The relationship between Adolf Hitler and his niece Geli between 1925 and 18th September 1931 when Geli committed suicide in Hitler’s apartment using his pistol has long drawn much unjust and a-historic speculation from (often jewish) authors desperate to find something – anything – to vilify Hitler with. (1)
The fullest contemporary account was provided by Konrad Heiden in his 1944 ‘Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power’ when he wrote that:
‘One day, Hitler’s parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side… simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected “Uncle Alf” to make things easy for her. Her uncle’s affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler’s ancestry.
At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakeable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away: it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with a masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls “undinism”. The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady’s son, a certain Doctor Rudolph: perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler’s change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication: it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason, Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph’s intention to make it public.’ (2)
To be very clear: undinism is the desire to be urinated on for sexual gratification.
Heiden’s claim that I’ve quoted in full above is often conflated with another similar story retailed by Otto Strasser in which Strasser contradicts Heiden and says that Geli was aware of Hitler’s masochistic and sexual desire to be urinated on because she’d done it with him and then later told Strasser before her death. (3)
The story is echoed but not corroborated by Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl who claims that fairly early in 1930 he bumped into long-time NSDAP treasurer Franz Xavier Schwartz who told him that he’d had to buy off a blackmailer for a large sum of money because they’d acquired very detailed nude sketches of Geli by Hitler. (4)
This seems solid until we note that the three claims simply do not match: in Heiden’s account Geli was unaware of Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on which then make Hitler subject to implied blackmail, in Strasser’s account Geli was not only aware of Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on but had actually participated in them (possibly more than once) and in Hanfstaengl’s account nothing is stated about Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on but instead we are told that Hitler had drawn some rather explicit nudes of Geli which are then successfully used to blackmail the NSDAP in early 1930.
Just from outlining what the three different sources say we can already see that Heiden and Strasser contradict each other while Hanfstaengl’s account doesn’t validate or really impact either claim since it is a completely separate claim. (5)
Rosenbaum has reasonably speculated there is some original ‘Q’ source on which Heiden, Strasser and Hanfstaengl stories about Hitler and Geli’s relationship are based. (6) I am inclined to agree with this since Heiden only wrote about this in 1944 – completely ignoring it in his far better known 1932 ‘History of National Socialism’ – and had Heiden had substantial justification for making this claim without being successfully sued by Hitler and NSDAP for libel in the courts then he would have made it.
Personally, I would speculate that the original ‘Q’ source for the claim that Hitler and Geli had a sexual relationship is probably something published in the SPD-aligned ‘Münchener Post’ – the famous ‘Poison Kitchen’ for publishing malicious rumours and gossip about the Hitler and NSDAP from the 1920s to 1933 – as it is the originating source for the claim that Geli died ‘due to Hitler’s loathsome sexual advances’ (7) and it would be make sense that the two similar claims about Hitler and Geli’s relationship are somehow related.
However, the ‘Q’ source for this claim might be one of Walter Langer’s principal sources for his psychological report on Hitler for the OSS: Alfred Zeisler.
Zeisler was an American jewish film director who had worked in Germany in the 1920s (8) who told Langer that Hitler asked him to send young actresses over to the Reich Chancellery and then Hitler would spend his time telling them about medieval torture methods which apparently terrified them. (9) Zeisler also claimed – falsely as far as we know - that Hitler had an affair with German actress Renate Müller who Zeisler claimed told him that Hitler begged Müller to repeatedly kick him while he was on the floor before she killed herself soon after. (10)
That Zeisler was claiming this as early as 1942-1943 tells us that he is also possibly the ‘Q’ source, and it might be that Heiden’s claim in his 1944 ‘Der Fuehrer’ is actually a combination of Strasser and Zeisler’s earlier but lesser-known claims. That Zeisler was jewish, doesn’t appear to have known Hitler and left Germany for America in 1935 (at least two years before Renate Müller killed herself on 7th October 1937) informs us that Zeisler’s claims are almost certainly made-up nonsense, but this didn’t stop Walter Langer treating them as if they were fact and it also wouldn’t have stopped Heiden including them in his own explicitly anti-Nazi propaganda work. (11)
Regardless of this as far as we know Heiden was the first person to make this claim publicly in 1944 and as such is the ‘ur-source’ (i.e., original source) for what Rosenbaum refers to as the ‘Hitler perversion myth’. (12)
The problem with it is that it simply makes no sense in that Strasser’s account of ‘Hitler’s sexual perversions with Geli’ grew and changed with every telling and re-telling, which almost certainly means that – quite aside from the sheer improbability of Strasser’s rather strange story of how Geli came to confide such a personal secret to him – that Strasser’s ‘Hitler as a sexual degenerate’ narrative is invented from whole cloth and not something he was actually told by Geli. (13)
It is also directedly contradicted by Mimi Reiter’s relationship with Hitler from 1926 to 1931 which came to light in 1959. (14) The relationship between Mimi Reiter and Hitler reveals Hitler (at worst) to be completely normal sexually. (15)
Now the entire relationship between Adolf Hitler and Geli Raubal is almost certainly a case of history being read to suit an agenda in the first instance because there is absolutely no evidence of a sexual relationship whatsoever. (16)
The popular and heavily promoted ‘Geli committed suicide to get away from Hitler’s loathsome sexual advances’ narrative is actually the wrong way around and this narrative – as we have seen - comes from the SPD (the German Socialist Party) aligned ‘Münchener Post’ in the immediate aftermath of her death – probably as a way to make political capital out of Geli’s suicide - and was immediately explicitly denied publicly by Hitler. (17)
Indeed, one of Hitler’s contemporaries and earliest biographers John Toland performed extensive interviews with people who had known Hitler very well at the time - not just relying on Strasser and Hanfstaengl’s anti-Hitler gossip as so many have since - and concluded that Geli likely committed suicide, because she wanted a sexual relationship with Hitler not Hitler with Geli and committed suicide as the result of the fact that Hitler had rejected her advances (preferring to stay as her kind caring uncle and not become her lover). (18)
More important historical context usually excluded from the equation is that Hitler was often photographed with beautiful women who found him very attractive in the 1920s and 1930s and this appears to have severely upset Geli as well as caused other problems in Hitler’s love life. (19)
This is known to have been the case since Hitler’s Vienna years between 1907 and 1913 and merely represents a continuation of Hitler’s love of women and their love of him. (20)
The aforementioned relationship between Mimi Reiter and Hitler reveals Hitler (at worst) to be completely normal sexually (21) as well as the fact that Reiter was completely infatuated with Hitler. (22)
That Reiter and Hitler’s relationship occurred at almost exactly the same time at the alleged one between Geli Raubal and Hitler lends significant force to Toland’s argument that Geli committed suicide in Hitler’s flat with his pistol on 18th September 1931 not because she wanted to marry someone else (such as Hitler’s bodyguard and chauffeur Emil Maurice) (23) or because she couldn’t bear Hitler’s sexual advances, but rather because Hitler didn’t reciprocate Geli’s feelings and desire for something more than a close uncle-niece friendship (remember Adolf and Angela Hitler’s father and mother were also uncle and niece) as even Kershaw admits. (23)
From the above we can see that the origins of the Geli Raubal story that Hitler had – or desired to have – a sexual relationship with her derives not from factual sources but rather as a political smear by the SPD-aligned ‘Münchener Post’ in 1931 and were then subsequently added to and enlarged by former associates and enemies of Hitler’s throughout the 1930s and 1940s ending up in the multiple different – and contradictory – variants of the ‘Hitler-Geli Relationship’ myth which have then become the basis for the popular myth that Hitler had a sexual relationship with Geli and then he either killed or Geli committed suicide because she found his attentions ‘so disgusting’.
Therefore, we can safely conclude that the entire ‘Hitler-Geli Relationship’ claim is simply a myth that was created out of whole cloth by the ‘Münchener Post’ in 1931 – and for which Hitler successfully sued them, won and forced a public retraction as it happens – and was then picked up by anti-Nazi propaganda and then filtered via this medium into the post-war literature on Hitler’s biography.
References
(1) I have discussed the myth of Hitler’s involvement in Geli’s suicide and how it roots from a complete misreading of their relationship as well as Hitler’s sexuality in three articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-a-paedophile-andor, https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-into-sexual-sadomasochism and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-a-homosexual
(2) Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, 1998, ‘Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: London, pp. 128-129
(3) Ibid., p. 129
(4) Ibid., pp. 129-130
(5) Ibid., p. 130
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ian Kershaw, 1998, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 1, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 353-354
(8) Meredith Chambers, 1999, ‘Sex and the Swastika’, 23 minutes: 50 seconds (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5911494/)
(9) Ibid., 24 minutes: 5 seconds
(10) Ibid., 24 minutes: 20 seconds
(11) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 130-132
(12) Ibid., p. 129
(13) Ibid., pp. 133-134
(14) Kershaw, Op. Cit., pp. 284-285
(15) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 110
(16) Alan Bullock, 1954, ‘Hitler: A Study in Tyranny’, 1st Edition, The Companion Book Club: London, p. 358; Kershaw; Op. Cit., pp. 352-354; John Toland, 1977, ‘Adolf Hitler’, 1st Edition, Book Club Associates: London, p. 229; Lothar Machtan, 2001, ‘The Hidden Hitler’, 1st Edition, Perseus: Oxford, pp. 161-162
(17) Kershaw, Op. Cit., pp. 353-354
(18) Toland, Op. Cit., pp. 273-275; Rosenbaum (Op. Cit., p. 126) and Kershaw [grudgingly] (Op. Cit., p. 354) agree.
(19) Toland, Op. Cit., p. 274
(20) J. Sydney Jones, 1983, ‘Hitler in Vienna 1907-13: Clues to the Future’, 1st Edition, Blond and Briggs: London, p. 67
(21) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 110
(22) Kershaw, Op. Cit., p. 284
(23) Ibid., pp. 353; 485
(24) Ibid., pp. 284-285