Hitler + Geli
Hayman, Ronald
Bloomsbury 1997
ISBN 1-58234-036-6
240pp
Date finished: 2006-02-27
[Buy this book] (why?)
A partial biography of Adolf Hitler that focuses on his relationship with Geli Raubal, his niece. She was pretty much the only woman he was ever comfortable with, and the evidence that they had an affair is strong. Hayman reports on more lurid sexual rumors of masochism and water sports, but while I can well believe that Hitler had odd sexual fetishes, the evidence for these is not as strong and is largely FOAF-ish gossip. The book is a readable overview of Hitler's life up until 1931 when Raubal died; later events are alluded-to, but not in much detail.
Raubal died of a gunshot wound, and the unconvincing verdict was suicide. The bullet entered above the heart and lodged around her hip, which is difficult to reconcile with her holding the gun. At that point, the police and government were under the thumb of the NSDAP party, so the records and the coroner's opinion could easily have been falsified. Could it have been an innocent accident? It seems improbable, and given the household's composition it would be unsatisfying to have this be a random death, but such things do happen -- consider the Chandra Levy case, where her murder seems unrelated to her affair. Perhaps Hitler, or a party member, killed her, but it seems impossible to determine what happened at this time. Hayman's account is angled toward the murder theory, suggesting that perhaps she had gotten pregnant; the resulting scandal would have been very damaging to Hitler's political career. It's a reasonable explanation, but it can't be convincing to me because too much of the evidence is secondhand report and there's too much speculation. I'm left with Geli Raubal's death as a puzzling and unsolvable historical mystery, like the identity of Jack The Ripper.