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Few people know of the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal. 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.

In 1931, aged 23, 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.

Hitler & Geli is the remarkable and little-known story of the most important relationship in Hitler's life.

Ronald Hayman is a celebrated playwright, and biographer of Nietzsche, Brecht, Sylvia Plath and Thomas Mann.

Hayman, respected British biographer of Sartre, Brecht, Kafka, Beckett and Sylvia Plath, has produced an intriguing albeit speculative psychobiography of Hitler that links the Führer's warped sexuality to his demonic destructiveness. Its immediate focus is Hitler's passionate relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal, found dead from a gunshot wound in 1931, at age 23, in the Munich apartment she shared with Hitler. The official verdict was suicide, yet rumors, some from credible sources, swirled that Geli and "Uncle Alf" had been having an affair; that she was pregnant; that he had forced her to engage in sadomasochistic sex and to model for his pornographic drawings; that Hitler either murdered her during one of their violent quarrels or ordered her execution. By pinpointing discrepancies in the extant testimonies and documents, Hayman makes a compelling case that Hitler, fearing a scandal, covered up the truth and pressured the authorities to pronounce Geli a suicide. To Hayman, Hitler's domineering treatment of his niece is symptomatic not only of his contempt for women, but also of a personality forever scarred by the bastard father who beat him and by the subservience of his mother. Hayman sometimes overspeculates, as when he argues that Hitler's sadomasochism shaped the structure of the Third Reich, or when he assumes Hitler suppressed homosexual impulses. But he more than compensates for these lapses with his glimpses into the Führer's stunted love life and his insightful account of Hitler's early transformation into an anti-Semite and of the rise of the Nazi party. Photos. (Oct.) Copyright 1998 Publishers Weekly Reviews