Hitler and Geli

Title: Hitler and Geli
Author: Ronald Hayman
ISBN: 9781582340081
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 246
Publisher Description: Few people know about the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal. It started in 1927, when he was thirty-eight and she was nineteen. Already leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he had been imprisoned after the unsuccessful putsch of 1923, released at the end of 1924 and had been banned from speaking in public. It was then that he decided to rent a house in Obersalzberg, a small alpine village close to the Austrian border. Geli came to live with him there, together with her mother, Angela Raubal, his widowed half-sister, but the ban was lifted before the Raubals moved in. Hitler could relax with his niece as he never had before with anyone else, and enjoyed her constant availability. He adored her and they could talk to each other uninhibitedly. The couple shared a strangely intense, passionate relationship, but it was always dogged by Hitler's intolerance, his chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his possessive jealousy. Later, the weakening of the bond between Hitler and Geli coincided with the phenomenal rise in the popularity of the Nazis. On 14 September 1930, nearly six and a half million people voted for the party that was, by then, virtually Hitler's personal possesson. He had achieved unchallenged supremacy as leader, and idolisation by his public lessened his need to idolise Geli. His tenderness became twisted and his behaviour even more oppressive. In 1931, aged twenty-three, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler, his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was shattered by his niece's death, and for the rest of his life couldn't speak of her without becoming emotional. Despite thedepth of Hitler's feelings for Geli and the importance of their relationship, there is little mention of the strange uncle-niece bond in any history books or biographies. In Hitler and Geli Ronald Hayman examines the degeneracy in the family Hitler and Geli came from and the emotio