Adolf Hitler's first victim may have been the 23-year-old niece some historians say was also his only love, said a Vanity Fair article Wednesday supporting an Austrian amateur historian's call to exhume her body.
The unresolved and hastily covered-up death in 1931 of Angela "Geli" Raubal, writes Ron Rosenbaum in the magazine, has fascinated historians for 60 years. And Viennese furniture restorer and art appraiser Hans Horvath, who says he has identified the site of Raubal's grave, has petitioned the city of Vienna for permission to exhume her body.Horvath said examination of the remains could determine whether her nose was broken in a violent last fight with Hitler, her jealous, possessive uncle, or whether she was pregnant, as some contemporary accounts suggest.
Vienna, fearful of stimulating neo-Nazi interest and still stung by the Nazi connections of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, has refused Horvath's request, the article said.
Rosenbaum concludes that Hitler, whose gun was found beside her body, either killed the young woman who lived with him or ordered her killed.
Other writers have said Raubel committed suicide because of her revulsion at Hitler's perverse sexual demands, according to the article.
However she died on Sept. 19, 1931 - police at the time officially declared her death a suicide - historians agree that Hitler's Nazi cohorts practiced "damage control" to protect the political rise of the Fuhrer.
Rosenbaum said Horvath even found an American connection to the sordid story, suggesting that Hitler's niece knew too much about money funneled to the Nazi Party from American sympathizers, and thus had to be eliminated.