Hitler's angel

Publié le 1 mai 1998 par Kris Rusch

Munich, 1972. Annie Pohlmann, working on a Harvard dissertation on police procedures, is interviewing Fritz Stecher, retired Detective Inspector of the Kripo, about his pioneering work in forensic investigation, when a chance question no earlier interviewer had ever thought to ask him—why did he retire prematurely over 40 years ago?—opens a Pandora’s box of revelations about his last case. The victim: Angela Raubal, niece of National Socialist party leader Adolf Hitler, shot to death in her uncle’s apartment. By the time Stecher and his men arrived on the scene, the body had already been spirited away to discreet interment in Vienna, leaving behind only a brusque note from the Bavarian minister of justice, Franz Gärtner, identifying Geli Raubal’s death as suicide.

But none of the evidence Stecher turned up—the time of Geli’s death, her broken nose, the shocking signs of earlier beatings, the indications that Hitler was her lover—confirmed this verdict, even though the more he pressed, the more emphatic the denials grew. Eventually Stecher, haunted by his own wife’s death, set the case aside, just in time for Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933. Now he’s finally ready to face the truth. SF/fantasy veteran Rusch turns the real-life story of Geli’s death into a workmanlike parable with little mystery, since the solution is as predictable as the Had-I-But-Known moral.