Who Killed Hitler's Niece? The mystery ignored by history that could change everything

On September 18, 1931, the body of the young Geli Raubal was found dead in a locked room on the second floor of number 16 of the Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The first analysis of the evidence and the body led to the conclusion that she had committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest with the Walther G.35 pistol belonging to her uncle Adolf Hitler, owner of the apartment and with whom she had had a heated She was 23 years old. According to some witnesses, the body had injuries from assaults and his face was shattered. The investigation was closed in eight hours, the body was cremated and the autopsy report disappeared.

Who was so interested in burying the case? Why has history hardly dealt with this issue that occurred in the middle of the Nazis' race to power? “I have tried to understand why it has been left out of universal culture. There is not a movie, not an essay, not a play about this in any language. And yet, in Nazi Germany everyone knew the fate of Hitler's niece: the scandal of her death was too great to ignore. I think there was a desire to forget how a young woman's right to justice was sacrificed to pave the way for a political revolution. The death of Geli Raubal was a general rehearsal for the errors that would come later, ”says writer Fabiano Massimi, who in El Ángel de Múnich (Alfaguara, translation by Xavier González) addresses the case from a fiction supported by tons of documents.

Raubal was very present in the life of the National Socialist party in the early 1930s. His uncle, who always had a portrait of his close by, even took him to conventions and parties, so Hitler, Goebbels or Goering are characters in the book and they were all involved in one way or another in the investigation. "I loved her. She loved me. She is the only woman I would have married. From now on, my wife will be Germany ”. Both these words of Hitler and everything that historical figures say is taken directly from memoirs, records, statements, diaries, letters and biographies. Massimi (Modena, 43 years old) thus tries not to take sides in difficult matters such as the paraphilias of the Nazi leader or her involvement in the death of Raubal. “We must not forget that we believe that we know everything about Hitler's perversions, even though we have no hard evidence. In the novel I collect everything that has been said or published about what was undoubtedly a particular union between Geli and her 'Uncle Alf', as she called her tutor ”, says Massimi by email.

The novel works like a thriller set in those days of 1931 that could turn history upside down. Commissioners Siegfried Sauer and Mutti Forster - who take the last names of the policemen who investigated the case but who are otherwise fictional characters - meet in their investigations, told with a classic police rhythm by Massimi, with a bureaucratic wall , tampered witnesses, disappearing evidence, cheating, death threats, blackmail. "The party called an urgent meeting after Geli's death to discuss what they were going to tell the press and who was going to take the reins of the party if Hitler did not survive the scandal," says Massimi. “For a few days, history traveled a very delicate path. If Geli had received the justice he deserved, the 20th century could have taken a different course ”.

• The woman who risked her life for Hitler three times a day

The approach is a fertile field for conspiracy theory. But the truth is that there were two people who had fundamental information about what really happened in that luxurious apartment in Munich and both died when the Nazis came to power. On one side is Gregor Strasser, an early Nazi and Hitler's appointed successor in 1931 if the leader succumbed to scandal. The documents he had of the case disappeared along with hundreds of evidence on many other crimes that the Nazis removed to erase the traces of their "years of struggle." And on the other, the reporter Fritz Gerlich, one of the best examples of committed journalism in the Weimar Republic and whose dossier on Raubal's death was never published and remains untraceable. Both were executed on the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934 - Gerlich had then been in a concentration camp for more than a year.

In The Angel of Munich the case is solved, or at least the reader knows who killed the young woman. And there is even a why. It is the characteristic of the criminal novel, of its restorative function. The reality and the truth are, however, ungraspable and Raubal's death remains without a known author. "What is the truth? This endless process of accumulation and counter-analysis enriches our knowledge of the past but leaves us with the conviction that there is no such thing as 'fact'. In the end they are all fragments, points of view and misrepresentations. No one will ever know for sure what happened in that room ”, reflects Massimi, satisfied because, at least, he has recovered the story of Geli Raubal.

A classic mystery, an endless story

'The Angel of Munich' contains in its pages a historical novel, a possible crime of passion, a closed-door mystery and a classic procedural. “The case is too mysterious, too surprising, too essential, too delicate, too everything. My idea was: let's find a way to put all of this into a 400-page novel, intense and fast. In the end I failed: there are 500 and I had to leave things out. I could have written 1,000 and there would have been elements to count, ”says Massimi. The Italian author, who has worked in the publishing world, comments with amusement how Italy has become a "country of curators" given the proliferation of characters of this style and how, after criticizing it, he has written a novel "not with one, but with two curators ”. The characters, anchored in the fertile tradition of the pairs of researchers, are the best of the novel. Its oppositions, its dark past and its moral conflicts complete the most historical part with a narrative sense.