Why Didn't Anyone Kill Hitler?

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a plot whose success might well have spared millions of lives, while claiming that of history’s most infamous mass-murderer, Adolf Hitler.

The elaborate conspiracy centered on Claus von Stauffenberg was the most well-prepared and organized attempt to put an end to Hitler, but it was scarcely the first. The number of serious attempts on Hitler’s life would fill a book and indeed have; Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006), for example, covers the ground of several such attempts from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, at which time his security detail was remarkably small and haphazard. Early, amateurish attempts, however, put him on his guard and before the Second World War had begun, Hitler never moved anywhere without a phalanx of security. Weaknesses in his security were nonetheless identified and exploited by attempted assassins –– yet fortune favored Hitler.

Thus, one of the most remarkable attempts on Hitler’s life was carried out in November 1939, just weeks into the Second World War. The idea was brilliantly conceived, painstakingly prepared, carried into execution and ought to have succeeded but, because it failed, its author is largely forgotten today. Johann Georg Elser, a carpenter from a humble family of lumber traders, had decided Hitler was a menace to Germany and the world who had to be eliminated. He conceived his plan the previous November in Munich, watching commemorations of Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. This event was a fixture of the Nazi calendar and thus followed a fixed, ceremonial pattern which included Hitler delivering an address in the Bürgerbräukeller.

Elser planned to kill Hitler at the next commemoration during his speech. In the course of the next twelve months, Elserstole gunpowder, obtained a job which gave him access to explosives and detonators, and taught himself the rudiments of their use. He dined nightly at the Bürgerbräukeller, secreting himself upstairs when it closed, and set to work by night, hollowing out a cavity in the pillar beside the dais used by Hitler each year in order to [install] a bomb inside it. Elserin geniously modified a clock to enable him to have a timer that could be set 144 hours in advance, and lined the cavity with cork to conceal the sound of its ticking, before sealing the cavity and sedulously concealing all evidence of his work. He timed the bomb to detonate at 9.20 PM on November 8, 1939, in the middle of Hitler’s speech.

Elser’s bomb worked perfectly, exploding punctually and bringing down the gallery supported by the detonated pillar on the appointed date at 9.20 PM –– except Hitler had altered his schedule, shortened his speech, delivered it early and thus departed the scene 13 minutes earlier. Taken in for questioning at the Swiss border while seeking to cross it, Elser’s possessions were self-incriminating and under interrogation he eventually confessed all. He was kept as a special prisoner until April 1945 when, in the dying days of the war, he was murdered along with other special prisoners warehoused by the Third Reich.

Elser’s attempt was not bettered for nearly the rest of the war. In June 1942 the Polish underground attempted to attack Hitler’s personal train but ended up derailing another. The Soviet leader Josef Stalin sought to assassinate Hitler but, by 1943, as Germany began losing the war, gave up the idea as counter-productive: Hitler’s death might lead to a better-led German war machine or a separate peace with the West. So it fell to the anti-Nazi senior German officers to take matters into their own hands, initially led by General Henning von Tresckow, chief of operations for Army Group Center on the eastern front.

Tresckow was the core of an expanding coterie of officers who had either been repelled by Germany’s paganistic and barbarous turn under Hitler or else had revised their earlier acceptance of it, the more so as Germany’s catastrophic military defeat now loomed. Tresckow did not accept that Germany’s impending defeat obviated the necessity to act against Hitler; millions more innocents would yet die if the war was allowed to take its course. He thought it imperative that decent Germans do what they could to end Hitler and with him the war. A plan for a coup took shape and a clandestine, anti-Nazi cabinet-in-waiting was formed to assume the reins of power when the moment came.

All that remained was to devise the means to dispose of Hitler. Hitler was perpetually secreted in high-security locales; only his lair at Berchtesgarden was relatively lightly guarded and this locale presented obstacles of its own. As to method, poison was out of the question, as all his food was pre-tasted by his doctor, while no-one could usually enter Hitler’s entourage carrying a firearm. The only practicable way to kill Hitler, therefore, was to penetrate the inner circle of the regime and kill him –– and preferably the other most senior Nazi officials, like Himmler and Goebbels –– with a bomb.

Tresckow made two attempts. On the first occasion, in March 1943, he arranged for British-made plastic explosives to be camouflaged in a bottle of Cointreau and placed with Hitler’s luggage on the Fuhrer’s plane, but the bomb failed to detonate; whether the fuse was defective or the extreme cold in the plane occasioned by a malfunctioning heater prevented the bomb from exploding has never been determined. A week later, another conspirator, a senior intelligence officer, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, volunteered to become a suicide bomber. With explosives placed on his person and equipped with ten-minute fuses, the plan was for him to set the fuses when accompanying Hitler on a scheduled tour of captured Soviet weaponry during the annual Heroes’s Day celebrations in Berlin. But Hitler, due to stay for half an hour, was distracted by who knows what and left after two minutes; Gersdorff had no choice but to beat a hasty path to a lavatory to secretly defuse the bombs. Yet again, luck had saved Hitler. A few months later, in October 1943, Tresckowlost his access to Hitler when he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Second Army and was thus off the scene in the east. His task thereupon devolved upon Claus von Stauffenberg, another aristocratic officer who had been inducted into the conspiracy only months earlier.

Some controversy has surrounded his motives, but the balance of evidence suggests that Stauffenberg’s deep patriotism went hand-in-hand with a strong moral conscience fostered by his devout Catholic upbringing. The potential dissonance between the two had first emerged during Kristallnacht, the Nazi-orchestrated nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews on the night of November 9, 1938. His growing revulsion for Nazism had not yet attenuated his sense of duty to his commander-in-chief; he learned of anti-Hitler conspiracies the following year and thought to report the ringleaders, but decided against it. Stauffenberg’s service on the eastern front during 1941-3, however, made him witness to German atrocities; an eyewitness account of one massacre of Jews in the Ukraine that he received in May 1942 might have been a turning point. Revolted, he saw no other outlet at this stage other to seek a transfer, which took him to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, now driven back to Tunisia from Egypt by ascendant Allied forces. There, in April 1943, Stauffenberg was severely wounded in action, losing his left eye, his right hand and all but the thumb, index and middle fingers of his left hand. A long convalescence in Munich brought him into contact with Tresckow and the other officers involved in the anti-Hitler conspiracy.

Stauffenberg could have been invalided out of active service and turned his back on the developing conspiracy. Instead, he returned to duty and rapidly took charge of it. He believed he had been spared for a providential reason and he was a determined man; even with now only one hand, he often insisted on dressing himself and tying his own shoelaces unaided. With his appointment to the Reserve Army in Berlin, he became perfectly placed to advance Tresckow’s assassination and coup plan: to him fell the task of updating Operation Valkyrie, a Hitler-approved emergency plan for deploying Wehrmacht forces at the word of the German High Command to secure the capital in the event on internal revolt or unrest. Stauffenberg altered the plan, its trigger being now the assassination of Hitler.

The lack of an officer with access to Hitler seemed filled when Stauffenberg recruited still another aristocratic officer, Axel von dem Bussche. Bussche was a man of similarly deep conviction and sense of purpose and he agreed to sacrifice himself by arming himself with a bomb and detonating it when he would have an opportunity to embrace Hitler at a formal inspection of the new eastern front winter uniforms at the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfschanze), Hitler’s headquarters in east Prussia. But the new uniform consignment went up in smoke the night before in a British air raid the inspection was postponed and Bussche returned to the front. Before the inspection was rescheduled, Bussche was badly wounded in combat, losing a leg, and was laid up for the rest of the war.

Another of Stauffenberg’s recruits, Captain Ewald von Kleist, volunteered to do the deed when the inspection was rescheduled in February 1944, but Hitler then cancelled the event altogether . Another officer, Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, who offered his services to Tresckow in March 1944, soon had what appeared to be his chance when he accompanied his superior, Field Marshal von Busch, to a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgarden. Breitenbusch, deciding to shoot Hitler with a concealed pistol, arrived at the anteroom with his weapon undetected –– but, at the last minute, he was not admitted to the conference room, being only a junior aide. Hitler again had been saved and the conspirators frustrated.

But then a new door opened: on June 20, Stauffenberg was promoted to full colonel and appointed chief-of-staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Berlin-based Home Army. Stauffenberg’s duties included reporting to Hitler; thus, out of the blue, the chief conspirator himself had suddenly obtained the vital, regular access to the Führer. They had met for the first time two weeks earlier, on June 7, the day after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Hitler had greeted the decorated and maimed war hero warmly; Stauffenberg withstood the test of having to peer into Hitler’s eerie, penetrating eyes. Far from being mesmerized, he found a void –– “Nothing! ... as if veiled” he later said.

Stauffenberg soon determined that he would have to do the deed himself. No one else seemed up to the task; not co-conspirator, General Helmuth Stieff, who lost had his nerve about carrying in and placing a suitcase containing explosives in one of Hitler’s staff meetings. This changed matters. Stauffenberg’s original intended role had been to orchestrate the coup in Berlin following the assassination and to convince army heads to arrest the Nazi apparatus. This vital role now had to be devolved to others. No one could have guessed the baleful consequences of this development.

Stauffenberg’s first attempt came at Berchtesgarden on July 11, when he brought the British-made explosives and pencil fuses to a meeting with Hitler. But, fatefully, Stieff persuaded him to postpone the attempt, as Himmler was absent, so the opportunity was lost.

Stauffenberg made a second attempt on July 15 when attending a staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair. Preparatory orders for Valkyrie had been issued that morning. No one knows for certain why Stauffenberg did not proceed with the attempt. Whether he lacked the opportunity to set the fuses, whether the attempt was aborted because Goering and Himmler were absent, we are unlikely to ever know. The Valkyrie orders had to be rescinded and the troop movements explained away as a drill; the sort of excuse that can be proffered only once.

Time was running out for the conspirators: two of its members had already been arrested by the Gestapo and could be expected to crack under torture before long and reveal other members. Stauffenberg was keenly aware of the enveloping danger and knew that, on the next occasion, he must not fail. That occasion arrived on July 20, when he again attended a staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair.

The meeting proceeded, not in the usual cavernous confines of the underground concrete bunker, where the force of the explosion would be greatly multiplied, but in an outdoor wood-and-fiberglass briefing room. Nonetheless, the two plastic explosives concealed by Stauffenberg in his briefcase should have been ample for the job.

During the meeting, Stauffenberg excused himself on the pretext of needing to freshen up and change his shirt. Assisted by his adjutant, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, the three-fingered Stauffenberg put the bombs together behind closed door in an officer’s room, but had only set the fuses for one of these when they were interrupted and Stauffenberg forced to return instantly to the meeting. Thus he returned to the briefing room with only one bomb in his case, primed to explode in ten minutes.

Seated routinely next to Hitler on the pretext of being still somewhat deaf from his injuries in Tunisia, Stauffenberg placed the case only a few feet from Hitler, then left to supposedly make an urgent phone call. This was nothing irregular in meetings of this kind and no suspicions were aroused. Minutes later, the bomb exploded. Stauffenberg witnessed it from a distance and, confident that he had finally succeeded, left in the resultant confusion and boarded his plane back to Berlin to assume command of the coup.

But it had all gone wrong. Before exploding, the briefcase had been moved to the other end of the heavy conference table, behind a thick base affording Hitler some protection. In the explosion, one participant was killed, three more mortally wounded, but Hitler and the rest, though injured in varying degrees, were alive and would survive.

Stauffenberg arrived two hours later in Berlin. Finding no one awaiting him at the airfield, he made his own way to Home Army command, only to find that his co-conspirators had been largely paralyzed by indecision in the absence of definite news from the Wolf’s Lair. The troops had been called out to surround various organs of the state, but otherwise little had been done; the telephone exchanges and radio headquarters had not been seized. Thus, the Nazi hierarchy was able to communicate the news that Hitler was alive and not seriously injured, though Stauffenberg refused to believe it. But it was over. Stauffenberg’s directives were exposed as a coup and countermanded and the conspiracy melted away into impotence. Goebbels, surrounded in the Propaganda Ministry by troops called out by the Valkyrie order, summoned their commander, Major Otto Remer, who thought he was carrying out the Führer’s command, only to be disabused by Hitler’s voice on the end of the telephone Goebbels handed him.

Stauffenberg and his cohorts were surrounded and captured after a brief shoot-out in the Home Army headquarters. His superior and co-conspirator, General Fromm, thereupon arrested Stauffenberg, who had been wounded in the shoulder during the shoot-out, and the others. In a bid to cover his own tracks, Fromm had them shot by firing squad in the early hours of the following morning, though this deed failed to save him from arrest, trial and eventual execution. Staufffenberg’s adjutant Hauften threw himself in front of the bullets intended for Stauffenberg, who was simply shot seconds later. Other conspirators were less fortunate: after conviction in show trials, some 200 were done to death by slow strangulation in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison and thousands more were also killed or dispatched to concentration camps.

The news of the attempt by Stauffenberg and the other German officers stunned and heartened people across Europe. Anne Frank, living for two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam, wrote in her diary, “I’m finally getting optimistic. Now, at last, things are going well! They really are!” (It was her penultimate diary entry. Two weeks later, her family’s hiding place was discovered and she was deported to her eventual death at Bergen-Belsen).

Stauffenberg’s failure meant that the war in Europe lasted nine further months, with millions of lives lost. Germany itself suffered the worst of its losses; of Germany’s 7.4 million dead in the Second World War, some 4-5 million lost their lives in the last six months. Thus, did a concatenation of chances on occasion after occasion –– personalities, changed circumstances, poor choices, indecision, bad luck –– determine the lives and deaths of millions.

I think a better strategy for Hitler would have been to maintain his alliance with Stalin, at least in the short term.

The forces used in Barbarossa could obviously have pretty easily conquered North Africa and swept all the way to the Persian Gulf. Stalin gets Romania, Bulgaria, Persia and Turkey. The Med becomes a German lake. Hitler’s fuel problems are over.

Spend perhaps five years using his newly acquired resources and the industrial power of all of Europe to build up an army and possibly even a navy that would allow him to quickly crush Stalin when he finally attacks and then turn on the West. World domination.

The American Revolution produced no radical social changes, it produced political independence and solidified self government. By contrast the French Revolution was a radical revolution, it involved a war against traditional French society, culture, and religion in addition to political change.

What rot.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution based on the Doctrin of Negative Rights is THE most radical, revolutionary social and political shift in human history. EVERYTHING else is merely a shifting around of subject status under various guises, the French Revolution being merely another socialist experiment in seeing how far the people could be pushed in the name of the collective "we" before they realized it was yet another ruling elite "them' under a different name.

If Kirk believed his own words he was a fool, otherwise he was just another RINO seditionist trying to parse away and trivialize the universality of the doctrine of innate human freedom promulgated by the Founders.

Mao, Stalin, Hitler. Leftists all.

Fwiw.

NationalSozialistDeutsheArbeiterPartei
National Socialist German Workers Party

Abbreviation. NAZI

Curious how the left easily float the smear of "Nazi" and "Fascist". This on anyone who offers a dissenting view. Especially one that flies in their face . This is their special weapon.

As for Adolf Hitler, he nearly got killed in WW1 as a dispatch runner. The German police fired on him and his comrades in the 1920's, as they marched on the government. 23 were killed. Hitler survived and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was let out after one year and the rest is history.

During WW2, we were cheerfully told that all the German people supported Hitler. The rotten communists in England demanded atrocities to be visited on Germany at the end of the war.

Fortunately wiser heads prevailed.

I agree. If Hitler hadn’t wasted his best divisions by turning on Stalin he would have been in an incredibly strong position for tying up fuel supplies and the Mediterranean.

The biggest obstacle for his long term goal was Nazism itself. It was essentially a ruthless criminal enterprise operating as a political party. The SS exemplified this, being the armed wing of the Nazi party rather than part of the regular German military. A documented act of cruelty against the German people had been a requirement for joining the SS. A regime that operated like that simply couldn’t last. Eventually your home grown enemies will find a way to turn on you.

” By comparison, our forebears went from monarchal subjects in a hierarchal society to republican citizens in a comparative blink of an eye. Way radical. “

Feel free to argue your case against Kirk. The American revolution was to preserve existing rights against the encroachments, the usurpations, of the King. Rights that American colonials believed that they already had and that they had been practicing without interference for a very long time. These rights were already spelled out in the Bill of Rights of 1689, a document we forget because we tend not to look back into English political history. But this document was well known to American colonials.

The colonials had stated repeatedly their willingness remain British subjects if George III respected their rights. He didn’t, and so the American colonies seceded from the United Kingdom. Hamilton and few others wanted to establish a monarchy over here and make Washington a king. But Washington and the majority chose to build upon the Continental Congress that they had been operating under since before war erupted. The new government was an evolution and codifying of what had already been operating in the American colonies.

If you want a radical revolution then look to what happened shortly afterwards in France. Edmund Burke knew the difference between the two, supported the American effort and deplored the French. Burke’s writings on this are one of the reasons Kirk featured him in ‘The Conservative Mind’ and ‘Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered’.

‘Russell Kirk was a leading figure in the post-World War II revival of American interest in Edmund Burke. Today, no one who takes seriously the problems of society dares remain indifferent to “the first conservative of our time of troubles.” In Russell Kirk’s words: “Burke’s ideas interest anyone nowadays, including men bitterly dissenting from his conclusions. If conservatives would know what they defend, Burke is their touchstone; and if radicals wish to test the temper of their opposition, they should turn to Burke.” Kirk unfolds Burke’s philosophy, showing how it revealed itself in concrete historical situations during the eighteenth century and how Burke, through his philosophy, “speaks to our age. “This volume makes vivid the four great struggles in the life of Burke: his efforts to reconcile England with the American colonies; his involvement in cutting down the domestic power of George III; his prosecution of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India; and his resistance to Jacobinism, the French Revolution’s “armed doctrine.”’

On the contrary I know exactly what it is. I notice that in your reply you didn’t mention your own familiarity with Russell Kirk. I’ll take that to be a confirmation that you know nothing of him.

I don't give a damn who he was. The idea that you can invoke a name without any personal support of a particular idea or argument that you are making your own, especially in order to dismiss the fundamental genius and revolutionary impact of the Doctrine of Negative Rights on American history is more than personally cowardly - it's ridiculous.

If there is some argument you believe Kirk espoused that you agree with in this matter, out with it. But to invoke his name and expect people to simply toss the very meaning of their country in the trash is some sort of mental illness. If Kirk negated the fundamental importance and uniqueness of Negative Rights, then hold your hat and sit down - I disagree with him. And repeating his name with an aura of breathlessness and showing contempt for someone who doesn't share your codependency is NOT an argument.

A fetish, yes. I'll give you that. But the invocation of his name is irrelevent. And there are oh, I don't know, one or two people through history who might agree with my understanding of the specific American importance of this issue.

Thank you for sharing your fetish with everyone. If you ever want to actually own your own words and discuss specific issues, feel free to share. Otherwise, get help.

“<>Hamilton and few others wanted to establish a monarchy over here and make Washington a king.<> You lost all credibility with that whopper.”

Evidently you didn’t take notes when you were reading Wood, McDonald, Bailyn et al.

On June 18, 1787 Hamilton offered the Constitutional Convention what was dubbed “the British Plan” due to its all too strong resemblance to the British form of government. Hamilton’s plan had a ‘Governor’ rather than a President, and that Governor held office for life.

Now maybe to you a Governor-for-Life doesn’t constitute a monarch as long as he wasn’t called a king. If so I’d call that a whopper.

“I don’t give a damn who he was.”

I never would have guessed. The post WWII conservative renaissance began with essentially two men, Russell Kirk and William F Buckley. Kirk wrote the first major book of the movement in 1953, ‘The Conservative Mind’ and in 1955 he helped Buckley found National Review.

” If Kirk negated the fundamental importance and uniqueness of Negative Rights, then hold your hat and sit down - I disagree with him. “

He didn’t. You seem to have drummed up the idea that he did all on your own.

“And repeating his name with an aura of breathlessness and showing contempt for someone who doesn’t share your codependency is NOT an argument. “

You’ll have to describe how breathlessness manifests itself in online posting, I’m sure it will be interesting.

It used to be that the conservative reading public had a rudimentary knowledge of heavyweights among conservative thinkers, many of whom had written for National Review. Kirk was one, James Burnham another. You’re evidence that that era is long gone.

You parse away context from my postings, and you do not supply your own words and thoughts - only idol worship. You speak as a collectivist, holding up the names of leaders you demand others agree with outside of any particular issue you personally support, explain or hold yourself. You also directly lie about specific issues, namely the one I refuted, the Doctrine of Negative Rights, which your hero did indeed attempt to diminish quite pointedly and at length as a subsidiary and pre-existing issue - which it certainly was not.

Finally, your collective dismissal of the entirety of my knowledge of politics, conservativsm, critical thinking and basically everything else, solely for my disagreement with your hero, and lacking any personal discussion of specific issues by yourself, is an excellent example of a collectivist's wrath over not being kneejerk-followed and intellectually obeyed.

Kirk and Buckley were elitist RINOs. They upheld conservative principles for corporate matters and distinguished between the relationships of people and corporations, corporations and government and people and government. Invocation of their posistions without careful discrimination of applicability concerning these three basic relationships is the age-old RINO technique that has resulted in the modern Republican Party, saying all the right things,a nd consistently doing all the wrong - with no one able to understand "how" it happened.

Your heroes were not conservative - they parsed conservatism away from small business freedom from regulations into corporate control of "conservative" regulatory domination. You're a poseur who invokes names, not a true student of political dynamics who dares address the core issues that have balkanized the Republican Party. Your ignorance of the use of decades of Delphi tactics by these people against conservative ideology while claiming to support it erases you from the discussion - you literally don't recognize what they did, how they did it, or even that they did it. Instead, to people like you, the Left just "rose" and conservatives just "fell," no doubt because of lack of appropriate worship, such as I am displaying here.

That's why you come in here with the lowest possible obedience meme - worship of name only. Which is not only intellectually insulting and highly condescending to anyone who reads your wroshipful screeds, but also fits the entire concept of RINOs and Leftist leader-worship perfectly. Except, of course, that you are doing it in the name of a philosophy that rejects such collectivism, which you obviously believe makes you clever, but actually reveals a tawdryness to which you remain oblivious.

Boy, you must be a quick reader. You managed to go from never having heard of Russell Kirk to declaring him an elitist RINO in less than a week.

But you should have stuck with just acknowledging that you’d never heard of him since that would have spared you from making what has to be the stupidest estimation of Russell Kirk ever written. Kirk was as far from an apologist for corporate power and the Republican establishment as any major conservative thinker ever has been. He was concerned primarily with the moral order as the basis for western civilization.

Capitalism and the Moral Basis of Social Order by Russell Kirk

http://facebookapostles.org/2012/07/27/capitalism-and-the-moral-basis-of-social-order-by-russell-kirk/

“A number of Americans, fancying that the world is governed mainly by economic doctrines and practices, are inclined to think that an era of international good feeling lies before us. I intend to sprinkle some drops of cold water on such hasty hopes. I have no faith in the notion that an abstract “democratic capitalism” is about to gain acceptance throughout the world.

We find fairly widespread in these United States a “capitalistic” version of Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism – more’s the pity. It is not a theoretical “democratic capitalism” that can preserve, unaided, order and justice and freedom. Materialism was an American vice when Alexis de Tocqueville travelled in the United States. That vice has not diminished in power. People who maintain that production and consumption are the ends of human existence presently will find themselves impoverished materially, as well as spiritually.....”

Reading comprehension I’d clearly not your strong suit - the established subject was your quote that Kirk minimized the Doctrine of Negative Rights (not that you made that statement yourself, never that, you’re just an acolyte randomly quoting your god Kirk, of course).

But then, you were just tasked with a single goal and you’re sticking to it - undermining the discussion of actual conservative issues in context, by getting conservatives to worship name over argument, accept lack of personal statements in exchange for name loyalty, and attacking anyone who calls you on your crap.

What a good little collectivist handler you are. Cost you your soul, but hey, look at all the little gold stars you got on your report card to replace it!

Carry on, worshipper. I’m no longer interested in wasting time with someone who won’t even own their own thoughts. Worms revolt me.

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