Killing Hitler (34 page)

For an SOE sniper, therefore, Hitler’s daily walks provided a clear opportunity, where his target was comparatively isolated, beyond the range of much of his security apparatus, and, crucially, out in the open. Given the likelihood that he would get only one shot, the sniper was to be supplied with explosive bullets. If he should fail, a second assassin might then attempt to ambush Hitler’s car on the return journey from the teahouse, using a PIAT anti-tank weapon.
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For all its pastoral innocence, the daily visit to the teahouse was perhaps the moment of Hitler’s greatest vulnerability.

While its plans for Operation Foxley were being assessed and evaluated, Section X was warming to its task and turned its attention to other possible targets for its would-be assassins. In time, Himmler, Goebbels, Göring, and Bormann were all included on a list of “Little Foxleys” and were subjected to the same minute investigation. Of Goebbels, for example, it was ascertained (among many other details) that he took a morning nap at 10:30, carried a hip flask of brandy, and apparently owned a property in
Majorca.
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He was, the report concluded, an “excellent candidate” for an assassination.
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Most notably, however, the bizarre suggestion was made that Rudolf Hess might be persuaded (or even hypnotized) to return to Germany and play the role of an assassin.
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The Operation Foxley file is a remarkable collection of documents. It represents probably the best information then available about Hitler’s movements, his habits, and his security arrangements. But one should not pretend that it was the finished article. It was certainly not a blueprint for an assassination. For example, it lacked contingency plans for the infiltration and exfiltration of the assassins. It even lacked assassins. Though a Captain Edmund Bennett was briefly considered for the job, described coyly as “a high-priority assassination task which would require his lying low in Germany,”
¹⁰⁰
it does not appear that SOE was especially energetic in recruiting an agent.
¹⁰¹

Foxley was still very much a planning document, a feasibility study, drawn up from behind a desk in London’s Baker Street. The enormous gulf between planning and operation had yet to be bridged. True, much of that additional research and logistical work would have been carried out if Foxley had been placed into the operational phase. At that point, a sniper would have been recruited, supplementary training given, exfiltration arranged, and a provisional date for the action fixed. But, it must be stressed, none of that vital detail is included in the Operation Foxley file.

Foxley’s primary shortcoming, however, was up-to-the-minute intelligence. It presented information on security at the Berghof that had been accurate, at the very latest, in the spring or early summer of 1944. Yet the Stauffenberg attack of 20 July 1944 (see
Chapter 7
) had brought about a fundamental rethink on security, and new procedures had been put into place. More seriously, Foxley concentrated its attention on sending a sniper to Berchtesgaden to assassinate Hitler at the Berghof, but in fact, Hitler left his residence there on 14 July 1944 and never returned. Even had an assassin succeeded in getting to his target area that autumn, he would have been left kicking his heels.

Whatever the relative merits or demerits of Operation Foxley, the fundamental issue of the advisability of assassinating Hitler had still not been resolved. While the report was being compiled, SOE, SIS, and the military were locked in an often heated debate about whether such a mission should be undertaken at all. Some, such as SOE’s air advisor, Air Vice Marshal Ritchie, suggested that Hitler was the linchpin of the entire edifice of Nazism. “Remove Hitler,” Ritchie wrote, “and there is nothing left.”
¹⁰²

Others highlighted the dangers of making a martyr of the German leader. The head of Section X, Lieutenant Colonel Thornley, who was a persistent critic of Foxley, warned that the removal of Hitler “would almost inevitably canonise him and give birth to the myth that Germany would have been saved if he had lived.”
¹⁰³
Some of his staff concurred, adding that Hitler “should be permitted to live—until he dies of senile decay before the eyes of the people he has misled. Rob him of his halo! Make him a laughingstock!”
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Perhaps the most cogent argument, meanwhile, came from the chiefs of staff, who suggested that “from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made.”
¹⁰⁵
Thornley agreed most emphatically, noting:

As a strategist, Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort….his value to us has been equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany…. [He] is still in a position to override completely the soundest of military appreciation and thereby help the Allied cause enormously.
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As he conceded, in November 1944 there was “a grave divergence of views” with regard to the “desirability and feasibility” of the proposed mission.
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Needless to say, unless and until these wrangles could be satisfactorily resolved, Operation Foxley would never get the green light.

In the event, the whole issue was overtaken by the course of the war. In the winter of 1944, Germany was plainly heading for defeat. The Red Army was on the Vistula, and the British and Americans were on the Rhine. France had been liberated and fascist Italy had collapsed. With every Allied success on the battlefield, Foxley grew less and less urgent, less and less necessary. It was finally shelved indefinitely and consigned to the archives.

The furor surrounding Operation Foxley neatly encapsulated the prevailing British attitudes toward assassination as a weapon of war. Despite the numerous successes of SOE in the field, many senior military personnel had remained deeply skeptical of its unorthodox methods. And though they might have countenanced the liquidation of figures of lower status, they found it hard to agree to the murder of their enemy’s head of state and commander in chief. This is not to suggest that the objections raised to Operation Foxley were in any way spurious or disingenuous. They were not. Rather, it is to recognize that elements of the British military and political élite were still not comfortable with covert operations of this magnitude. Killing Hitler was still, for some, beyond the pale. As Churchill himself had privately admitted: “That would be like anarchy.”
¹⁰⁸

Indeed, Churchill’s attitude toward resistance in general had cooled considerably once the Allied bridgeheads in Normandy had been established.
¹⁰⁹
With that, it appeared, he considered the task of SOE and the native resistance movements to have drawn to a close. They had kept the flame of liberty alive and had prepared the way for the arrival of the professional soldiers. In a speech to the House of Commons, he even seemed to pour cold water on Operation Foxley itself. Referring to the failed German plot to kill Hitler in July 1944, he stated: “Decisive as [such attempts] may be one of these days, it is not in them that we should put our trust, but in our own strong arms and in the justice of our cause.”
¹¹⁰

While the British debates over Foxley raged, the Americans
were belatedly beginning to target Hitler themselves. The previous summer, a young German émigré, Egon Hanfstaengl, an American Secret Service officer and the son of Hitler’s former foreign press chief, had volunteered to attempt to assassinate Hitler. As Hitler’s godson, Hanfstaengl had met the Führer many times as a youth, and proposed to talk his way into the residence at Berchtesgaden on the premise of acting as a messenger for his exiled father. He was naively convinced that if he could get close enough to Hitler to shake his hand, then he could kill him.
¹¹¹
Given the plan’s somewhat unrealistic nature, it was rejected by Roosevelt, who apparently preferred to avoid attempting to assassinate a fellow head of state.

The following year, however, the issue was raised once again and in rather bizarre circumstances. A group of American Secret Service (OSS) research operatives known as the “Choirboys” devised a plan that they thought would tip Hitler into insanity and bring the war to a swift end. Mindful of their target’s legendary puritanism, they planned to expose him to a flood of pornography, which could be dropped from the air around Hitler’s headquarters near Berchtesgaden. After assembling an enormous collection of suitable material, they called in an Air Force colonel to discuss the number and type of aircraft that would be required for the raid. However, the colonel was less than impressed, denouncing the Choirboys as maniacs and describing the plan as insane. With that, the operation was quietly dropped.
¹¹²

Nonetheless, in June 1944, the prospect of targeting Hitler was raised a third time. General Carl Spaatz, commander of U.S. strategic air forces in Europe, requested a detailed photo reconnaissance of Hitler’s residence at Berchtesgaden for an operation he dubbed “Hellhound.”
¹¹³
His intention had been the launching of an air raid on the area using P-38 fighter-bombers of the 15th Air Force in Italy. But, like the British, he soon became mired in a discussion of the plan’s merits and opted to cancel the operation. Four months later, the U.S. Mediterranean Tactical Air Force managed to overcome such concerns. On 4 November, four P-47s of the 27th Fighter Group bombed a Milan hotel
where it was believed Hitler was staying.
¹¹⁴
Though a number of direct hits were scored, Hitler was staying at Wolfschanze in East Prussia at the time.

Not to be outdone, the RAF finally decided to raid Berchtes-gaden. On the night of 25 April 1945, in one of the last aerial operations of the war, 359 Lancasters and 16 Mosquitoes targeted the complex of buildings that constituted Hitler’s home. Two Lancasters were lost and four men from one crew were killed, but the target suffered substantial damage. As the Interpretation Report noted:

A. Hitler’s residence:

A direct hit has destroyed the central part of the north side of the west wing. The east side of the main building has suffered slight damage from a glancing hit. Some outbuildings on the west side of the house have been destroyed and the side of the house is seriously damaged.
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As was probably surmised at the time, “A. Hitler” was in Berlin. And even if he had been present, he would doubtless have found refuge in the huge network of bunkers and tunnels that had been constructed at the site during the previous two years.
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So one has to wonder what military rationale would induce the RAF to target a few buildings in a remote area of southeast Germany with a force of 375 aircraft—a force comparable to the one that had devastated the city of Kiel ten days previously. Perhaps the RAF was genuinely attempting to kill the Führer. If that was the case, the archive file on the attack neglects to mention it as a priority. Perhaps it was attempting to disrupt the preparations for the putative “Alpine Redoubt,” where the much-vaunted last stand of Nazism was supposed to take place. Rather, it may just be that the enormous raid on Berchtesgaden was merely the result of a fit of pique. It was, perhaps, a demonstration of what might have been done earlier had circumstances and tactical considerations—and scruples—allowed.

CHAPTER 7
Honor Redeemed: The German Military

The assassination must be attempted at all costs…. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.

—HENNING VON TRESCKOW
¹

AT DAWN ON
5
OCTOBER
1942,
A CONVOY OF TRUCKS RATTLED
into the small eastern European town of Dubno. Inside were units of the local Ukrainian militia, a ragtag collection of extreme nationalists, anti-Semites, and petty criminals, who served as the enthusiastic auxiliaries of the SS. Their targets that morning were the remaining inhabitants of the Dubno ghetto.

Dubno itself was situated on the margins where Poland and the Russian Empire had once overlapped. Before 1939, it had spent a generation in the Polish Republic, but with Poland’s demise that autumn the town had been annexed by the USSR and had found itself in “Western Ukraine.” It was a quiet, unassuming place, nestling among gently rolling hills on the banks of the Ikva River. At its heart, along the narrow dusty streets, stood a large late-medieval palace—once the residence of the influential Ostrogski family—and an impressive Catholic church.

Of Dubno’s fifteen thousand inhabitants, around half were Jewish, and the remainder was shared between the Polish and Ukrainian communities. They lived mainly as shopkeepers and merchants, with a few working in the new industrial concerns, a plow factory and a meat processing plant located just out of town.

The town’s Jewish tradition was especially rich, stretching back to the Middle Ages and including a remarkable eighteenth-century scholar and preacher, Jacob Kranz (known as the Dubno Maggid), whose parables had become an integral part of Jewish religious and literary life. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Dubno’s Jewish community could boast its own elementary schools, a hospital, and a good-sized synagogue.