Frau Braun, 86, is one of the very few people left alive who met Geli Raubal before Hitler marked her life the way he did. She knew Geli as a young girl in Vienna in the twenties. Frau Braun lived in the same apartment building in Vienna where Geli was going to flee to, just a day before she died in 1931. On the 18th of September, Geli Raubal was found dead in Hitler’s Munich apartment with his gun by her side.
The Fränkische Tagespost wrote a report on the death of Geli, 48 hours after she was found dead, describing it as “a mysterious darkness” and Geli as “an unusual beauty”. Questions have since stayed unanswered. Was it suicide or murder? And if it was murder, who was the person who fired Hitler’s gun?
Frau Braun recalls the moment when she first saw Geli and heard her singing. There was this girl, so tall and beautiful, she had to stop to admire her that day.
Although the real nature of Hitler’s affection for his half-niece has never been clear to us, historians kept on building stories on the impact this “unusual beauty” had on the German commander, the Vanity Fair reports.
“The only truly deep love affair of his life,” said historian William Shirer, while German biographer, Joachim Fest, called Geli “his great love, a tabooed love of Tristan moods and tragic sentimentality.”
Geli Raubal was seen as “the perfect image of Aryan maidenhood”. According to Der Spiegel, there was no other woman connected in any way to Hitler that had kept this fascination about her alive for decades.
Hitler was Fuhrer for the National Socialist Party in 1931, less than a year before he decided to start his campaign for the presidency. His future career would have been seriously affected if the death of his 23 years old half-nice who was sharing an apartment with her uncle, hadn’t been called suicide.
A story that Geli had taken her life because she was feeling nervous about a music recital, was put out by Hitler’s men after the girl’s body was only given perfunctory post-mortem and pronunciation of suicide and just before she was shipped off to Vienna for the funeral.
One of the first reports written on the death of Geli Raubal came from the Münchner Post, an anti-Nazi newspaper and began with “A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR: HITLER’S NIECE COMMITS SUICIDE”.
Informed sources have said that Hitler and Geli kept on having these arguments regarding Geli’s intention to get engaged in Vienna. As Hitler was entirely against it, the two were repeatedly fighting. On September 18, after a long argument, Hitler left his flat. It became clear that Geli had been found dead in her uncle’s apartment, on September 19.
Shortly after, the reason for Raubal’s death was called by the men in the Brown House, as “unsatisfied artistic achievement.”