Take out Hitler?

Did anyone see the programme on the history channel last night regarding the SOE plans to kill Hitler?
They had an interview with one of his bodyguards who was with him right up until the end in Berlin. He stated that it would have been very simple for the allies to have killed Hitler as he was a great creature of habit and would often wander about on his own on walks etc.

Was it simply that he was better off left running the German army rather than someone who knew what was going on?

Seems that the Germans themselves had the best attempts......One bomb planted by a Mr Elser missed him by 13 minutes as he had left for Berlin by train after only speaking for an hour instead of his usual two and a half ....Killed about eight other Nazi's though

Regards Graham

 

There were incredibly many tries to take out the m**********r.... hell of bad luck none of them suceeded.

 

There were indeed a lot of attemts to kill Hitler and the one that could have been succesfull - if not for the tabel - was the one of Von Stauffenberg.

But I also read in some book that if Hitler would have been killed, that there might have been a civil war in Germany. Let's say a battle for power between the SS and the Wehrmacht.

 

The only real chances there were of getting rid of Hitler were the early assessination attempts in the 1930s - which would have made a hero of Hitler - or the General Staff plots of 1938 and 1944. The first was ruined by Sir Neville Chamberlain and the second by an ill-planned coup d'état.

 

Of course Elser DID have a perfect chance... just a little wrong timing again.

 

Interesting to know the different parties working against each other:

Why the German coup against Hitler did not have success in the west ( at least some reasons to it )

http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Nemesis.html



Kim Philby

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/philby_harold.shtml

Philby's Soviet mentors make it clear to him that a German coup d'etat resulting in the overthrow of the Nazi system by pro-West anti-Soviet conservative forces is Moscow's nightmare scenario.

Philby's secret mission is to report to his Soviet handlers the slightest sign of an Anglo-German dialogue and to sabotage to his full capacity at his level any and all secret German offers to establish a working dialogue that could end the war between Britain and Germany.

An intelligence study on the growing rift between the German General Staff and the Nazi regime surfaces in Section-5 and incites a great deal of interest and excitement. . Its central premise was that World War II in Europe could be speedily ended if only the British government were willing to give the German General Staff the right incentive to launch a coup d'etat - a guarantee that if the German Army overthrew Hitler and the Nazi regime, an armistice and a negotiated peace settlement could soon take place. Section-5 Deputy Chief and Soviet agent Kim Philby wastes no time censoring the report to make certain it never goes beyond Section-5.

Philby again sabotages the efforts of the German conspirators :German conspiracy emissary Otto John who has supplied leading Army Group Center conspirator Colonel Henning von Tresckow with the blueprints of Hitler's Condor aircraft, makes contact with an SIS officer code-named 'Tony' who works for the British embassy in Lisbon.He was given strict instructions from London forbidding any contact with 'emissaries of the German opposition'.The "strict instructions from London" in fact come from Philby, who has suppressed Tony's report of his initial meeting with Otto John on the grounds that the German emissary is "unreliable".

In February 1944, a senior German Abwehr officer, Eric Vermehren, serving in the German consulate in Istanbul, defects with his wife Elizabeth to British intelligence. Having arrived in England, they supply their debriefing officer with a complete list of Germany's most prominent Catholic political activists working against the Nazi regime. According to the Vermehrens, the people on this list would be crucial to helping the western Allies set up a post-nazi anti-communist government in Germany. Tragically for the anti-communist German opposition to Hitler, the debriefing officer assigned to the Vermehrens is none other than Kim Philby.

Shortly after the war, when American and British secret service agents attempt to contact the Germans on the Vermehren list, they learn to their horror that nearly all of them have been killed. A generation later, it is discovered that Philby had passed on the list to his Soviet controllers and that the KGB had assassinated nearly everyone on that list.

 

Oh f***... this guy really did have some vile impact on world history!

The Vermehren list is interesting. After the war, the Soviets kidnapped an Austrian conservative politician & economist, Margarete Ottilinger, and kept her arrested for no obvious reason. Maybe she was on this list?