No one is entirely monstrous all the time,
which is why people have talked a lot about the “banality of evil.” His own nephew, William
Patrick Hitler, who was born in Liverpool and later fought for the US Navy, talked about
how ordinary his uncle could be at times. When William was in his 20s, and his uncle
was becoming the most powerful man in Germany, he often tried to get Uncle Hitler to do favors
for him. He said Adolf was friendly for the most part, but a few years later, he wrote a
magazine story titled “Why I Hate My Uncle.” In it, he wrote, “We had cakes and whipped
cream, Hitler's favorite dessert. I was struck by his intensity, his feminine gestures.
There was dandruff on his coat.” He also said that Adolf lost his temper over the smallest
of matters regarding his family. William said, “He was furious. Pacing up and down, wild-eyed
and tearful, he made me promise to retract my articles and threatened to kill himself if
anything else were written on his private life.” So, when dealing with his family, Adolf Hitler was what you might call a bit uptight. This
brings us to his half-niece, Geli Raubal. Her father died when she was just a kid; after
that, she went to live with her Uncle Hitler along with her mother and sister. Her mother
became his housekeeper at his Munich apartment, while Geli and her sister spent the years
living under the watchful eyes of Hitler. He was a kind of surrogate father to her, a
role he took very seriously as he would often be a bit too overprotective over what she’d get
up to. She was like the daughter he never had. Then Uncle Hitler became the leader
of the Nazi Party. He was arguably the most feared man in Germany. Large crowds
cheered his name when he spoke at events. His rise to power also increased
his possessiveness over Geli. One time she secretly dated his chauffeur, Emil Maurice, and that possessiveness
started to manifest itself more and more. Hitler had loved this man. He’d made him an
honorary Aryan even though he had some Jewish ancestry. He trusted him with his life. But when
Hitler found out he’d been getting it on with his niece, he hit the roof. You already know how
family matters could ignite that temper of his. So, he fired Maurice on the spot, even though
he still allowed him to be a member of the SS. As for Geli, Hitler never let her out of
his sight again. if she went to a movie, he went with her. If she said she wanted to
go for a walk in the park, he said, “Wait on, I’ll get my coat.” If she said she was going
shopping, he replied, “No, we’re going shopping.” As she got older, he basically kept her
as a prisoner in his own home. Her mother later testified to this, saying he pretty much
controlled every aspect of her life. Later on, she fell in love and wanted to get married,
only for Hitler to say there was about as much chance of that happening as him becoming
a pacifist and going to India to study yoga. Nonetheless, being the focus of so much
attention from Hitler made her the envy of many other women in Germany who had their eyes on
the powerful man. According to Vanity Fair, she became a “bird in a gilded cage, trapped within
the stony fortress with an uncle twice her age.” A man named Otto Strasser later said that he
might have been one of the only men in Geli’s life ever to have a date with her that was greenlit
by Hitler. He later became an enemy of Hitler as he started working with American intelligence
agencies. He once told a German writer about his one and only date at a ball with Geli, saying:
“Geli seemed to enjoy having for once escaped Hitler’s supervision. On the way back…we took a
walk through the English Garden. Near the Chinese Tower, Geli sat down on a bench and began to cry
bitterly. Finally, she told me that Hitler loved her but that she couldn’t stand it anymore. His
jealousy was not the worst of it. He demanded things of her that were simply repulsive.”
We don’t know how true this is, though. He worked with US Intelligence, so perhaps he
wasn’t the most reliable source when it came to Hitler. Still, as much as certain factions
might try and dehumanize Hitler as a monster, he certainly did commit some of the most monstrous
things known to man. We imagine he wasn’t the best guy to have a close relationship with.
On September 18, 1931, Hitler and Geli got into an argument. She wanted to go to Vienna, and
he wouldn’t let her. He later went to a meeting, and when he returned, she was lying on the floor
with blood leaking out of a bullet hole in her chest, Hitler's Walther pistol lying by her side.
Hitler, of course, said he had nothing to do with it. That didn’t stop his political opponents
from smearing Hitler’s image by proclaiming that he imprisoned the poor woman and how he might
have even been in a sexual relationship with her. The Münchener Post said that her nose had been
fractured as if she’d been in a fight. To those who were not Hitler fans, the widely accepted
story was that Hitler had killed Geli in a fit of rage. The Regensburger Echo alluded to something
else, saying Geli, “Took on forms which obviously the young woman was unable to bear.”
But did he kill her? That’s the question no one has ever been able
to answer. The police said there had been no foul play. Hitler himself became profoundly
depressed after the event, having to take time off from politics and recuperate at a lake house.
He even kept her bedroom the way she had left it. According to the book “The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich,” Hitler later said that Geli was the only woman he’d ever loved, but that compels
us to ask if he had killed her because she was going to leave his tight embrace and fall
in love with another man. He was, after all, as history has shown us, emotionally unstable.
After that story in the Münchener Post tainted his name, he wrote a response which
was also published. In it, he said: “It is not true that I was having fights
again and again with my niece and that we had a substantial quarrel on Friday or anytime
before that. It is [also] not true that I was decidedly against her going to Vienna. I was never
against her planned trip to Vienna…I [also did not leave] my apartment on September 18 after a
fierce row. There was no row, no excitement, when I left my apartment on that day.”
Nonetheless, his nephew, who we just told you about, later said, “When I visited
Berlin in 1931, the family was in trouble. Everyone knew that Hitler and Geli had long
been intimate and that she had been expecting a child – a fact that enraged Hitler.”
It’s worth mentioning that the newspapers soon stopped printing anything about the
scandal since they found themselves being sued by the Nazi Party. One reporter
named Fritz Gerlich kept investigating, concluding that Hitler had indeed murdered Geli.
In March 1933, he was about to publish what he knew when his office was raided by Nazi storm
troopers. He was beaten badly, and all of his files were burned. In July, the Nazis put a bullet
in his head during the Night of the Long Knives. Over the years, the case has been investigated
numerous times. One historian wrote, “Geli’s sudden and apparently inexplicable
death has challenged the imagination of contemporaries and later historians.”
Some people believe he might have killed her accidentally or even that he hired someone
to do the deed. Or, as some others speculate, was Geli actually madly in love with Hitler,
and when she found out he was involved with another woman, she lost the plot.
It may have been none of those things. We just don’t know. As Vanity Fair
wrote in 1992, perhaps Geli was “His great love—and perhaps his first victim.”
Now for something equally as fascinating. 2.
One of the enduring mysteries about the Nazis is where did all that
Nazi gold go? We know for a fact that the Nazis stole unbelievable amounts of gold during the
war. On one day alone, March 12, 1938, the German Wehrmacht turned up at the Austrian Central Bank
and emptied the vaults of around 100 tons of gold. But when Allied bombers were making a mess
of Berlin and Adolf Hitler was down in his bunker thinking about what the Allies would
do to him once they got their hands on him, he gave the order to take the gold, billions
of dollars worth of gold in today’s money, not to mention all the cash, jewels, silver,
and valuable artwork, out of the Reichsbank. He wanted it to be hidden, and perhaps one
day, someone would be able to recover it. We are talking about a lot of loot here.
Things were stolen from all over Europe during the six years and one day of the war.
We know that part of it was discovered by the Americans. One day in 1945, they looked
down a salt mine in the village of Merkers, about 200 miles from Berlin, and could
hardly believe what they were looking at. There were piles and piles of loot;
money in various currencies, silver, precious jewels, art, and
lots and lots of Nazi gold. It’s estimated that today what they found
would be worth in the region of $8 billion, but as much as that seems, the Nazis
had stolen a lot more than that. We know that the Soviets took a fair bit of
Nazi loot when they arrived in Berlin; we know that SS Colonel Josef Spacil on the orders
of the Nazi elites, took a fair bit of gold and hid it, but we don’t know where he hid it.
We also know that some of it likely ended up buried in Lower Silesia in southwestern
Poland. We know that the Nazis had spent a long time digging giant holes in that
area big enough to fit small towns. What we’ve never really known is what the
Nazis were going to do with those massive tunnels. Were they going to hide in them?
Were they going to develop weapons down there? They could have done many things because
we are talking about underground cities here, great labyrinths that never seemed to end. About 5,000 people taken from the Nazi
concentration camps died building those tunnels, and they never had an idea about what they were
building. To this day, we don’t really know the true purpose of these projects. We do know
that some folks who were later interrogated said they’d been told to hide gold, and we know
that now and again, long convoys of trucks would head through towns in this area. At the time, the
Nazis told the local people that they'd be shot if they looked out of their windows at the convoys.
This is why treasure hunters have been scouring the hills and forests of Lower Silesia for
decades. Some of them believe that hidden someplace is what they call the “Nazi Gold
Train.” They think there could be about 300 tons of gold and other valuables on this train.
While it sounds like something out of a movie, the hunt for the Nazi gold is taken seriously.
Not too long ago, the mystery got even more exciting when a diary was found that had
belonged to an SS officer named Von Stein. On one page Von Stein wrote, “The
remaining 48 heavy Reichsbank's chests and all the family chests
I hereby entrust to you. Only you know where they are located. May God help
you and help me fulfill my assignment.” It talked about the artworks of some of
the most renowned painters in history. He mentioned 11 separate sites where gold
was buried but not the exact locations. To this day, plenty of people believe that
the Nazi gold train is down there somewhere, hidden under the soil, and if found will
no doubt become the largest discovery of hidden treasure in history. It’s just
a pity Indiana Jones is fictional, as he would be the right man to try and find it.
Ok, this next mystery you might fight absurd, but more than enough people have talked about
it to give it at least some credibility. 3.
Was Adolf Hitler actually gay? That might seem silly to ask, given we talked
about how in love he was with his niece. It might seem even more implausible when we tell you he
had a relationship with his secretary, Eva Braun, whom he married in his bunker just before the
pair started playing around with cyanide capsules. Ok, was he bisexual then? Or, maybe you
might be thinking, why are you even talking about the possibility of him being gay?
Good question. Let us explain something now. The so-called founder of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud, died in 1939. He lived long enough to see his daughter get
arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. The Freuds were Jewish and understood
how dangerous Hitler was. One day in 1938, his home and publishing house was ransacked by
the Nazis, and his passport was confiscated. John Cooper Wiley, who was an American diplomat
in Vienna at the time, cabled the words, “Fear Freud, despite age and illness, in danger.”
Freud, a long-time cigar smoker and a big fan of cocaine, was dying of cancer. But what’s
important here is what he had long said about the unconscious mind. He believed humans have a
subconscious where much is hidden. This repressing of thoughts or urges can make us mentally
ill. Many of our urges, he said, are sexual. So, with homosexuality, perhaps some people
repress their natural urges. In fact, they become so repressed that it makes them almost mad.
Some of them might even become homophobic as some little part of them knows their real urges and
feelings, and so to overcompensate from the guilt, they go the other way: they hate what
they are, so they hate others like them. Hitler was a rabid homophobe, so much so that
he had homosexuals executed in large numbers. He had a high-ranking Nazi killed, Ernst
Röhm, ostensibly, partly, because he was gay. Röhm actually was gay, but if that’s why Hitler
had him executed is another matter. He died in the bloody period we mentioned earlier called
“Night of the Long Knives”, when Hitler went on a killing spree of people he believed were about
to overthrow him. Röhm was at the top of the list. Many Germans were shocked after hearing about
85 people who’d just been executed in what we might call an extrajudicial fashion. But Joseph
Goebbels's propaganda machine then went into overdrive, and the public kept hearing about
how bad those 85 people were to the nation. This propaganda drive talked about
sexuality and how homosexuality was wrong. Men loving men and women loving
women was illegal in Germany at the time, but it had been mostly tolerated. After
the Night of the Long Knives took place, the cruelty against homosexuals was ramped
up several notches. It was a horrible time for people who’d done nothing but be
attracted to someone of the same sex. Rumors did circulate in Germany about
Hitler’s secret life. Many years later, someone wrote the book, “Hitler's Secret:
The Double Life of a Dictator.” This was not a book written on the back of sketchy tabloid
newspaper articles but a well-researched tract written by a respected German historian.
The book states that one of the main reasons for Night of the Long Knives was
that some Nazis had threatened Hitler, saying they would tell the world about his
homosexuality. One of them was Ernst Röhm. The book points to documents that still
exist today that suggest Hitler was gay. One of the documents was written in 1915 by a
man named Hans Mend. He wrote about the young Hitler’s time on the Western Front during
the First World War. The document reads: “At night, Hitler lay with Schmidt, his male
whore.” It states that Hitler and Schmidt were not just lovers but totally inseparable.
The lawyer Erich Ebermeier, who had access to Hitler's military files, once wrote,
“Despite his bravery towards the enemy, because of his homosexual activity, he lost out
on a promotion to non-commissioned officer.” There are also police reports that state
Hitler was being looked at by cops in Munich for his homosexual activities.
If you’re wondering how these files were never destroyed by Hitler when he
came to power, a German general named Otto von Lossow said he took them from the police
as “a form of personal life insurance.” If Hitler messed with him, he could just threaten
the Fuhrer with the release of the files. Did Hitler later try hard to repress his
homosexuality? Is this why he hated gay people? Is this why tens of thousands of
homosexuals were brutalized, tortured, and thousands executed at the hands of the Nazis?
Did he really mean it when he said, “Homosexuality is actually as infectious and as dangerous as
the plague?” Did he say that while pushing down an attraction to men he’d had all his life? A
psychologist and biographer of Hitler once said, “There is insufficient evidence to warrant
the conclusion that Hitler was an overt homosexual. But it seems clear that he had
latent homosexual tendencies, and it is certain that he worried a great deal about them.”
But again, we need to ask if this gay thing was just more anti-Hitler propaganda disseminated by
his enemies in Germany and later by the West? This is why it remains a mystery.
4. During the pillaging rampage that the Nazis
went on during the war, perhaps the most valuable thing they took was the so-called
eighth wonder of the world, the Amber Room. This place wasn’t so much a room than
it was a giant jewel box. Covered in gold and engraved with precious stones and
beautiful mirrors, it might fetch as much as $500 million if it could be sold right now.
But it can’t be sold because we don’t know where it is, the original one anyway. That was built
in 1701 for the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, Prussia, and it later went to the Berlin City
Palace. It only stayed in Berlin until 1716, when the Prussian King Frederick William I decided he’d
make Tsar Peter the Great happy and give it to him. It wasn’t exactly easy to move, either. The
room contained about 6 tons (13,000 lb) of amber. After the war broke out, the Russians
were well aware that the Germans would likely steal the room. This is why
they tried their best to move it, but it was so old at that point that removing
it would destroy many of the amazing features. Still, they did manage to hide it, but it
didn’t work. The Nazi’s got most of it to Königsberg Castle in Prussia, only for
Adolf Hitler to give the orders to move all of the loot from Königsberg. Later
the British RAF bombed the hell out of the city and later still the Red Army marched
in there and did their best to wreck the city. And like that, the Amber Room just seemed to
disappear into thin air. It was never seen again, so we really don’t know who got it. Did the
Russians take it and not tell anyone? That’s a possibility since they took all kinds of
Nazi loot and didn’t tell anyone about it. Decades later, Russia admitted to stealing
some of the Nazi fortunes, but they have always said they didn’t take the Amber Room.
It’s not as if people haven’t looked for it. Teams of hunters have looked high and low for
the room, just like they have looked for that Nazi gold train. The Amber Room might
also be hidden in a tunnel someplace, but investigations into its disappearance have led
some people to think it might have just been blown to pieces when bombs dropped on Königsberg Castle.
So, it may have been taken by the Russians or destroyed by the Russians, or it could
have ended up in one of those giant German bunkers. It might also have gone down with a
ship bombed at the war's end. Now there is a reconstructed version of the room which cost
the Russians millions of dollars to build. It’s a dazzling piece of art, but
we think we prefer the original. Now for another murder mystery.
5. The man in question was Otto Rahn. What
happened to him is perplexing, to say the least. He was a fascinating guy whose work took him
all over Europe looking for the Holy Grail. Yep, all that stuff in the Indiana Jones
movie about Nazis being obsessed with ancient myths was based on the truth.
The story of the grail goes back centuries to those early stories that were written about
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The grail was a kind of cup that may have been
used to collect Jesus Christ’s blood as he was having a really bad day on the cross. One of
the legends, written between 1191 and 1202, says that the grail was given to someone
at the Last Supper right before Judas snitched on Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
What’s important here is that for centuries after, many people thought the grail was real. If you
could get your hands on it and drink out of it, you might well be rewarded with
eternal youth. That’s the legend, anyway. As you can imagine, more than a few
folks have occasionally wanted eternal youth, including some members of the Nazi Party.
Rahn was a believer, which is why he headed to the mountainous Pyrenees region of France. He
thought the grail was buried there. Then the war broke out, and one man rose to power alongside
Hitler. He was SS leader Heinrich Himmler, the guy who oversaw the Holocaust
and was perhaps more powerful than Gestapo founder Hermann Göring and
propaganda master Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis were known for their belief in the
occult, but the person really into all that strange stuff was Himmler. So, when he learned
that Rahn was looking high and low for the holy grail, he told him to carry on and gave him some
funding. He also made Rahn a member of the SS. There was a problem, though, and it wasn’t a
minor one. Rahn was homosexual, and despite the illegality of being gay in Germany, he was gay and
proud. Unlike many other masters of repression, as you know, likely many of the homophobic
clan, he was open about his sexuality. This made being chums with Himmler difficult
since Himmler was very openly anti-gay. Rahn also hated the Nazis. Of course, he did.
They hated homosexuality. But he also needed the cash. He once told a buddy, “What was I
supposed to do? Say no to Himmler?” The Nazis paid for him to search for the grail all over
Europe, but they kept hearing that this guy was constantly being critical of them. Then enough
was enough when he got drunk and was caught getting it on with another man. They arrested
him and sent him to Dachau concentration camp. Sometime later, he sent a letter to the SS,
saying, “I must ask you to accept my immediate discharge from the SS. The reasons…are of so grave
a nature that I cannot explain them in writing.” Nonetheless, the Nazi Party was a bit like a
prison gang or the Italian Mafia. It was blood in, blood out, meaning it wasn’t exactly easy to
retire from the Nazi party. Rahn became a free man, but the Gestapo wanted a word in his ear. It
was then he realized that he best go into hiding. Then on March 13, 1939, someone found him
frozen into a block of ice somewhere in a mountainous area of Austria. The question
was, what had happened to him, this famed hunter of the grail who would, in time, serve
as inspiration for the Indiana Jones franchise? Did the Nazis, eternally embarrassed over this
guy, take him out there and dump him so he would freeze to death? Or, as many have said, the
body was not Rahn’s. Did the Nazis just make that up so they could shoot him in the head and
secretly bury him? One rumor says he was sent back to Dachau concentration camp and was beheaded
just before the Americans liberated the place. On his death certificate, the words “exposure” and
‘pneumonia” were written. Yet another rumor says Rahn was the orchestrator of his death. That
one says he faked his death and then went off to have some plastic surgery. This take on his
life says he joined the diplomatic service and later became an ambassador in Iraq and then Italy.
This is where he supposedly died in 1975, aged 71. We rather like this version of the story.
It’s much better than turning into a human popsicle in the Austrian Alps with a bunch
of homophobic Nazis trying to chase you down. Now you need to watch “How Nazi Angel of Death
Finally Got Caught.” Or, see what Hitler might have done if things had been different in
“Hitler's Plans for the World if He Won.”
