Hitler Had an Intense, Mysterious Relationship With His Half-Niece. New Research Suggests His Alibi for Her Murder Might Not Hold Up

As the leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler had a direct role in the systematic murder of millions of people across Europe and beyond that is undisputed and well documented. But the German dictator’s potential involvement in the mysterious death of his half-sister’s daughter, with whom he shared an oddly close relationship, has remained much more ambiguous for nearly a century. In 1931, 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. 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.