In This Cold-Case Death, the Suspect Is Adolf Hitler

Bureaucratic details buried in a Munich ledger is reviving one of the darkest rumors about Adolf Hitler's private life—that he fatally shot his half-niece, reports Smithsonian Magazine. Newly surfaced archival records suggest 23-year-old Angela "Geli" Raubal died a day earlier than the official account long claimed—at a time when Hitler was still in Munich, not already en route to Nuremberg. Raubal, 23, was found shot in Hitler's Munich apartment in 1931, in what police ruled a suicide with his pistol. For decades, records put the discovery of her body on Sept. 19, after Hitler had supposedly left the city, shielding him from direct suspicion.

But historian Harold Sandner says Munich's death register and two death notices list Sept. 18 as the date. (The German language Der Spiegel first reported his findings.) Sandner suspects a possible cover-up by police looking to protect Hitler, who was at the time a rising political force in the Nazi party, per CNN. Experts caution that even if the new documents are authentic—and one Nazi-era scholar calls them highly credible—they don't prove murder. The records do, however, destabilize the official timeline and again spotlight Hitler's tightly controlling relationship with Raubal, whose death has long been shrouded in speculation that it was something the Nazi Party needed kept quiet.