Hitler’s regime killed over 6 million Jews, was responsible for the death of several million more, but the Nazi chief is reported to have personally killed only one person, and she was his niece

Before Adolf Hitler became responsible for the Nazi regime that murdered six million Jews and millions of other people, there was very little evidence that he personally killed anyone. But rumors and mysteries about his role in it have not died down even after 95 years since the death of his niece, Geli Raubal, with whom he had a rather unusual relationship.

Like Hitler’s death from a gunshot wound, over the years, considered suicide; official records put his 23-year-old half niece Geli’s death in the same category. Now, newly unearthed records have reopened the mystery surrounding it and suggest that there is a possibility that the same finger has pulled the trigger on her niece, too.

Geli Raubal (aka Angela Maria Raubal) was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Munich apartment in September 1931. Her death was officially ruled a suicide. The pistol belonged to Hitler.

New records challenge Hitler’s alibi

According to the established chronology, Georg Winter, Hitler's housekeeper and servant, discovered Raubal’s body in her locked room on the morning of September 19, 1931. Hitler said he had already left Munich for Nuremberg the previous day, apparently a believable alibi.


But German historian Harald Sandner has found two death notices and an entry in an official Munich death registry that reportedly place the discovery of Raubal’s body on September 18, a day earlier than the established account. It was a Friday, and the time was 10.15 in the morning, a whole day earlier, as per Der Spiegel article explaining Sandner’s findings. Hitler was still in Munich at the time.

It might be a clerical error

Another German historian, Heike Görtemaker, an expert on Hitler, told UK’s The Telegraph that the new evidence had not changed her view of the established account. She said the September 18 date on Raubal’s death certificate was most likely a transcription or registration error. Görtemaker also pointed to testimony from eight witnesses supporting the account that Raubal died after Hitler left for Nuremberg.

It was “highly unlikely,” she said, that all eight had conspired to provide a false account.

Görtemaker was also not convinced of the idea that a police conspiracy had hidden Hitler’s crime of killing her niece. She argued that Munich police had little reason to protect Hitler in 1931, when he had not yet seized power.

“He didn’t yet wield power. The police chief was an opponent of his and would have taken the opportunity to take him out,” she said.

Hitler’s unusual relationship with his niece

Hitler’s relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half-sister Angela, remained unclear even to people around them. Some contemporaries suspected they may have had a romantic relationship. According to Der Spiegel, Hitler closely controlled Raubal’s daily life after she moved to Munich in 1927, where she studied medicine before switching to vocal training, which he reportedly financed.

Raubal later wanted to move to Vienna to continue her vocal studies, but Hitler reportedly opposed the plan. As per the Hamburg-based German weekly, the two argued over the issue on the contested date of September 18, 1931. Hitler was said to have left for Nuremberg that afternoon, while Raubal allegedly remained in his Munich apartment.

She was later found dead from a gunshot wound, with Hitler’s pistol beside her. The established account says she shot herself after Hitler’s departure and that her body was discovered the following morning.

From one suspicious murder, Hitler eventually became a mass murderer

Quite interestingly, 1931 is the same time when he was on his way to power. His party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), had performed well to become the second largest in the parliament in previous year's elections. And two years later, in January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power, followed by a state-sponsored antisemitism campaign that eventually became the starting point of Holocaust.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators murdered six million Jewish men, women and children. That represented about two-thirds of Europe’s prewar Jewish population. As per the New England Holocaust Memorial, this is equivalent to one-third of the global Jew population at that time.

The US forces that fought for four long years to free Europe from Nazi occupation also paid a heavy price, with over 176,000 American Army personnel killed in battle in the European and Mediterranean theaters, according to the US National Archives

The Nazis didn't spare non-Jewish people either. The victims included around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, around 1.8 million non-Jewish ethnic Poles, at least 250,000 Roma, more than 310,000 Serb civilians murdered by Ustaša authorities, and an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people with disabilities, among others.