Did Hitler murder his niece? Fresh files spark new claims
Historian Harald Sandner has challenged the long-held belief that Adolf Hitler’s half-niece, Geli Raubal, died by suicide
A historian has challenged the long-held belief that Adolf Hitler’s half-niece died by suicide, as records may show she was found dead while Hitler was still in Munich.
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Geli Raubal was found killed by a gunshot wound whilst at Hitler’s Munich apartment in September 1931.
Police later concluded that the 23-year-old had taken her own life using Hitler’s Walther pistol.
However, historian Harald Sandner says that documents held in Munich’s city archives contradict the established timeline, according to The Times and Der Spiegel.
Sandner says that two death notices and a death-register entry indicate that Raubal’s body was discovered at 10.15 am on Friday 18 September 1931.
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This is a day earlier than the official account, which would place Hitler in the city at the time, rather than in Nuremberg, where he was believed to have been when Raubal’s body was found.
Sandner told The Times: “The five-page official report from the Munich police headquarters, dated to September 28, 1931, has been taken at face value for nearly a century by academic historians and large media outlets such as the [public broadcaster] ZDF.
“For generations, people simply copied this version off each other. My research exposes this document as a historical work of deception and shows precisely 62 mistakes, lies and deliberate manipulations by [officials] in the justice system and functionaries who were close to the Nazi party, to formally conclude the case in Hitler’s favour.”
In Sandner’s upcoming book, he argues that Raubal may have been murdered but has not yet laid out all the evidence to support this claim.
Professor Thomas Weber, a historian at the University of Aberdeen, told The Times that the documents shown to him seemed genuine, whilst emphasising that he could not independently verify their authenticity.
Weber added that the evidence could undermine the accepted chronology of Raubal’s death but was more cautious about the suggestion she was murdered.