MURDERING HITLER

MURDERING HITLER - the failed attacks on Hitler’s life
A lot of murder attempts on Hitler were planned. Here’s a list with a lot of the efforts made to kill him

München November 1921
Location: unknown
Assassination attempts on Hitler's life began long before he ascended to political power. The first recorded attempt occurred in Munich in 1921. In November of that year Hitler spoke at a beer hall rally that was attended by a large audience, which included some three hundred people who were either members of opposition groups or merely violently hostile to him. The crowd included members of the Independent Socialist Party, the Majority Socialist Party, and the Communist Party.

Hitler's speech "Who Are the Murderers?" was a vitriolic denunciation of the assassination on October 25, 1921, of Majority Socialist Reichstag Deputy Erhard Auer. It was routine at such gatherings for the audience, both proand anti-speaker, to consume beer in inordinate quantities and to cache the empty steins under the tables to use as ammunition in the inevitable melee. During Hitler's speech sharp remarks were exchanged between members of the gathering; this triggered first an avalanche of Steins, then the throwing of chairs, and finally a brawl that erupted throughout the hall. In the midst of the ensuing battle, the twenty-five Nazi Storm Troopers on hand for just such an eventuality managed to shepherd most of the three hundred opponents out of the building before the police appeared in sufficient strength to secure the hall. Before the police arrived several unknown assailants fired shots at Hitler, none of which hit the target.

The gunfire was returned, possibly by Hitler himself, who always carried a pistol. These shots also failed to find a target. By the time the SA men cleared the hall of opponents many people had been injured, however, none seriously. Incredibly, Hitler persisted with his tirade for fully twenty minutes more, until police reinforcements finally closed the hall and dispersed the crowd into the street. Police reports show that some 150 Steins were smashed, together with a number of chairs and tables, and the hall was strewn with lengths of brass pipe, brass knuckles, and similar weapons commonly used in civilian riots.

Thuringia and Leipzig 1923
Location: unknown
In 1923 Hitler again narrowly escaped death. Two attempts were made on his life by unknown assassins. The first occurred in Thuringia where shots get fired at Hitler from a crowd; a second, in which shots were fired at his car, in Leipzig.

Berlin 1929
Location: Sportpalast
In 1929 an SS soldier on guard duty at the Sportpalast reportedly secreted a bomb under the speaker's platform minutes before Hitler was scheduled to appear. After the usual introductions, Hitler began a speech anticipated to last several hours. The SS guard felt a sudden need to use the men's room; confident that there was ample time in which to set off the bomb, he left his position for what he expected would be only a brief absence. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the world, he was accidentally locked in the toilet. Unable to free himself from the locked room in time, he failed to trigger the bomb. Hitler escaped injury or death because of an odd twist of fate. A friend later called it the joke of the century. "The history of the world might have been changed if he hadn't had to go to the bathroom.

Berlin 1932, January
Location: Hotel Kaiserhof
The food at the table of Hitler gets poisoned. Nobody gets arrested.

Train 1932, March 15
Location: between München and Weimar
A fusillade was fired at Hitler while he rode a train from Munich to Weimar but missed the mark.

Car 1932, June
Location: near the town of Straslund
Hitler's car barely escaped attack by a group of armed men who waited in a blind on a roadside near the town of Straslund.

Car 1932, July
Location: unknown
Another ineffective assault failed to kill Hitler when his car was stoned, although one rock did graze his head.

Assner 1933, February
Location: unknown
After Hitler became Chancellor, the assassination attempts not only persisted but in fact increased. Hardly a week passed without an assassination plot being unearthed, or at least a report of one filed with the police authorities. In February a schoolteacher reported a plot to poison Hitler, and the Bavarian Legation in Berlin revealed that Ludwig Assner, a former Nazi turned communist, claimed that Hitler was a madman who would plunge Germany into misery and that he, Assner, would kill him to prevent this from happening. Although police were on alert for the would-be assassin, his threats against Hitler were dismissed as trivial when he demanded a large sum of money in exchange for abandoning his plans.

Throughout 1933 and 1934, reports of planned attempts on Hitler's life were received almost weekly by police. They included bizarre stories of exploding fountain pens, tunnels crammed with explosives dug under buildings in which he was to appear, poison squirted in his face, and dozens of others including one claiming his plane would be shot down over East Prussia. Many of these rumors were not taken seriously, largely because of the sources; however, at least fourteen were deemed sufficiently valid to merit earnest investigation by criminal police officials.

Bomb 1933, March 4
Location: Königsberg
On March 3, 1933, one day before the newly appointed Chancellor was to address a political rally in Königsberg to campaign for his slate of candidates in the March 5 Reichstag elections, police moved against a communist group whose leader, a ship's carpenter named Kurt Lutter, had organized a plot to blow up the speaker's platform while Hitler spoke. The plan took form during two clandestine meetings held in February that were infiltrated by a police informer who leaked the information to the authorities. An investigation failed to uncover the explosives, and since none of the conspirators would confess to the crime of attempted political assassination, which carried the death penalty, Lutter and his group were ultimately released after being detained for several months

Tag von Potsdam 1933, March 21
Location: Potsdamer Garnisonskirche
A tunnel was discovered under the church where the ceremony of the day of Potsdam was going to be. The people that made the tunnel wanted to blow up Hitler and Hindenburg.

Berlin 1933
Location: Old Reichskanzlei
Beppo Römer, a communist and former leader of a Freikorps, came into the Reichskanzlei. When he got discovered they send him to Dachau concentration camp. In 1942 he was killed.

Obersalzberg 1933
Location: Berghof area
Hitler's life was threatened by a would-be killer at Hitler's country house not far from Berchtesgaden. The hilly countryside surrounding the house was crisscrossed with numerous walking paths along which Hitler liked to stroll, usually accompanied by a small entourage of security people and political followers. The Führer generally led the column while his disciples alternated walking alongside him to exchange a few words of intimate conversation. The security men maintained a discreet distance and performed their duties as unobtrusively as possible.

However, since the grounds through which Hitler's party strolled were public property, it was not unusual for them to meet other strollers, sometimes even exchanging pleasantries. Repeated observances of a man in an SA uniform who was acting in a suspicious manner and was watching Hitler's group carefully did not escape the attention of the security forces. During a routine security check, a personal search revealed that he was carrying a loaded handgun, a serious violation of law, and he was immediately arrested.

Rosenheim 1933
Location: road between Rosenheim and Obersalzberg
After Hitler picks up friends from München in Rosenheim, unknown people shoot at the car of Hitler, somewhere on the road between Rosenheim and the Obersalzberg.

Bad Wiessee 1934
Location: Road München-Bad Wiessee, exact location unknown
An alleged coup attempt against the Führer in 1934 by the leaders of the SA, remains an enigma to this day. The SA leader, Ernst Röhm, had long advocated replacing the German army with his own organization. Unproven rumors persisted that Röhm coveted the position of Führer for himself. Whether the rumors were valid or Hitler simply decided to appease his army generals and rid them of a nuisance, the alleged plot was Hitler's pretext for the arrest and murder of several hundred SA leaders from June 30, 1934, through July 2, 1934.

Hitler himself participated in Röhm's arrest while the latter was vacationing in Bad Wiesse, south of Munich. With the arrests accomplished and the prisoners en route to Stadelheim prison near Munich, Hitler and his entourage, including an SS security contingent, prepared to drive to Munich. Minutes before they were to leave, a truck carrying heavily armed SA bodyguards known as the Stabswache drove up. Learning that their leaders had been arrested, the SA men assumed combative positions against Hitler's cadre, creating a highly charged and dangerous situation for the Führer.

Hitler somehow persuaded the SA team to retire. Reluctantly they returned to their truck and started out on the road to Munich. Minutes after leaving Bad Wiesse, the men had a change of heart and resolved to kill Hitler, disarm his security force, and rescue the SA leaders. Concealing their truck well off the highway, they established a deadly ambush. Machine guns set up on both sides of the road created a lethal field of fire that could not fail to annihilate Hitler's party. However, Hitler distrusted the SA group and decided to take an alternate route to Munich as a precaution against just such a contingency. Had Hitler traveled the main road, it is likely the SA unit would have killed him.

Lacking documented hard evidence that the SA leaders planned to murder Hitler, and since Röhm and his closest confederates were executed, it will never be known whether the plot actually existed. Hitler's brutal action against the SA caused many former Nazis to join a growing list of those who wanted him dead.

Berlin 1935
Location: unknown
In 1935, a right-wing group hatched an elaborate scheme to kill Hitler. The group's leader, Dr. Helmuth Mylius, was head of the Radical Middle Class Party, an industrial entrepreneur, and editor of a right-wing newspaper. Mylius and retired Navy Captain Hermann Ehrhardt developed a plan to infiltrate Hitler's SS bodyguard units with their own supporters. So successful were they that 160 men penetrated SS security and began accumulating data on Hitler's movements. The coup never came about because the Gestapo, having been informed of the plan, infiltrated the group and arrested most of the participants.

Berghof 1935
A SA man, named Kraus, according to Bridget Hitler, who was granted permission to present a petition personally to the Führer, was the would-be assassin who came nearest to succeeding. At the Berghof, Hitler's Bavarian Alps' retreat, he fired a single shot at Hitler and missed. He was shot at five times by the guards and died instantly. His motives are unknown but it might be surmised that they had something to do with the murder of Röhm, SA leader in 1934.

Julius Schreck, who occasionally acted as Hitler's double because of their resemblance

Berghof 1935
Another version of an attack motivated by Röhm's assassination was brought forward by Otto Strasser in his book Flight from Terror (NY 1943). It seems much more credible than the Bridget Hitler's version. Another SA man named Heinrich Grunow, who had not swallowed Ernst Röhm's murder, got in touch with Otto Strasser, head of the Black Front opposition movement to Hitler, and set up a plan to kill Hitler while the Führer was driven to his beloved Berchtesgarten retreat. Grunow was a member of the close guard protecting Hitler at Berchtesgarten and knew that at some spot on the road the car had to slow down to less than 15mph and argued to Strasser that it would be a propitious location to shot at Hitler. Strasser agreed to the plot and Grunow went to execute his murderous task. Unfortunately, according to Strasser, Hitler had taken the wheel on this day and Grunow shot the driver in the back seat while Hitler escaped alive. The irony is that Grunow, persuaded that he had succeeded in his attack, committed suicide on the spot while Hitler-the-driver scared to death rushed out of the car that he had put to a sudden halt. Hitler's chauffeur, Julius Schreck, was hit in the chest, the jaw and his right temple. Officially he died of a tooth infection.

Wien 1935
Location: unknown
Communists planned an attack on Hitler, Blomberg, Göring, Göbbels and Hess.

Group Markwitz 1935
Location: unknown
The group Markwitz wants to kill Hitler, but the Gestapo infiltrated the group. All the members of the group were killed.

Hagana 1936
During 1936, David Frankfurter, a Jewish medical student living in Berne, killed Wilhelm Gustloff, Hitler's deputy in Switzerland. Gustloff became Frankfurter's substitute target when the assassin realized his primary target, Adolf Hitler, was beyond his reach. A year later it was learned through SS contacts with the Hagna, the Jewish intelligence service in Palestine, that Gustloff's murder was part of a failed assassination plan against Hitler by a Paris-based group known as the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

Strasser’s Plan December 1936
Location: Nürnberg Stadium
In December 1936, a young German Jew who had been living in Prague infiltrated into Germany as part of a plot to kill Hitler by blowing up a building in the Nuremberg Stadium. Helmut Hirsch, acting under the influence of Otto Strasser, one of Hitler's most virulent opponents, agreed to plant the bomb built by another of Strasser's followers.

Hirsch arrived in Stuttgart on December 20, three days before the scheduled meeting with his contact, a Strasser disciple who was to deliver the bomb. Hirsch did not know his contact had been arrested crossing the German-Polish border with the bomb, and under questioning by the Gestapo he revealed the bombing plan and identified the would-be bomber. Since Hirsch had used his own name at the hotel when he completed the forms required of all guests, it was a simple matter to track him down and arrest him.

On March 8, 1937, Helmut Hirsch was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by beheading. The execution was carried out on June 4th  in Plötzensee.

Otto Strasser probably instigated more than a few death plots against him. Otto and his brother, Gregor, were socialists before joining Hitler's National Socialist Party. Gregor entered into an unqualified allegiance to Hitler, but Otto held some serious reservations. He openly disagreed with Hitler on important issues such as a major strike by metalworkers in Saxony. Otto Strasser championed the workers; Hitler, who was being subsidized by wealthy industrialists, was ordered by them to disclaim Strasser and condemn his support for the strikers. Hitler and Strasser met twice in Berlin's Hotel Sanssouci on May 21 and 22, 1930, to reconcile their differences. Neither man budged from his position and they parted enemies. Expelled from the Party, Otto Strasser formed his own socialist organization, which he called the Schwarze Front (Black Front).

When Gregor Strasser died in Hitler's attack on the SA, Otto realized that he had lost the protection his brother's position in the Nazi Party had afforded him and that his own life was now in danger. He fled Germany and continued to scheme against Hitler from asylum in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and later Paris. Throughout 1937 and 1938, German intelligence uncovered a steady flow of information revealing plots to kill Hitler by the Black Front, as well as other opponents of the Führer, many of whom were German émigrés.

Josef Thomas 1937, November 26
Location: Reichskanzlei Berlin
A mentaly ill man called Josef Thomas from Ebersfeld ran around in the Reichskanzlei. He got arrested. No one ever heard from him again.

Bomb 1937
Location: Sportpalast Berlin
An unknown person puts a bomb in the speakers platform of the Sportpalast. It is said that the bomb didn’t go of because the guy who placed it got, in some way, stuck in the toilets.

Dohnanyi 1937
Dr. Johannes von Dohnanyi of the Abwehr, personal advisor to Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gurtner, had disapproved of Hitler and his Nazi Party almost from the beginning when, through his post in the attorney general's office, in Hamburg, he was exposed firsthand to Nazi brutality. As early as 1937 Dohnanyi tried to recruit Hitler's adjutant, Hans Wiedemann, in a plot to shoot the Führer.

Maurice Bavaud 1938
Location: various
The year 1938 was a busy time for another would-be assassin, Maurice Bavaud. Through a strangely twisted logical reasoning, Bavaud concluded he must kill Hitler because the German dictator had reneged on his promise to squash the communists. Bavaud was a Swiss citizen attending a French Catholic seminary in Brittany when he came under the influence of another seminarian, Marcel Gerbohay. Gerbohay founded a small secret society of seminarians who called themselves the Compagnie du Mystère. This group was pledged to fight communism wherever it appeared, especially in Russia.

Gerbohay portrayed himself as a descendant of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over three hundred years. He prophesied they would rule again when the communists were overthrown. Hitler, whom many thought would be the instrument for the destruction of the Russian communists, was now showing every indication that he intended to co-exist peacefully with the Soviet Communist regime.

At Gerbohay's bidding, Bavaud set off from the seminary on a mission to assassinate Hitler because of his outward tolerance of the communists. He returned to his family's home in the west Switzerland town of NeuchU00E2tel and lived briefly with his parents and his five brothers and sisters. While he earned his keep helping his mother in a small grocery she ran to supplement her husband's postal workers salary, Bavaud studied German and read the French translation of Mein Kampf

On October 9 he bid his family farewell and set off on an odyssey that would crisscross Germany in pursuit of Adolf Hitler. He told his family he was going to Germany to find work as a draftsman, a trade he had learned before joining the seminary. He spent a fortnight visiting relatives in the German resort town of Baden-Baden. Telling these relatives he was going to Mannheim to seek work, he instead left Baden-Baden and proceeded south to the Swiss border town of Basel, where he purchased a 6.35-millimeter Schmeisser automatic pistol. He then traveled four hundred miles by rail to Berlin, where he expected to find Hitler.

In Berlin Bavaud learned that the Führer was at his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden. Determined to kill his quarry, Bavaud immediately entrained for the resort three hundred miles to the south. Arriving in Berchtesgaden on October 25, he checked into an inexpensive hotel, the Stiftskeller, and found a source where he purchased extra ammunition for his pistol. To improve his nonexistent shooting skills he went deep into the woods and used trees for target practice. He decided that he would be able to shoot Hitler if he could get within twenty-five feet of him. It apparently did not occur to Bavaud that there was no guarantee that if he was successful in shooting Hitler the Führer would necessarily die.

Unfortunately, Bavaud again missed connections when Hitler left Berchtesgaden shortly after he arrived. Dejected over this second failure to find his target, Bavaud decided to plan more carefully by learning as much as possible about Hitler's movements before taking further action. However, his German was only rudimentary, and he was severely handicapped in these inquiries.

One afternoon while eating lunch he met two French instructors with whom he carried on a lively conversation, claiming to be an ardent admirer of Hitler who wanted to meet the Führer. Although his companions could not be of any help, the conversation was overheard by a police captain sitting at the next table who spoke French. Captain Karl Derkert told Bavaud that he was connected with Hitler's security and assured the young Swiss that to arrange a personal audience with Hitler would require a letter of introduction from a high-ranking foreign official. But if he only wanted to see Hitler up close, Deckert advised, he should go to Munich in time for the anniversary of the November 9, 1923, putsch. Hitler traditionally led a parade through the city's streets that retraced the route he and his band had taken in 1923.

On October 31 Bavaud once again boarded a train, this time for Munich, where he rented a furnished room. Using a tourist map, Bavaud plotted the route of the march during the days preceding the celebration, looking for a vantage point from which to shoot Hitler. A series of grandstands had been constructed along the route, and for one of them he was able to obtain a ticket by impersonating a reporter for a Swiss newspaper.

Not entirely confident with his marksmanship, he located a suitable site about twenty-five miles from the city where he could safely practice his shooting skills.

The morning of November 9 was cold and clear. Dressed in a heavy overcoat, with his pistol inside the coat pocket, Bavaud made his way through the thousands who thronged the streets of Munich and arrived at the grandstand near the Marienplatz with time to spare. He found a front-row seat and sat quietly, hoping to remain inconspicuous while he waited for Hitler. The street in front of him, as well as along the entire march route, was flanked on both sides with two rows of burly SA men who stood shoulder to shoulder to keep the crowd from rushing into the streets. The intended assassin knew he would have to shoot Hitler from the grandstand because it would be impossible for him to push his way through the brown-shirted guards. Suddenly the cry went up, "The Führer is coming!"

Rising as one, the people in the grandstand, Bavaud included, stood to view the approaching parade. Inside his pocket his hand gripped the pistol tightly, ready to remove it quickly when Hitler came within range. With his heart pounding, the young man stood poised to act as the line of marchers approached. When the parade drew abreast of Bavaud, disappointment gripped him as he realized that Hitler was marching on the opposite side of the street, not in the center as he had expected.

This placed his target more than fifty feet away, twice his confidence range with his weapon. Bavaud released his hold on the Schmeisser and could do nothing except watch Hitler and his entourage turn a corner and disappear from view.

Bavaud was disappointed but far from discouraged. He purchased some tastefully expensive stationery and envelopes and returned to his room, where he proceeded to forge a letter of introduction to Hitler from French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin.

The letter stated that Bavaud carried a second letter that was to be read by Adolf Hitler only. It was a poorly conceived ruse born of desperation. That Bavaud even imagined such a letter would gain him admittance to Hitler's presence is incredible. To believe that the foreign minister of France would use this young Swiss citizen to carry important correspondence to the Fuehrer of Germany instead of his own ambassador was the height of foolishness.

Hearing erroneously that Hitler had returned to his retreat, Bavaud again boarded a train for Berchtesgaden. At the station he hired a taxi to take him to the Berghof, but he was prevented from entering the grounds by the armed guards who told him Hitler was not there, but still in Munich. Bavaud rushed back to the railroad station and took the next train to Munich, arriving there about the same time Hitler's private train left on its way to Berchtesgaden.

Frustrated and nearly out of money, Bavaud gave up his quest to kill Hitler and decided to leave the country. He did not have enough money to travel to Switzerland, so he hid aboard a train bound for Paris where he hoped to obtain from the Swiss embassy sufficient funds to return to his parents' home. When he was discovered by a railroad conductor he was turned over to the police at Augsburg, who handed him to the Gestapo because he was a foreigner and because he was carrying a gun and letter addressed to Hitler. For some insane reason Bavaud had failed to dispose of the incriminating letters and the weapon he intended to use against Hitler.

Under arduous interrogation Bavaud eventually confessed his plan to the Gestapo. He was put on trial, found guilty, and on May 14, 1941, was beheaded.

Having traveled hundreds of miles pursuing his fantasy to kill Hitler, Marcel Bavaud succeeded only in bringing about his own demise. Perhaps he would have accomplished his mission had he been a bit more imaginative and more resourceful, but he was doomed from the beginning because of a grievous lack of planning. Even when certain failure became apparent, the poor fellow was not smart enough to rid himself of the evidence that ultimately incriminated him

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