What is Angela Hitler?

Angela Hammitzsch, born Angela Hitler (July 28, 1883 - October 30, 1949), first married to Leo Raubal, Sr., was the elder half-sister of Adolf Hitler.

She was born in Braunau, Austria, the second child of Alois Hitler and his second wife, Franziska Matzelberger. Her mother died the next year. She and her brother Alois Hitler, Jr. were raised by their father and his third wife Klara Pölzl. Her half-brother Adolf Hitler was born six years after her and they grew very close. She is the only one of his siblings mentioned in Mein Kampf.

Her father died in 1903 and her stepmother died in 1907 leaving a small inheritance. By this time she had married Leo Raubal, a junior tax inspector, and in 1906 had given birth to a son (also named Leo). In 1908 she gave birth to Geli and in 1910 to a second daughter, Elfriede.

Her husband Leo Raubal died on August 10 1910. According to an OSS profile of the Hitler family, Angela moved to Vienna and after World War I became manager of Mensa Academia Judaica, a boarding house for Jewish students where she once defended her charges against anti-Semitic rioters.

Angela had heard nothing from Adolf for a decade when he re-established contact with her in 1919. In 1928 she and Geli moved to Obersalzberg where she became his housekeeper and was later put in charge of the household at Hitler's expanded retreat in Berchtesgaden.

Adolf Hitler began a relationship with her daughter Geli who committed suicide in 1931. Meanwhile Angela strongly disapproved of Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun (while some report she tried to warn Eva Braun of the dangers of getting involved with Adolf; her motives for this are not clear). She eventually left Berchtesgaden as a result and moved to Dresden. Adolf Hitler broke off relations with her and did not attend her wedding to Prof. Martin Hammitzsch. It seems, however, that he re-established contact with her during the war, because she remained his intermediary to the rest of the family with whom he did not want contact. In 1941, she sold her memories of her years with Adolf Hitler to the Eher Verlag, which brought her 20,000 Reichsmark (Hitler himself earned millions for Mein Kampf).

In spring 1945 - after the destruction of Dresden in the massive bomb attack of February 13/14 -he got her moved to Berchtesgaden, to avoid her being captured by the Russians. Also he let her and her younger sister Paula hand over 100,000 Reichsmark for further life. In his testament she was guaranteed a pension of 1,000 Reichsmark monthly. It is quite uncertain if she ever received a penny of this amount. Nevertheless, she spoke very highly of him even after the war and claimed that neither her brother nor she herself had known anything about what was going on in the concentration camps. She declared that if Adolf had known about these things, he would have stopped them.