Here at The Infographics Show, we try to brainstorm all kinds of topics we think you’ll find
interesting.
But it’s even better when we get a great suggestion from our viewers.
Viewer Robert suggested we cover the many attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
It’s quite a story, so, Robert, here’s the video!
July 20, 1944, was a sweltering day at Germany’s Eastern Front headquarters, near the town
then known as Rostenburg, East Prussia.
Weather is always a factor in war, but even though there was no battle at Rostenburg that
day, the unpleasant heat would alter the course of history.
Someone made the call that it was too hot to hold the high level meeting in the concrete
bunker within the so-called Wolf’s Lair, or Wolfschanze.
Instead they would meet in a wooden room with windows.
You’d think that the Nazi leadership would be more vulnerable in the less fortified setting,
but the change of venue may have saved Adolf Hitler’s life--at least for a little while.
Today was to be the culmination of an assassination plot by the German resistance, including several
high ranking military officers and civilians, that had been years in the making.
Hitler had no idea that there was a briefcase containing a bomb underneath the oak table,
just two seats down from him.
Neither did anyone else in the room, save the man who placed it there, Lieutenant Colonel
Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who excused himself on the pretext of making a phone call.
At 12:42 pm, the bomb went off, and Stauffenberg hurried away to set the rest of the plan in
motion.
The July Plot was only the latest of more than 30 assassination attempts against Hitler
both before and after he’d seized power.
The Nazi dictator had literally been dodging bullets left and right.
In 1921 an unknown person in a crowd took a shot at Hitler as he was speaking.
Two more shooting attempts followed in 1923: the first, also in a crowd; the second, a
shot at the car Hitler was in.
There were four attempts in 1932.
The first, in January, was an attempted poisoning.
Others dining with Hitler at Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof contracted severe food poisoning.
Hitler took ill as well, but wasn’t as sick as the others, possibly because of his vegetarian
diet.
A few months later, someone fired a shot at the train carriage where Hitler was sitting.
In June, a group planned to ambush Hitler’s car, but without success.
At a speech on July 29, several people lobbed stones at him, one of which did hit him in
the head, but not hard enough to take him out.
In 1933, Karl Luttner, a communist and labor leader, plotted with others to kill Hitler
by planting a bomb.
The day before the election of March 5--which brought Hitler to power--he was to deliver
a public speech, and Luttner intended to use the opportunity to assassinate the Nazi leader,
before it was too late.
But the authorities in what was still the democratic Weimar Republic found out about
the plan and arrested Luttner and his collaborators.
Later that year, a separate group, never identified, dug a tunnel underneath a church in Potsdam
where Hitler was scheduled to speak, accompanied by other Nazi leaders.
Presumably the tunnel would have been used to plant explosives, had security forces not
discovered it.
As Hitler tightened his stranglehold over the German government, members of the right
wing outside the Nazi circle also began to plot against him.
Helmuth Mylius, head of the Radical Middle Class Party, joined forces with retired Navy
Captain Hermann Ehrhardt to recruit 150 collaborators to infiltrate the SS.
The plan was uncovered by the Gestapo, and most of the conspirators faced severe punishment.
A few avoided discovery, and remained in the army to continue the internal resistance.
The Night of the Long Knives was a deadly purge of the SA, the Nazis’ original core
group, which was being sidelined in favor of the elite sub-group, the SS.
Otto Strasser, a disaffected former Nazi whose brother was killed in the Night of the Long
Knives, led other German exiles in Prague in the anti-Nazi Black Front.
They carried out an unknown number of assassination attempts in the late 1930s.
Joseph Goebbels named Strasser Germany’s Public Enemy Number One.
In 1938, the military intelligence chief Major General Hans Oster, along with several other
military leaders, conspired to arrest Hitler if he reneged on his commitment not to invade
western Czechoslovakia, which the Nazis called the Sudetenland.
They were counting on British support for this action, which they intended as a prelude
to the reinstatement of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
But when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acceded to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland,
the conspirators lost their opportunity, and instead of coming across as an illegal warmonger,
Hitler gained popular support in the German public.
Members of the Oster plot would also continue as part of a secret resistance.
Also in 1938, Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss national who held the bizarre belief that killing the
Führer would also somehow bring down the Soviet government and restore Russia’s Romanov
dynasty, launched a one-man operation.
He planned to gun down the dictator at a party in Munich celebrating the anniversary of the
Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis’ failed attempt to seize power in 1923.
But he couldn’t get a clear shot, and since he didn’t want anyone else to die, he didn’t
fire.
Bavaud then traveled to Berchtesgaden, where he hoped that forged documents might get him
close to his target.
He learned that Hitler was still in Munich, so Bavaud tried to make his way back by train.
He was arrested, and confessed under interrogation by the Gestapo.
Like several other would-be assassins, Bavaud was executed by guillotine.
The following year, the carpenter Georg Elser skillfully hid a bomb inside a wooden pillar
ahead of time for the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary, and set it to go off at the customary time
of the observance.
But Hitler, rushed for time, started and ended early, and was gone by the time the bomb exploded.
Elser was caught, but the Gestapo kept him alive until almost the end of the war, believing
that he must have been part of a conspiracy.
If so, he didn’t talk.
Over time, the number of upper level military leaders in the Wehrmacht with grievances against
the Führer grew.
Henning von Tresckow, part of the leadership in the German campaign against Russia, became
the ringleader for Project Valkyrie, an elaborate plan to replace all of the Nazi leadership
loyal to Hitler, upon completion of an assassination.
Following the fall of Stalingrad, Hitler paid a visit to a site in western Russia.
Coup plotters considered simply shooting him while he was there, but that action was called
off, in part because Himmler wasn’t present.
But there was a second strike in motion that went ahead.
Tresckow asked Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Brandt, who would be flying with Hitler back to the
headquarters in East Prussia, if he would deliver a bottle of liqueur to a colleague.
Brandt put the bottle in his luggage, unaware that it was a disguised bomb, which was timed
to explode when the plane was over Minsk.
But the bomb malfunctioned in the cold cargo hold.
Learning that the plane had landed intact, Tresckow dispatched an aide to retrieve the
bomb before it could be found out.
In another attempt, Hitler, along with Himmler and Herman Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe,
were reviewing new winter uniforms.
The handsome officer Axel von dem Bussche, who was to serve as model, volunteered for
the suicide mission to wear a bomb under the overcoat.
But the planned meeting was delayed.
The conspirators continued seeking a chance to kill all three leaders at a stroke.
In the end, Stauffenberg was the only conspirator who could get close enough to the increasingly
wary Führer, who by now had decided it was a good idea to wear a bulletproof vest.
A veteran of both the African and Russian campaigns, Stauffenberg had lost a hand and
an eye in battle.
He was to carry out the assassination, but many others by now were involved in another
key aspect of the plan, which required a military coup by the German Reserve Army.
The co-plotters in Berlin would use the assassination as a false flag operation, accusing the Nazi
leadership of taking out Hitler themselves, providing a pretext for the overthrow, after
which they would sue for peace, and restore civilian government and the rule of law.
But first they had to kill the man who had led Germany down the ruinous path of war.
Friedrich Fromm, the Reserve Army’s Commander in Chief, had agreed to turn a blind eye to
the actions of the conspirators.
But he appointed Stauffenberg as his chief of staff, enabling close access to Hitler
during meetings, without understanding his new subordinate’s intentions.
Stauffenberg was to carry a British-built briefcase bomb to the meeting at the Wolf’s
Lair.
It was equipped with two explosive devices.
After arriving at the fortress, Stauffenberg ducked away, saying he needed to change his
shirt.
But interruptions prevented him from arming both devices.
He went ahead with the single bomb, though.
The physics of a wooden, porous room would make for a less deadly blast than one that
was sealed and concrete.
So Stauffenberg made sure to sit as close to Hitler as he could, just one seat over.
But this wasn’t to be a suicide mission.
After placing the briefcase under the table as close as he could manage, Stauffenberg
slipped out.
But once the spot at the table was empty, a colonel came in to fill it, wanting a closer
look at the maps being reviewed.
Unknowingly, he kicked the briefcase behind a table leg.
When the bomb went off, that made the difference.
One person was killed instantly; three others later died of their injuries.
Hitler was wounded.
He suffered temporary paralysis and a dislocated arm.
His buttocks were bruised, and he had a broken eardrum.
His pants were torn to shreds, and his hair was a mess.
But he lived.
And that message was relayed to Berlin, preventing the coup.
Hitler, who now boasted of being immortal, gave the order that the conspirators should
die like animals.
They were hanged with meat hooks and piano wire.
One account describes a prolonged torture, with the condemned repeatedly taken to the
edge of death and then revived.
The following year, the nightmare of Nazi rule would end with the Soviet capture of
Berlin, and Hitler would become his own last victim, shooting himself in the head rather
than face justice for his crimes.
In the early post-war years, German public opinion remained hostile to the conspirators
in Operation Valkyrie, with most people considering them traitors.
Meanwhile, following the Nuremberg trials, many rank and file Nazis received amnesty
from the West German government.
It took time, but Germans did come to confront their complicity in Nazi atrocities, and the
view of the German resistance began to change.
By the early 21st century, only a small minority of Germans polled held negative views of the
resistance, who are now officially memorialized.
Perhaps the greatest symbol of respect for the resistance fighters comes in a ceremony
every year, when new recruits to the current German military are sworn in on July 20.
Are there any other moments in history you think could have changed things as dramatically
as if one of these assassination missions was successful?
Let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video called “What If Hitler Had Won?”
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!