Few people have been the target of as many assassination attempts as Adolf Hitler. None of them worked out as planned.
Several months ago, the Internet lit up in debate after one author posed the question, “Would you kill baby Hitler?”
While more of an ethics game than anything else, the fact is that there were many people living in Hitler’s time who wanted to kill Hitler the man, and simply failed. All his life, Hitler claimed he was protected by Divine Providence; the men who gave up their lives trying in vain to kill him could hardly disagree…
The Early Attempts On Hitler’s Life
There were many conspired to kill or depose Adolf Hitler right from the Nazi era’s very beginnings. He was genuinely popular, however, so most of the early attempts were divided between half-crazed lone gunmen and halfhearted former government officials.
The former tended to fail because they were disorganized and careless, while the latter was naively convinced it would be enough to simply arrest Hitler and depose his government. These are the men who failed:
Josef “Beppo” Römer was a war veteran who spent the 1920s cracking skulls for the Freikorps he ran. Sometime in the mid-’20s, he apparently had a change of heart and converted to communism. After being kicked out of his own paramilitary organization, Römer earned a law degree and started organizing workers into labor unions.
In 1933, appalled at Hitler’s rise to power, he conspired with a handful of other communists to kill the new Chancellor. The plans came to nothing, and the Nazis didn’t even bother to kill him. After his 1939 release from Dachau, Römer got back to work organizing plots, seemingly unaware that the Gestapo would be watching him. In 1942, he was back in prison. In September 1944, Römer was finally executed.
Helmut Hirsch was technically an American citizen, though he was born in Stuttgart and had never visited the United States. As a Jewish man with doubtful legal status in Hitler’s Germany, he certainly had a grievance. Unfortunately for him, that grievance led him to join the Black Front, a Czechoslovakian anti-Nazi group that was thoroughly penetrated by German intelligence.
In 1938, somebody in the group – possibly the Nazi agent who later gave evidence at Hirsch’s trial – sent him across the German border with instructions to pick up a couple of bombs and kill Hitler. Instead, Hirsch was picked up at the border, interrogated by the Gestapo, and beheaded in 1939.
Maurice Bavaud was an odd man. A devout Catholic from Switzerland, he traveled to Germany in 1938 with plans to kill Hitler on orders from a man he thought was – of all things – the heir to the Romanov dynasty.
Bavaud’s multiple attempts on Hitler’s life were a comedy of errors. At the 1938 Nuremberg rally, Bavaud positioned himself on an overpass Hitler was scheduled to travel under — the plan was to shoot him from above with a .25 pistol Bavaud had in his pocket.
As Hitler approached, Bavaud reached for the gun, only to lose sight of his target when scores of people in front of him stood up and saluted, blocking his view.
Directly after that failure, Bavaud bought a ticket to Berchtesgaden, where he’d heard Hitler would be relaxing after the rally. When he got there, he learned that Hitler was still in Munich. Bavaud bought another ticket to Munich, only to learn when he got there that Hitler was now in Berchtesgaden.
Out of money, Bavaud was arrested for vagrancy at a train station. Police found the gun, a forged letter of introduction, and another document addressed to Hitler himself. Bavaud confessed everything and was sent to the guillotine in 1941.
Bizarrely, the German government put Bavaud on trial twice after his death. In 1955, his death sentence was commuted to five years, which would have been nice to hear 14 years earlier. A year after that, Bavaud’s conviction was overturned entirely and his family given a pension for his anti-Hitler activities.
Georg Elser on his way to Dachau.
Georg Elser was the real deal. In November 1939, 13 minutes after most of the German leadership left the beer hall where Hitler had given his customary speech to commemorate the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a bomb Elser had spent months planting in a column behind the speaker’s podium went off, killing eight and wounding many more.
Elser was arrested trying to cross the Swiss border. He had wires and bomb components in his pockets, photographs of the beer cellar, and diagrams of the explosive device he’d built.
The next day, when word of the attempt reached the local authorities, Elser was remanded to the Gestapo. According to a witness, Himmler himself took part in the beating Elser got. After several delays, Elser was sent to Dachau, where he was executed days before the camp’s liberation in 1945.
Adolf Hitler Assassination Attempts: Internal Plots
Adolf Hitler near Rastenburg in East Prussia after the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
All of the attempts so far described were civilian efforts that were carried out with little or no outside support. Starting in 1938, however, a series of increasingly desperate plots were hatched by members of the German military elite.
Following several scandals that discredited high-ranking German officers in 1938, Hitler took the opportunity to clean house. The German War Minister was fired for having married an ex-prostitute, and the Army Chief of Staff was cashiered for disloyalty. One field marshal was even court-martialed for suspected (later disproved) homosexuality.
The purge outraged senior officers, who got together and started plotting. Their leader was the fired Chief of Staff, Ludwig Beck, who coordinated efforts to depose Hitler in the name of the German people.
Ludwig Beck: former chief of staff and lead plotter.
None of their efforts were successful, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. For almost seven years, the conspirators cooked up one plot after another; even going so far as to commit their plans to paper like the staff officers they were.
Again and again, bad luck dashed the plotters’ hopes and let Hitler unwittingly stroll right past men who were ready to die for the chance to kill him.
Beck, with help from members of the Abwehr, or German military intelligence, made contact with Neville Chamberlain and other members of the British government, seeking support. There’s no evidence that they got any, however, which left the generals operating alone for the time being.
Their first plan was to overthrow and arrest Hitler if he fomented crisis over the Sudetenland. Plans for the putsch were all but finalized when Chamberlain announced he’d meet with Hitler in Munich. Everybody knew right away this meant Hitler had won his gambit, which made arresting him impossible. The plan was shelved.
Image Source: YouTube
The next plot took shape while Hitler was planning the invasion of France. The generals, convinced this would be Germany’s doom, updated their old plan and got ready to move.
One of the plotters, serving Chief of Staff Halder, insisted on waiting for the outcome of one last meeting with Hitler, where the staff’s objections would be formally presented. At the meeting, Hitler flew into one of his trademark rages, ranting about how he knew all about the generals’ disloyalty and promised to crush what he called “the spirit of Zossen” (where the general staff was headquartered).
It’s likely Hitler was just blowing off steam, but Halder took this to mean the plot had been exposed. Plans were shelved again and Hitler won a victory over France.
Nothing much could be done until the German armies were bogged down outside of Moscow in 1941. There, the commander of the Moscow military district, Henning von Tresckow, took charge of the plot and worked it up into a full-scale plan codenamed Operation Valkyrie.
The plotters made foreign contacts with British and American intelligence and prepared for a military occupation of Berlin. Most importantly, the plotters’ resolve had hardened – this time, Hitler would have to die.
On March 13, 1943, shortly after the surrender at Stalingrad and just before the disaster at Kursk, Hitler arrived in Smolensk for consultations. Plotter Helmuth Stieff gave one of Hitler’s aides a case of brandy for the plane trip back. Inside the case were two dummy bottles, prepared by British intelligence, that were filled with explosives and a 30-minute timer.
Two hours after takeoff, Hitler’s plane landed safely in Berlin. Another plotter hurried out to switch the parcel with a real case of brandy and figure out what went wrong. The bombs were duds; both of them.
One week after the failed bomb plot, Hitler was scheduled to speak at an exhibition of war trophies in Berlin. A German colonel got there first with a bomb in his pocket. His plan was to set the bomb’s 10-minute timer and stand next to Hitler until it went off.
At the last moment, the colonel was told Hitler would only be staying for around eight minutes. That was cutting it too close: The would-be bomber disabled the device and gave up.
A few months later, in November 1943, Hitler was scheduled to have a look at some winter uniforms the Wehrmacht had ordered. One of the uniform models, a Wehrmacht colonel who had once witnessed mass shootings in the east, brought a grenade with him.
His plan was simple: He would slip the grenade into his pocket and tackle Hitler. Unfortunately, an Allied bombing raid destroyed the train carrying the uniforms and the show was canceled.
The big plot finally came off in the summer of 1944. That July 20, Colonel and Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg planted a British-made suitcase bomb under the huge oaken table in Hitler’s situation room. The bomb went off, and blew up the High Command.
Hitler survived, though quite a few others died right next to him. The problem seems to have been that the bomb was planted on the wrong side of a thick wooden table leg, which shielded Hitler from most of the force. The bomb wasn’t designed with any shrapnel, so everybody who wasn’t killed by the blast force alone was more-or-less okay.
Had American intelligence not been so lacking, this failed assassination attempt may not have resulted in such extreme punishment for its plotters.
It eventually turned out that the conspiracy had been compromised by the SS, and Himmler himself knew the names of almost every plotter, thanks to an outrageous act of negligence on the part of American intelligence.
The July 20 plotters had been in regular contact with the OSS station chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, who would later lead the CIA. The liaison, Hans Bernd Gisevius, visited Dulles and gave him a list of the conspirators.
Gisevius hated von Stauffenberg for personal reasons, so he didn’t include the man’s name on the list. That’s why, when Dulles transmitted the names over a compromised channel, the SS agents who intercepted the message were at a loss to know who the actual bomber was.
The day before the bombing attempt, the chief of the Gestapo sent a letter to Himmler and urged him to move against two of the plotters. Himmler, still presumably wanting to catch the assassin himself, declined, but sent his wife and children into the countryside for a vacation on July 20.
In the 24 hours following the bombing, the Gestapo effortlessly rounded up almost all of the conspirators who survived. Beck had committed suicide with a gunshot to the head on the night Valkyrie failed. Von Tresckow, at his post on the Eastern Front, got news of the failure over the radio, grabbed a grenade, walked out toward the Soviet lines, and blew himself away.
Bloody Vengeance
The SS reaction to the July 20 plot was as brutal as it was swift. Thousands of people, both real and alleged plotters, were rounded up and executed. Many were tortured for days before execution.
Leading plotters were given a show trial and slowly hung from piano wire suspended on meat hooks. The Wehrmacht was purged and political officers were posted to every command. Spontaneous demonstrations of loyalty and affection for Hitler broke out all over Germany. Soldiers’ letters from this period reveal the men’s disgust at what their officers had done.
Four months after the last attempt on his life, Hitler moved into a bunker under the Chancellery building in Berlin known as the Führerbunker. Five months after that, Adolf Hitler died when he took his own life with cyanide and a self-inflicted gunshot.
Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris, who had been swept up in the July 20 backlash, was survived by a widow who spent the rest of her life collecting a pension from the CIA, hinting at the role American intelligence had played in these failed plots.
After you read about the many Adolf Hitler assassination attempts, check out the people who enabled Hitler’s rise to power and the photo of Hitler that he had banned.
