Hitler + Geli

by Ronald Hayman

Few people knew about the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal, when he was 38 and she was only 17. Geli came to live with Hitler in his house in Berchtesgaden with her mother, Angelika Raubal - his widowed half-sister and the only one of his relatives he was on good terms with. The couple shared a strangely intense passionate relationship in the early years they spent together, but it was always dogged by Hitler's hopeless intolerance, chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his perpetual possessive jealousy. Later, the significant weakening of the bond between Hitler and Geli coincided with the phenomenal rise in the popularity of the Nazis. On 14 September 1930, nearly six-and-a-half million people voted for the party that was, by then, virtually Hitler's personal possession. He had achieved unchallenged supremacy as leader, and this idolization by his public lessened his need to idolize Geli. His tenderness became twisted and his behaviour even more oppressive. In 1931, aged 21, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler; his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was absolutely shattered by his niece's death.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, 20th Century, Politics

251 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Ronald Hayman is a critic, dramatist, director and writer best known for his biographies.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has three major problems, one historical, one methodological, and one conceptual.

The historical problem is unfortunately inherent in the subject matter. We just don't know enough about Angela Raubal to provide material for an entire book. (Weirdly, this is the same problem I had with Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.) She was a woman in Nazi Germany, she was only twenty-three when she died, and almost everything she herself put to paper was destroyed. And all the information we do have about her is warped by its proximity to Hitler, who provides a distorting vortex for anything that gets near him.

There's only two things you can do with this problem. One is write a short book, more of a monograph, and we now consider that a non-viable option unless you are an academic and only interested in academic publication. The other is to find something else to fill your empty pages. In this case Hayman's got Hitler standing right there, and I have Ian Kershaw's 2 volumne biography of Hitler: Hitler, Vol 1: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler, Vol 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis. I know how much space that bastard can take up.

Hayman provides a weak, surface-y biography of Hitler--obviously and strongly influenced by The Psychopathic God (itself a problem we'll come back to in a moment)--which really does nothing for his argument and feels very much like filler. I admit and agree that the lack of material on his subject matter is a problem that he is not responsible for--and just because we don't know very much about Geli Raubal is NOT a reason not to write about her--but I don't think his solution was a good one. He might have done better to do some social history about women's roles and options in Weimar Germany, especially as it transitioned into Nazi Germany. Angela Lambert does an excellent job in The Lost Life of Eva Braun of showing that even without Hitler, Braun had no good path open to her, because no woman in Nazi Germany did. Hayman doesn't show much if any awareness of that side of the problem--it's unfortunately probably not inaccurate to say that he's more interested in Hitler than in Raubal. (If I don't call him Adolf, I don't call her Geli. Fair is fair.)

The second problem, the methodological, is also inherent in the first. Almost all of Hayman's evidence (and sometimes "evidence") for his argument about Hitler and Raubal's relationship and her death is secondhand and hearsay. It's what surviving members of Hitler's inner circle wrote about Raubal or told interviewers about Raubal. And sometimes what they're saying is what somebody else told them about Raubal. In all cases, they can't be trusted because they have their own narrative and their own interests and (post-war) self-exculpation--and those are serious problems because again, Hitler is a distorting vortex. (Henriette von Shirach is probably the closest thing he has to first-hand testimony, and regrettably, I don't think you can trust her as far as you can throw her.) Hayman does not discuss (or seem to be aware of) this problem about his evidence, which makes it even less trustworthy, especially when what he's using as evidence is rumors and gossip about Hitler's sex-life.

And that leads us to the third problem, the conceptual one, which is what Hayman thinks and how he thinks about, well, Hitler's sex-life. As I said, he's clearly heavily indebted to Waite, and the distinctive thing about Waite is his careful, ponderous, by-the-book Freudian analysis of the second-hand evidence, hearsay, and rumors about Hitler's sex-life. The cryptorchism, the impotence, the "deviant sexual practices": Hayman reproduces it all without apparently noticing that we have no evidence of any of it. We have only what people say other people said about Hitler (the pornographic drawings that we have not one single example of) and what can maybe be inferred from what Hitler said about himself, and that kind of inference is a very dicey proposition, even with someone as sublimely un-self-aware as Hitler. Nobody who might have had first-hand experience of Hitler in the bedroom survived the end of the war.

The major conceptual problem comes in the discussion of Hitler's "sado-masochism"--which I put in quotes because Hayman is using Freud's model, which sees sadism and masochism purely as perversions and sicknesses, and shows absolutely no awareness that our thinking has advanced since Freud and that there are other, better, more nuanced and sophisticated models available for thinking about BDSM. (This is the same thing I bitched about at length in my review of Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator.) The problem with Hitler's sexual practices, insofar as we have genuine evidence about them, isn't the sadism or the masochism or the urophilia per se; it's that he was forcing unwilling women to participate in fulfilling his sexual needs. (Hayman labels Eva Braun a "victim of Hitler's sado-masochism" and it's not at all clear that's true, either from his perspective of "sado-masochism" being a crime or from the position I would prefer to discuss about consent, just as his calling Renate Mueller a victim of Hitler's "sado-masochism" is pretty misleading. She certainly did not enjoy her relationship with Hitler, whatever it consisted of, and hers is the clearest evidence* we have, as best I can tell from Hayman, about what Hitler's sexual practices were, but the fact that she was victimized by Hitler's government and committed suicide because she thought--rightly or wrongly--that the SS were coming to arrest her is not a direct result of "sado-masochism," Hitler's or otherwise, though you can certainly make an argument it's a direct result of Hitler's paranoia.) It's consent issues, in other words, that we need to be looking at if we want to talk about Hitler's monstrosity, and those need to be carefully separated from sadism/masochism and dominance/submission. And I could really have used Hayman to have--and to impart--a better supported understanding of how all of these things were understood in 1930s Germany instead of going for sensationalism. (And there's another thing he could have been doing instead of rehashing Hitler's biography.)

But where he really goes off the rails (for me) is in his attempt to do a Freudian analysis of Hitler's career as a dictator and mass murderer, trying to use "sado-masochism" as an explanation for Hitler's aggression against his European neighbors, for his orders to massacre the Poles and the Russians and the Jews of all nationalities, for his scorched earth tactics at the end of the war. And trying to argue that Hitler's "sado-masochism" infected all of Nazi Germany, that that's the explanation for totalitarianism and the rule of terror. Leaving aside the question of how much influence Hitler's personal style had (and I'm willing to be persuaded it had a LOT, but I need some evidence), this argument is completely ignoring the entire history of the German right-wing at least back to World War I, if not much, much farther. The things that Hayman points to as the results of Hitler's "sado-masochism" are things--like everything else about Hitler--that were lying around waiting to be picked up and turned into weapons.

So. Hayman's argument is that Hitler murdered Raubal (or, more likely, would have been convicted of manslaughter), and where the book is actually interesting is in his analysis of the lies the top Nazis were telling (half an hour after they said it was suicide, they were trying to announce it was an accident) and where they contradicted each other and what we can learn from those contradictions. It's not clear whether Raubal died on the day before her body was found or the day before that. It's not clear whether her face was bruised, not clear whether her nose was broken. It's not clear whether Hitler was in the Munich flat when she died or--as everyone loudly insisted--on the way to Nuremberg. Her motive for suicide was thin at best, and the letter she broke off writing in the middle of a word was full of plans for a visit to Vienna. The path the bullet took through her body (entering above the heart and lodging at her left hip) was very peculiar and an almost impossible angle for a suicide to achieve, even if she would have wanted to. Everyone very carefully forgot to look for powder burns on her skin and clothes. Her body was whisked away to be buried in Austria before anyone could suggest an autopsy or an inquest.

It's hard to tell what's genuine hinkiness and what's the effect of Hitler's distorting vortex (and again, Hayman's refusal to admit the vortex into his analysis is a serious problem), but I ended up being fairly convinced that Raubal did not kill herself, even if I didn't buy any of the rest of Hayman's argument about Hitler.

And in the end, I suppose that's my most central disappointment in this book: it's about Hitler when the person I'm interested in is Raubal.


---
*The "evidence" we have from Renate Mueller is what the OSS Source Book says (quoting someone, but Hayman's citation isn't clear enough for me to figure out who) that a director named Adolf Zeissler said (and goodness knows when he said it, since it could be any time from 1936 through the end of the war) that Renate Mueller told him in 1936, four years after her experience and at a time when, blacklisted and a morphine addict, she had no incentive to be, and cannot be counted by any stretch of the imagination as, a reliable witness. Hayman does not talk at all about the problematic nature of his evidence here. Or anywhere else.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book came very close to receiving a 1-star rating (generally I reserve those for books which are so bad I can’t even finish them), but it did redeem itself a bit at the end. Of course, one cannot expect too much from a book on the subject of Hitler’s incestuous love affair with his much younger niece. It is by its nature a sensational subject, with little to offer in the way of exploring legitimate historical concerns (in the end, who cares what a historical figure did or did not do in bed?). The author is a playwright who has also written several other popular biographies, including those of de Sade and Nietszche. He has no historical training, and it shows in his use of sources, his prose, and his interests.
Probably for me the biggest problem was the question of sources. Hayman sticks almost exclusively to secondary works and published memoirs, except where he has been pointed to a specific primary document by such a source. He is generally uncritical of his sources, accepting them at face value, and often treating vague recollections written decades after the fact as if they constituted “eyewitness testimony” in a court trial. When he is critical, it is usually because a source contradicts his own preconceptions, and he is inconsistent even about this; sources are treated as perfectly reliable in all respects except when the author chooses to undermine a piece of evidence. The poor documentation does not help. Two books by Joachim Fest are referenced (in abbreviated form) throughout the notes, but their full titles and citations do not appear in the bibliography. When I would check a source that was cited, I found, as often as not, that the wrong page had been referenced, or sometimes the wrong book entirely. Some quotes are so severely out of context as to suggest that the author never actually read the book, but found the quote in some other source and cited the original without checking it.
Based on this flimsy evidence, Hayman tries to argue that there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth about Geli’s death. The “truth,” for him, is that Hitler shot her in a fit of possibly drunken pique when she began to resist his control. Ironically, however, he admits that had the Nazis themselves not issued a statement to the press, “the newspapers would have announced that Hitler’s niece had died after shooting herself accidentally, and, almost certainly, the official verdict would have been accidental death” (171). In order to explain this, he has to postulate the collusion of the Munich police with an extremist political party which was not in power, and to seek “contradictions” (often fabricated through his own mis-reading of sources) in the “testimony” of people who were often writing decades after the fact and the official police report made at the time. He makes much of the fact that an elderly deaf lady was not questioned, who lived in the same apartment building as the shooting, although it is unclear whether this would have been standard police procedure at the time and place. Indeed, much of his allegation of “conspiracy” needs to be examined in the light of standard procedure, about which he knows nothing whatsoever.
Apart from this, much of the book is concerned with salacious details of Hitler’s supposed coprophagia, sado-masochism, and impotence. This is culled from the scurrilous gossip of former followers eager to distance themselves from the excesses of the regime, with no attention to the distinction between hearsay and evidence. Hayman does at least shield himself from indulging in slander by using terms like “if this is true…” but it is clear enough from the conclusions he draws that he believes it to be.
The final chapter of the book puts the possible murder into historical context by examining some fairly good sources on the Holocaust with far more intelligent criticism than had been applied in the rest of the text. He does manage to use the psycho-historical speculations he has drawn to good effect here in discussing the possible motivations for this catastrophe, and for Hitler’s behavior after 1941 in general. Even with its shaky foundation, this section does have some interesting ideas to contribute, which more serious historians might follow up on to their credit. Certainly, the possibility that Hitler began his career of mass murder with the murder of the one woman he loved has a certain logical appeal, but that detail will probably never be proven. In any event, some work could still be done in examining the psychological effect of Geli Raubal’s death on the man and the movement.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting insight into Hitlers private life. I found the book difficult reading, probably because of Hitlers abhorrent character. I did find myself gasping at some of the episodes described in the book and had no idea how truly mad the man was. I think I must be more naive that I thought!

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Angleica "Geli" Raubal was born in Austria-Hungary in 1908. Her mother got work as Adolf Hitler's housekeeper in 1925. Geli was actually the half-niece of Adolf Hitler, and was seventeen years old when her mother first went to work for him. She remained in close proximity to her half-uncle, Hitler, for the rest of her life. In fact, she moved into his apartment when she began studying medicine, but she did not finish school. Hitler began being more controlling over her as his power was growing. I think that was partly because he enjoyed having control over everyone and everything, and partly because he had a sordid interest in her. He went absolutely mad whenever he discovered she had a relationship with his driver, Emil Maurice. He forced them to end the relationship, stopped allowing her to have friends, and fired the driver. He made someone he trusted or he himself followed her around any time she left the apartment. She was not allowed to continue singing or anything else that she loved to do.

After one particular row in 1931, supposedly over her wanting to have a relationship with a boy from her hometown and continuing her singing career, she shot herself with Hitler's pistol. She was only twenty three years old when she died. There are rumors that he killed her, which is possible. She also could have possibly killed herself, and I wouldn't blame her at all, because that is no way to live. Unfortunately, anything she wrote was destroyed. He had total control over everyone and everything, so who is to say that a cover up of some kind did not happen. There were rumors that he had a very brutal and bizarre sexual relationship with her, which is terrible and gross if true. There were also rumors that he was physically abusive, which he probably was, but he was certainly emotionally and mentally abusive to her. He did not attend her funeral, as he was too upset. He kept pictures of her in his offices and kept her room as she had left it. He also claimed she was the only woman he ever loved.

This book was interesting, but it was really full of speculation. There aren't a lot of hard facts about their relationship, so we can only speculate on it. It wasn't a boring read by any means, just presented as 100% factual, and I do not believe it to be. How could anyone know what her thoughts and feelings and her side of the story is when everything about her was destroyed or disappeared? What is factual is that her life was cut tragically short by the unfortunate way she was sucked into Hitler's black hole.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insight of how a monster is createf

[Cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this book contained some interesting subject matter concerning the relationship between Hitler and his niece Geli. The author seems to have done rather extensive research into this relationship, to the best of his ability when one considers the difficulty of researching the specifics of Hitler's life, as well as those of the lives around him, and then trying to separate the fact from the fiction.
I was most interested in the final few chapters when the author discusses the mystery that surrounds Geli's death. I was unaware of their relationship, really of any relationship he had with family, but I had at least heard of Eva Brun. I know quite a bit about the Holocaust and WWII, but not all that much about Hitler as a person.
I understand why Hayman decided to approach the subject like he did. It is necessary to understand Hitler's personality to really understand his actions. Hayman also seems to think that Hitler did kill Geli, intentionally or not, but with the small amount of evidence even collected by the police at the time it is almost impossible to make any specific remark for either argument, so it makes sense for his argument for him to have taken the time to explain Hitler's personality throughout his life. Though it makes the book much more about Hitler and much less about his niece.
I had a difficult time with the arrangement of the book. Mostly how the author organized paragraphs in chapters, it was almost like he skipped in between topics and sometimes it was confusing to keep things straight. For most of the book I felt like I was trying to find a specific needle of information hidden in a pile of informational haystacks. I wasn't sure what he was trying to prove with his argument until the end, and even then, it seemed like he had a lot of extra information. Now that I think about it a little more, I had trouble following along also because he created his argument by topic and loosely by chronology after that, so sometimes chapters would jump from one time to another, and then the next chapter would backtrack, then jump again.
To summarize, the topic was interesting and included information many people many not be aware of concerning Hitler and how his personal life may have influenced decisions he made when he was in power, but the writing style seemed disorganized to me. The author also relies a lot on a specific psychological explanation for Hitler's actions, and, as I don't know much about psychology, it was difficult for me to accept as such a large part of his argument for a historical work. Also, I learned WAY more than I ever wanted to know about Hitler's 'sex life' whether it be hear say or not...be warned.

[Steve Higgins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book in some ways but it's more about Hitler than Geli. So much of this is based on opinion rather than hard facts, as a reader I feel a little let down. Was Geli murdered by Hitler? Did the Nazis get rid of her? How was she shot? None of these questions are answered. Still, an interesting read and quite topical at the moment (April 2016) because of the current news story about Zionism, Hitler, and Ken Livingstone's comments.

[P.J. Sullivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

About Adolf Hitler's kinky relationship with his niece, Geli. She called him "Uncle Wolf." A sordid story, but gives some insights into Hitler's psyche.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story ... I wonder how much of it is true? ...