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.
It’s just… “Hitler probably murdered his niece with whom he’d had an abusive sexual relationship with” isn’t exactly a game changer in terms of his public image and maybe CNN’s article could at least sort of nod in that direction. Or if editorializing is off the table then maybe they could’ve milked the other Hitler expert, British professor Thomas Weber, for a quote more calibrated than “Assuming that the photocopies of the documents that Sandner shared with me are authentic – and I have no reason to doubt that – it seems clear that Raubal died a day earlier than we all have assumed over the last almost one hundred years, and thus that Hitler was still in Munich when she died.”
“Kanye West must answer for his love of an absolute monster who would do such a thing to his own flesh and blood,” Weber did not add, but that’s basically the next logical step of this mind-meltingly fucking weird and galactic-level tone-deaf article CNN printed for reasons beyond fathom.