Documents unearthed by German historian Harold Sandner are raising new questions about whether the 1931 death of Adolf Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal was in fact a suicide or if something more sinister happened, CNN reports in an article that maybe might’ve benefitted from a fresh set of eyes.
Now to be clear, Sandner’s find is not nothing: Hitler’s relationship with Raubal – 23 at the time of her historically documented September 19, 1931 death to Uncle Adolf’s 42 – was freaking creepy as hell, way worse than merely “domineering.” At that time that Hitler – still two years away from seizing power in Germany – was starting to see Eva Braun whilst simultaneously interfering in her own plans to marry a guy closer to her age, forbidding her from seeing him. That’s the tragic context in which his butler, Georg Winter, barged into Geli’s room on the 19th and found her lying on the floor, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. Thing is that Sandner found an entry in Munich’s official death register giving the date and time of the discovery of Raubal’s body as 10:15 am on September 18, 1931. Two death notices found in the archives also carried that date – important because both would place Hitler in Munich at the time whereas he had departed for Nuremberg the previous afternoon.
