Killing Hitler (4 page)

Of course, Hitler’s political activities inevitably exposed him to some considerable danger. As head of the most violent and aggressive movement in German political life, he naturally aroused the personal enmity of his opponents. But in campaigning, whether speaking before hostile audiences or merely traveling to political events, he was regularly obliged to confront his detractors. He was ambushed a number of times. Once, a train he was traveling on was attacked. Communists also took potshots at his car. On another occasion, in 1920, he escaped detection by a menacing mob only by posing as the batman of one of his entourage.
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Only his (then) relative anonymity saved his skin.

Yet, beyond what one might call necessary exposure to danger, Hitler also regularly and willfully undermined the efforts of
his protectors. For one thing, he could be astonishingly reckless. Once, in the Black Forest city of Freiburg, when his car was pelted with stones, he jumped down from the vehicle waving his whip, forcing his astonished attackers to scatter.
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On another occasion, Albert Speer described how Hitler’s motorcade drove through hostile crowds in Berlin:

The temper of the crowd grew ugly. When Hitler with his entourage arrived a few minutes later, the demonstrators overflowed into the street. Hitler’s car had to force its way through at a snail’s pace. Hitler stood erect beside the driver. At that time I felt respect for his courage, and still do.
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Years later, Hitler would explain his actions. If an idealist assassin wanted to shoot him or blow him up, he opined, it would make little difference if he was sitting or standing.
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“In the heroic days,” he said, “I shrank from nothing.”
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Hitler was also utterly and deliberately unpredictable. Speer called him “royally unreliable.”
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His routine, insofar as it is worthy of the name, consisted of rising late and “working” long into the night, usually ranting to his minions. He was incapable of any systematic work, preferring to indulge his own whims or to submit to indolence.
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In addition, he would often disappear to spend the weekend with associates in Berlin or Munich, but would accept little in the way of forward planning. Though this pattern served as an effective hindrance to any potential assassin, it also did little to facilitate the work of his bodyguards.

Indeed, for all his attention to security details, Hitler was fundamentally unconvinced that his bodyguards would actually serve any practical purpose. His belief in “fate” and “destiny” caused him to ascribe his continued survival “not to the police, but to pure chance.”
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Thus, though he paid painstaking attention to the details of his security regime, it is tempting to think that, in this case at least, he really was just playing at soldiers—reveling in his own supernatural importance, yet knowing in his heart that all such efforts would ultimately prove futile.

On one level, Hitler’s apparent nonchalance would appear to have been justified. In the early months of 1933, numerous accounts were received in Berlin of the wildest plots and conspiracies to kill the new chancellor. They arrived from all parts: Switzerland, Holland, Morocco, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and the United States.
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Some overheard Jews plotting in Basle, others had wind of anarchists conspiring in Barcelona, still others heard of communists scheming in the Saarland. Most of the reports were flimsy, based on hearsay or a flippant comment such as “someone should bump that Hitler off.” But some defied credibility entirely. One informant from Augsburg, for example, wrote to inform Hitler of the possibility that the Chancellery building itself might be undermined and that “subversives” might plant explosives there. Though the correspondent confessed to having no knowledge of such a plot, he exhorted his Führer to guard his “precious life” most carefully.
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As a result of such enthusiastic and imaginative informants, the Berlin police were alerted almost every week that a new plot was afoot. Most of the threats were investigated, but of the hundreds received, only about ten were considered to warrant serious attention, and even these amounted to very little.
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One might have assumed that the greatest threat to the life of the new chancellor came from the left. Certainly, Germany’s socialists and communists were well aware that the new regime was likely to declare open season on them, and some were perhaps minded to prepare a preemptive strike. However, the German left was almost congenitally unable to rouse itself to target Hitler. The socialists were wedded to the democratic process and found such extreme measures hard to stomach, while the communists were being exhorted by their masters in Moscow to direct their efforts against the socialists. Beyond sheer myopia, much of their common problem was ideological. Marxist theory viewed fascism as the last gasp of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the bloody prelude to an inevitable socialist utopia. History, it was thought, was driven by grand social and economic forces, not by individuals. So, to many on the left, the elimination of Hitler made little sense.

Nonetheless, a brave few were willing to give history a helping
hand. One was Beppo Römer, a communist and former
Freikorps
leader, who gained access to the Chancellery in the spring of 1933 but was discovered by the SS. He would spend the next six years in Dachau and would cease conspiring against Hitler only when he was executed, in 1942. Another was Kurt Lutter, a communist shipwright from Königsberg, who plotted a bomb attack on Hitler in the spring of 1933. Arrested and interrogated, Lutter was released without charge due to a lack of evidence. Later, in 1935, an ambitious communist conspiracy was uncovered in Vienna, which planned to assassinate Hitler as well as the minister of war, General Blomberg, along with Göring, Goebbels, and Hess.
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Interestingly, the conspirators intended to give the impression that their plot had been hatched by the SA.

In contrast to the largely latent threat from the left, that emanating from the disgruntled on the right appeared to be more serious. First, there were many within the SA who still viewed Hitler as a traitor to their principles. Some of the more prominent among them could be bought off after January 1933, but much of the rank and file was barely reconciled to the new constellation of power or to the apparent success of “their” Führer. Indeed, in 1933, a would-be assassin in SA uniform was arrested carrying a loaded weapon into Hitler’s residence at Berchtesgaden.
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The SA crisis culminated in the Röhm Purge in the summer of 1934. Yet, even while the SA was being purged, and its supposed threat to the “peace of the nation” was being widely touted by Hitler, it momentarily found an opportunity to avenge itself. As Hitler and his SS entourage were preparing to leave the Bavarian guesthouse where many of the SA leadership had been arrested, an SA bodyguard detachment arrived. Clearly confused and increasingly aggressive, they were ordered to return to barracks in Munich. However, they drove only a short distance before setting up a roadblock, with machine guns on either side of the road, to wait for Hitler. The Führer, meanwhile, had thought it wise to depart the area by another route.
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Another source of opposition to Hitler was the so-called Black Front, headed by the former Nazi Otto Strasser. Always on the fringe of the Nazi Party because of his eclectic ideology—a
curious amalgam of extreme nationalism, anti-capitalism, socialism, and anarchism—Strasser was forced out of the party in the summer of 1930. He conceived the Black Front as an umbrella organization for all those on the right who were disaffected with Hitler, and by the time of the movement’s prohibition in January 1933, it had attracted some five thousand members. Thereafter, based in Vienna and then Prague, Strasser fought a propaganda campaign against Hitler and maintained a small underground network within Germany itself.

His most audacious move came in 1936, when he planned to assassinate Hitler. His chosen assassin was a Jewish student from Stuttgart, Helmut Hirsch, who was studying architecture in Prague and was persuaded to carry out a “heroic act” to inspire the Jews of Germany. Hirsch was to take a suitcase bomb to the Nazi Party headquarters in Nuremberg but was arrested on crossing the German frontier in December 1936, and executed the following spring. Two theories might explain his failure: either the Gestapo had an informant within the Black Front, or else the Black Front had cynically betrayed Hirsch itself, so as to benefit from the attendant publicity.

Yet Hirsch was symbolic of another growing source of resistance to Hitler. Organized Jewish opposition to Nazism only really sparked into life with the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943. Until that point, the growing persecution of Jews within Germany and elsewhere was met with an almost stereotypically phlegmatic response. Some individuals, however, were goaded into action. Hirsch, for example, had been frustrated by his family’s vain efforts to secure American citizenship.

He may also have been spurred by the actions of a young Yugoslav Jew, David Frankfurter, who in February 1936 had successfully carried out a near-perfect assassination. Frankfurter was a failed medical student who had fled to Switzerland after briefly attending Frankfurt University. In exile, he read reports of the concentration camps and anti-Jewish propaganda and was spurred to act.
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He had initially wanted to target Hitler but had settled on the German-born Swiss Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff. Frankfurter did his homework. He studied Gustloff’s routine,
memorized his movements, and carried his photograph to aid identification. He also bought himself a revolver and practiced on a shooting range in Berne. On 3 February, he purchased a oneway ticket to Davos, where he rented a room. The following day, he went to Gustloff’s house, calmly rang the doorbell, and asked to see his target. He was ushered into a study, seated beneath a picture of Adolf Hitler, and asked to wait. When Gustloff entered the room, Frankfurter shot him five times in the chest and head before fleeing the scene and telephoning the police. He surrendered himself with the words “I fired the shots because I am a Jew. I am fully aware of what I have done and have no regrets.”
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Like Hirsch, Frankfurter was seeking to spur his tormented people to resistance against the Nazis. Like Hirsch, he failed in this wider aim. While organized Jewish resistance was still absent, however, Hirsch and Frankfurter demonstrated that individuals could be provoked into action by their repeated humiliations and privations. And in such circumstances, they required few means beyond the humble accoutrements of the lone assassin. Their example would be followed once again, with horrific results, in 1938. That November, the secretary of the German legation in Paris was murdered by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been expelled from the Reich. Grynszpan was caught and subsequently killed by the Nazis.
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But his crime would provide the cue for the murderous pogrom of
Kristallnacht.
Jewish resistance appeared to have scored a spectacular own goal, but it had at least demonstrated what was possible.

Following Hitler’s accession to power in January 1933, and in view of the increased threat that the new chancellor was considered to be under, yet another revision of his personal security was carried out. For the first time, the Führer’s protection could command state funding, and those surrounding Hitler wasted little time in exploiting the new situation for their own ends, creating power bases and seeking to exert influence. The foremost among them was Heinrich Himmler.

In March 1933, soon after the Nazi “seizure of power,” Himmler established a new security body to operate in parallel to those already existing. He envisaged the new unit—christened the
Führerschutzkommando
(Führer Protection Group)—as a small group of “tried and trusted National Socialists, and […] excellent criminal-police officers” that would guarantee Hitler’s “unconditional safety,” exercise conscientiousness, and show exemplary manners.
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This move would naturally serve to expand Himmler’s growing influence and bring him closer to the epicenter of power. But it was also seriously flawed. First, officially at least, Himmler’s own writ, and by extension that of his pet organizations, did not yet carry Germany-wide. His Führer Protection Group, therefore, could initially protect the Führer only in Bavaria. Moreover, the unit was made up almost exclusively of Bavarian policemen, the very officers who had put down Hitler’s abortive putsch a decade before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hitler initially refused to be guarded by anyone other than the trusted
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
(Adolf Hitler Bodyguard), which had been established by Sepp Dietrich a few months before.
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The
Leibstandarte
had, in turn, been developed in parallel to Dietrich’s previous bodyguard unit, the
SS-Begleit-Kommando “Der Führer,”
which had been set up the previous year. It was to serve as a model SS unit and would absorb all previous security organs. Initially numbering only 120 individuals, it was composed solely of the German “élite”: those with proven Aryan ancestry, Nordic in appearance, possessing no criminal record, and having a minimum height of 1.80 meters (5 feet 11 inches). (One is tempted here to recall the contemporary Polish line: “as tall as Hitler, lean as Göring, blond as Himmler, and athletic as Goebbels.”) The first detachment of the
Leibstandarte
to assume its post was a detail of twelve men assigned to guard the Reich Chancellery in April 1933. A second unit was sent to Berchtesgaden that July. By November, the entire
Leibstandarte
, now over eight hundred strong, swore an oath of allegiance to Hitler before the memorial to the fallen of the Beer Hall Putsch. Their oath was a personal one, which made no mention of the
constitution, or even of the German people: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you and to my superiors appointed by you obedience unto death. So help me God.” One witness recalled the scene with no little emotion: