The Failed Assassins

The side-steps create a framework for this history of failed assassination attempts by adding to the voluminous library which tells the history of the Third Reich that was to last forever. My favourite book from this literary conglomeration used to be William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but a tremendous amount of new information has come to light after this 1959 volume, and some of it—apparently well-researched, yet occasionally to be taken with a grain of salt—appears in the Moorhouse book.

An example is the tale of the last days of Hitler, his marriage to Eva Braun in his Führerbunker (various bunkers play a leading role in this story); his order, given to his personal adjutant for 200 litres of precious fuel for the cremation of his body, and the description by a member of his surviving entourage of the seventeen people plus a small garrison of SS guards in that state-of-the-art self-contained complex beneath the gardens of the Reich Chancellery as “a morgue where the corpses were stubbornly pretending to be alive”. Indeed, the description of the final day, April 30, 1945, of the Nazi regime makes vivid reading. Hitler had already attacked Göring and Himmler for their disloyalty in contacting the Allies, and Göbbels undertook the fatal poisoning of his six children to stop them falling into Soviet hands. Yes, the Moorhouse book appears meticulously researched, with appendices of many notes, a selected bibliography, and forty-four photographs. Yet, sometimes, you reach for that grain of salt.

Now what about the actual assassination attempts, some of which remained unknown to their target. Details rely partly on documents from Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain and elsewhere, obtained long after the events from sources which became public knowledge only after events like the fall of communism in Russia, the end of the Berlin Wall, and personal stories from survivors such as employed secretaries and valets.

The Polish underground resistance groups caused much damage to the invading Nazis after September 1939 (such as destruction of railways and bridges) but actual personal attacks on Hitler, though no doubt discussed and planned, produced no results. Moorhouse says much about Hitler’s security apparatus, which in summary seems to have been haphazard and divided between too many conflicting organisations (names like Sicherheits Kontrolldienst and other high-falutin titles pop up everywhere), but Hitler himself often ignored or avoided them.

Other invaded countries, like Czechoslovakia, had well-functioning resistance and sabotage groups (not always in accord with their own governments-in-exile) but here, especially, there was a sharp difference of opinion about the usefulness, and consequences, of actual assassinations. After all, after Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague”, had been killed in May 1942, there was a dreadful Nazi retaliation when the nearby villages of Lidice and Lezaky were razed, and their complete populations, including women and children, massacred. This made many Czechs unhappy about assassinations, especially as one of the two Heydrich killers had been executed, and the other suicided.

Great Britain was also involved. Some factions remembered the “peace in our time” spirit of Chamberlain and felt squeamish about assassinations (“we simply don’t do such things, even in war”) while others, Churchill for instance, believed that unless we agreed to fight “dirty”, we could lose the war. So despite figures like Colonel Sir Frank-Noel Mason Macfarlane (British Military Attaché in pre-war Berlin) who saw what was coming and proposed, without getting any official support, violent action, minority “hawks” were ignored.

Unsuccessful assassins were numerous, and Moorhouse goes into considerable detail about their methods—something which future assassins on a learning curve might well take to heart. Some names and methods deserve mention.

Probably the earliest attack on Hitler happened when he was leading a putsch (insurrection) in the huge Munich Bürgerbräukeller on November 8, 1923. The Bavarian police resisted, and the revolt failed, with deaths on both sides. Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years detention for “high treason”. One cannot help but wonder how history would have progressed had he been killed. It might have saved the world a lot of sorrow.

Maurice Bavaud, a mystic born in Switzerland in 1916, made a badly planned assassination attempt in 1938. He was identified, arrested, and executed in 1941. Georg Elser, a German born in 1903 who believed war was inevitable, went to an astonishing amount of trouble installing an elaborate bomb during a series of nights in a pillar of the Munich venue where Hitler was to give a speech in 1939, but the speech finished earlier than expected. Hitler had already left when the bomb went off at the expected time causing huge damage and several deaths. After much research, Elser became a suspect, was arrested and eventually killed, though not until 1945. Hans Oster, a career soldier who had served in the First World War, planned an attempt in 1939 with the hope of preventing another war, having persuaded several highly-placed army members to help him. Among those implicated was Admiral Canaris, who played a double game and was executed shortly before the war ended. So was Oster.

Another highly placed would-be assassin was the Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer, who decided on an unusual method—to use a poison gas called tabun, developed first as an insecticide but later made into a lethal nerve destroyer. Victims died of asphyxi-ation. Speer wanted to send this through a ventilation shaft into the Reich Chancellery bunker which Hitler used, but was told by an accomplice that the gas needed a shell to liquefy and become effective, and that some other gas would have to do the trick. But Speer changed his mind (so his memoirs say) when he realised how many Germans still believed in Hitler. Instead he developed a plan to assassinate three senior Nazis: Bormann, Himmler and Reich Labour leader Robert Ley. Speer and senior helpers were still hatching this plot when the war ended. Speer was arrested and expressed contrition at the Nuremberg trials, but his sincerity was questioned. He was sentenced to twenty years confinement in Spandau, where he wrote his diary.

Other names could be mentioned, and Moorhouse calls up many, but you need to read the book to find out how they fitted into the plots. But the most famous, best remembered and documented assassination plot was that of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg in 1944. He had access to Hitler for military briefings, and at one such event, placed his briefcase containing a bomb on the floor very close to the Führer, then left the room ostensibly for a phone call. The bomb exploded, causing chaos, yet Hitler was merely injured. This happened in the Wolfschanze,an elaborate bunker system near Rastenburg in East Prussia. The explosion was to be followed by a coup in Berlin, but this did not come off. There were 7000 arrests. Stauffenberg and three close accomplices were shot; as his shot rang out, he called “Long Live Holy Germany!” An important, crucial accomplice, Colonel Henning von Tresckow, committed suicide.

We approach the end of this review, but one important moral point needs emphasis. It takes us to the village of Dubno in western Ukraine. Half of its inhabitants were Jewish, with rich traditions, and in 1942 they were herded into a tiny ghetto, then murdered after being forced to dig a long trench into which they would fall, layer after layer, after being shot, young and old, in cold blood. This affair, far from being unusual, was observed by several Wehrmacht soldiers and officers, whose disgust was aroused; they felt their honour impugned. And they decided that “an honourable soldier” had only three ways to react: to die in battle, to desert, or to rebel. They took the third option, and this led to a sizeable military confrontation by sections of the army against the Nazi regime.