspaper reported that Nazi officials had met to strategize how to share the news publicly, according to the Telegraph. Hitler was gaining momentum as a political force with the party, and bad press threatened to derail his rise. Adding to their concerns were allegations that he and his half-niece had been arguing intensely in the days before her death, and that her corpse exhibited other injuries, such as a shattered nose.
Sandner believes that the outcome of these meetings was to provide an alibi for Hitler by fudging dates and times in the public record. If true, the plan succeeded.
“For generations, people simply copied this version off each other,” Sandner tells the London Times’ Oliver Moody. “My research exposes this document as a historical work of deception and shows precisely 62 mistakes, lies and deliberate manipulations by [officials] in the justice system and functionaries who were close to the Nazi Party, to formally conclude the case in Hitler’s favor.”
Hitler’s relationship with his half-niece has long been the subject of speculation. She moved to Munich in 1927, and into his apartment in 1929. That Hitler wielded obsessive control over Raubal is well documented, and something that even family members have spoken about directly.
“When I visited Berlin in 1931, the family was in trouble,” William Stuart-Houston, Hitler’s nephew, wrote in a 1939 article quoted in the Guardian in 2017. “Everyone knew that Hitler and she had long been intimate and that she had been expecting a child—a fact that enraged Hitler.”...
