Killing Hitler (32 page)

But all this is not to suggest that assassination had been abandoned by the British Special Forces and their allies. After all, the operational instruction to Rommel’s would-be kidnappers stated that if they were unable to exfiltrate the field marshal, they were to kill him.
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Assassination also remained the tactic of choice for eliminating low-level targets among the occupiers and their collaborators. In Denmark, for example, the resistance liquidated a succession of informants, in some cases using the Welrod silent pistol. In one instance, in the town of Aarhus in November 1944, a target was executed in a busy hospital ward without anyone
noticing anything amiss.
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In Norway, meanwhile, a number of collaborators were assassinated as the war neared its end: Ivar Grande, a senior Gestapo informant and spy, was gunned down in Ålesund in December 1944, and two months later, the head of the Norwegian police, Karl Marthinsen, was murdered in Oslo.
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As late as April 1945, SOE was still dropping assassins into Nazi-occupied Europe. One of the last of these was Wilhelm Borstelmann, a former POW, who had been persuaded to return to Hamburg, where he was to target U-boat commanders. Though the operation was a failure, it is perhaps instructive to note that the planning file spoke unashamedly of Borstelmann as “a first-class thug.”
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By 1945, it appears, the days of the gentleman spy were well and truly over.

The British attitude toward irregular warfare had shifted a great deal since Mason-Macfarlane had made his “unsportsmanlike” suggestion some six years earlier. Some, admittedly, preferred to cling to the old certainties and viewed the dark arts of assassination, kidnapping, and sabotage, if not as morally reprehensible, then at least as distasteful necessities that could be swiftly abandoned once victory was secured. But it is also obvious that a line had been crossed. SOE, especially, appeared to embrace the methods of the dirty war with alacrity, and even saw itself as the “fourth arm of modern warfare.”
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Its activities in the field—disrupting communications, fostering resistance, and tying down enemy troops—were of proven benefit to the Allied war effort. It brought the nefarious methods of the saboteur and the kidnapper out of the shadows and almost succeeded in making them respectable. In a few short years, it had established the political assassination, which was once viewed as utterly beyond the pale of decent human conduct, as a legitimate tool of subversive warfare. Its murder of Heydrich demonstrated that few Germans could consider themselves to be immune from its attentions. Hitler himself kept a wary eye on SOE, spending at least half an hour each day being briefed on its latest activities, both successes and failures.
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He naturally saw himself as its primary target. There was a fair amount of conceit in this assumption, but he was not wholly
mistaken. The British had, in fact, been wrestling with the idea of assassinating him almost from the outset of World War Two.

In September 1939, just as war erupted in Europe, the novel
Rogue Male
was published by Chatto and Windus in London. It was a fast-paced and crisply written thriller recounting the tribulations of a British gentleman-adventurer who, after a hunting trip in Poland, decides to cross the border and stalk an unnamed European dictator.

Traveling aimlessly, the protagonist finds himself being drawn to “the House” and becomes obsessed with “the idea of a sporting stalk.” He discusses his motivations, suggesting that he had speculated on the methods of guarding “a great man” and on the ways in which they might be circumvented. Yet he concludes, “Like most Englishmen, I am not accustomed to enquire very deeply into motives,” and admits that “I haven’t any grievances myself. One can hardly count the upsetting of one’s trivial private life and plans by European disturbances as a grievance.”
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But as he reaches the forests above “the House,” he soon becomes wrapped up in the sense of adventure—the thrill of the chase.

I arrived on the ground at dawn and spent the whole day in reconnaissance. It was an alarming day, for the whole forest surrounding the house was most efficiently patrolled. From tree to tree and gully to gully I prowled over most of the circuit, but only flat on the earth was I really safe. Often I hid my rifle and glasses, thinking that I was certain to be challenged and questioned. I never was. I might have been transparent.
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When he finally finds a likely vantage point with a clear shot to the house from around 500 yards, he observes his target as he comes out “to play with the dog or smell a rose or practise gestures on the gardener.”
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Then, after watching the security procedures in force and identifying an escape route, he settles down with his rifle:

At last the great man came out on to the terrace…. I had ten minutes to play with…. I made myself comfortable, and got the three pointers on the sight steady on the V of his waistcoat. He was facing me and winding up his watch. He would never have known what shattered him.
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Captured before he could get a shot off, the assassin is interrogated, tortured, and left for dead, spending the remainder of the narrative on the run from enemy agents determined to silence him. After eluding his pursuers, the protagonist then ends the novel by returning to the task that he had set himself at the outset. “My plans are far advanced,” he concludes. “I shall not get away alive, but I shall not miss and that is all that really matters.”
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Though the words
Germany
and
Hitler
are never mentioned in the book, it is patently obvious from the context and the detail given who the assassin’s target was supposed to be. Indeed, subsequent editions and two later film versions dispensed with the pretense of anonymity altogether, the books often carrying a portrait of Hitler on the cover. The fact that Hitler should have been targeted in the novel is unsurprising. Concerns about the international situation were rife in Britain throughout 1939, and the suggestion that they could be eased if Hitler were “bumped off” would have been commonplace. What might be slightly surprising, however, is the novel’s author. Geoffrey Household was an Oxford-educated former banker and banana merchant and an occasional writer of children’s books. In the autumn of 1939, just after
Rogue Male
had been published, he was thirty-eight years old, with no military experience and a less than impressive curriculum vitae. Nonetheless, he was recruited to work for British military intelligence and later for SOE. As he recalled in his memoirs, the “sudden conjuring of Captain Household” was startling.
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As Household later conceded, his urge to join the British intelligence service had originated, at least in part, in a desire to “have a crack at Hitler.”
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After all, his feelings toward Nazi Germany, he admitted, had all the “savagery of a personal vendetta.”
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Yet,
though his rise was swift, it would be wrong to conclude that he was immediately set to work on a real-life assassination plot. Indeed, so far as is known, he spent most of his intelligence career in the Middle Eastern section, serving in Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. British intelligence, for its part, recruited widely and eclectically and included many agents whose talents were less than immediately apparent. Thus it may be that Household’s other skills were what attracted their attention. But it would also be absurd to suggest that the idea of assassinating Hitler had not been discussed. Perhaps one might conclude that the bold premise of Household’s novel did not harm his application.

In due course, the first tentative plan for Hitler’s assassination was formulated. As the diaries of the remarkable ornithologist-
cum
–intelligence officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, record, it originated in the spring of 1940 with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a prominent and militant Zionist who was active in London at the time, trying to establish a Jewish army to combat Nazism alongside the Allies. Jabotinsky’s plan was as simple as it was utterly impracticable. As a first step, he proposed the assassination of any prominent Nazi, who, it was thought, would then be the subject of a lavish funeral ceremony in Munich. At this point, British agents were somehow to switch the body for a little over 85 kilograms of high explosives, which could then be detonated during the requiem, thereby killing numerous senior Nazis.
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Unsurprisingly, the proposal was turned down flat. Speculative in the extreme, it contained no details of how the initial target was to be assassinated, how the body was to be switched, or how the charges were to be detonated. Its primary failing was much more fundamental, however. The British, who were wrestling at the time with the ethics of assassination per se, were not yet prepared to contemplate indiscriminate slaughter, even if it was feasible in operational terms.

Ironically, the source for that story, Richard Meinertzhagen, had himself already been much better placed to carry out an assassination. As a senior member of the Anglo-German Association, he was occasionally summoned to meet Hitler in Berlin. The first such occasion gave rise to a memorable anecdote. On meeting Meinertzhagen, the Führer gave his trademark “German
greeting,” extending his right arm and shouting, “Heil Hitler.” Meinertzhagen, thinking it strange that Hitler should salute himself, responded in kind, raising his own arm and proclaiming, “Heil Meinertzhagen.” The remark was met with consternation and an uncomfortable silence.
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By the time of his last meeting with Hitler in June 1939, however, all traces of levity had long since vanished. Meinertzhagen, who had been an early enthusiast for Hitler, now referred to the Führer as a “rabid dog.” Summoned to the Chancellery, he took the precaution of putting a loaded pistol in his pocket, as he recalled, to prove that he had “the opportunity to kill the man.” After sitting through a forty-minute harangue from Hitler, with Ribbentrop interpreting, he made his excuses and left. He had not been searched and the pistol had not been detected. As he later confided to his diary:

I had ample opportunity to kill both Hitler and Ribbentrop and am seriously troubled about it. If this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two.
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The fact that he had proved to himself that he had the opportunity appears to have been scant consolation for having failed to take it.

When the British finally got around to thinking seriously about targeting Hitler, the primary role was initially taken by the RAF rather than SOE. In early July 1940, barely two weeks after the French capitulation, Sholto Douglas, the deputy chief of the Air Staff, suggested a “special action” to coincide with the expected German victory parade in Paris, though adding that he considered it a “rather futile gesture” to bomb the parade itself. Three days later, however, Donald Stevenson, director of home operations in the Air Ministry, had already run with the idea, proposing what had been unthinkable only a year before. He wrote:

We could try to kill the Führer. Doubtless the saluting base will be close to the Arche de Triomphe
[sic]
and no-one can say what effect a few salvos of 40lb and 250lb bombs would be on an occasion of this kind…from our experience, provided we have good cloud cover, it is a practicable operation.
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Discussions continued for the next week or so, with all the military and strategic considerations of such a raid being aired, as well as the possible effects on French morale. However, the suggestion was finally dropped. As Stevenson himself admitted, the bombing of a military parade was considered inappropriate. Yet, curiously, the ethics of attempting to murder Hitler were not called into question.

Unbeknownst to the British, Hitler already had secretly visited Paris in the early morning of 28 June. Accompanied by his two court architects, Albert Speer and Hermann Giessler, and the sculptor Arno Breker, he led a three-hour whistle-stop tour of the Parisian sights, traveling in a convoy of three Mercedes. As he marveled at the Opéra, strolled by the Eiffel Tower, and mused at Napoleon’s tomb, his motives were clearly artistic rather than political. There were no bodyguards, no security cordons, and no
Leibstandarte.
Parisian early risers reacted to him either with disdain or abject terror, but he remained unmolested. When the matter of the victory parade was raised, he declared that he had decided against it. He feared that the event might become the target of a British air raid.
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In time, and in comparison to some other schemes suggested, Stevenson’s proposal would appear as a beacon of sanity, however. The following spring, word reached London that Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur, had become disillusioned with the war and was willing to defect and fly the Führer to Britain. The report came from the unlikely source of the British air attaché in Sofia, who had been approached by a Bulgarian named Kiroff, claiming to be Baur’s father-in-law. When the tale reached Arthur Harris, the new deputy chief of the Air Staff, it was rightly judged to be a “fantastic story.”

Despite the story’s patent implausibility, instructions were nonetheless passed back to the source, just in case it was to turn
out not to be “too fantastic for words.” The intermediary was instructed that Baur was to approach the RAF’s Lympne base on the Kent coast in a steep descent, firing red flares at thirty-second intervals. Upon landing, he was to taxi to a secure section of the airfield and stop his engines. His cargo was to be kept strictly confidential and would be described simply as a German “deserter.”
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