Vienna. She was beautiful, they said, but there was something unusual about her beauty, something peculiar—even frightening. Consider the testimony of Frau Braun, now eighty-six (and no relation to Eva), one of the few people left alive who knew Geli Raubal before she became Hitler’s consort. Knew her as a teenager in Vienna in the twenties, when Hitler would come to call incognito in his black Mercedes.

Indeed, until recently, Frau Braun was living in the very same Vienna apartment building that was once Geli’s refuge, the one she apparently was seeking to flee to on September 18, 1931—the day before she was found dead in her bedroom in Hitler’s Munich apartment with a bullet through her chest and Hitler’s gun by her side.

I was led to Frau Braun by Hans Horváth, the obsessed amateur historian whose current petition to exhume and examine Geli’s long-dead body has stirred up controversy—and resistance from the Vienna city government. Resistance that is “a scandal,” says a professor supporting Horváth. A scandal resuiting from a Waldheim-era desire to keep not just Geli buried but memories of onetime Vienna citizen Adolf Hitler interred as well.

“A mysterious darkness” surrounds the death of this “unusual beauty,” the Fränkische Tagespost reported forty-eight hours after her body was discovered. Sixty years later, when I traveled to Vienna and Munich to investigate the controversy, that darkness has yet to be dispelled. It still obscures the answers to such basic questions as whether Geli’s death was suicide or murder. Who fired Hitler’s gun that night?

Frau Braun’s recollection is a gleam in that darkness, eyewitness testimony to the peculiar kind of power Geli had even as a young teenage girl.

I’d been reading accounts of Geli’s beauty, the spell she cast over Hitler and his circle. I’d seen the blurry photographs of her. Some of them captured a hint of her haunting appeal, some did not.

Frau Braun, however, saw it face-to-face. “I was walking down the street and I heard her singing,” Frau Braun tells me one winter afternoon in the comfort of her dignified pension in a senior citizens’ residence, a place she moved into after living sixty years in the apartment building Geli grew up in.

As she approached the girl singing in the street, “I saw her and I just stopped dead. She was just so tall and beautiful that I said nothing. And she saw me standing there and said, ‘Are you frightened of me?’ And I said, ‘No, I was just admiring you. . . ’ ”

Frau Braun offers me another Mozart chocolate ball and shakes her head. “She was just so tall and beautiful. I’d never seen anyone like that.”

Geli, short for Angela: Hitler’s half-niece, love object, angel. Although the precise physical nature of that “love” has been the subject of heated debate among historians for more than half a century, there is little doubt she was, as William Shirer puts it, “the only truly deep love affair of his life.” Joachim Fest, the respected German biographer of Hitler, calls Geli “his great love, a tabooed love of Tristan moods and tragic sentimentality.” His great love—and perhaps his first victim.

Who was Geli? While many testify to the peculiar power of her beauty—she was “an enchantress,” said Hitler’s photographer; “a princess, people on the street would turn around” to stare at her, according to Emil Maurice, Hitler’s chauffeur—the question of her character is a matter of dispute. Was she the perfect image of Aryan maidenhood, as Hitler exalted her? Or an “empty-headed little slut” manipulating her besotted uncle, as one resentful Hitler confidant depicts her?