Chapter 4
The Conspirators Within: Military Intelligence Against Hitler
While lone wolves like Bavaud and Elser acted from personal conviction, another resistance center emerged from an unlikely source-the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, this organization became what one historian called "a nest of vipers in the bosom of the Reich."
The Abwehr conspiracy represented a profound irony-the very agency charged with protecting Germany became a hotbed of resistance. Canaris, a decorated naval officer from World War I, initially supported Hitler but grew disillusioned as Nazi brutality escalated. By 1938, he had assembled a remarkable group of conspirators including his deputy Hans Oster, lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi, and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Unlike ideological opponents, these men were conservative patriots who initially supported German rearmament and territorial expansion. What turned them against Hitler was witnessing the regime's lawlessness, particularly during the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. Canaris reportedly remarked after touring a concentration camp, "Against this lunacy, something must be done."
Their first serious plot emerged during the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis. Convinced Hitler was leading Germany into a catastrophic war, they planned a coup if he ordered an attack. Oster leaked German invasion plans to British intelligence while establishing contacts with German generals willing to arrest Hitler. When British Prime Minister Chamberlain defused the crisis by capitulating at Munich, the plot collapsed-leaving the conspirators devastated not by Hitler's victory but by the West's failure to stand firm.
"The Western powers have left us in the lurch," lamented Oster. "They have handed us over to the criminals."
Undeterred, the Abwehr plotters developed a new plan for November 1939, after war had begun. Code-named "X-Report," it involved smuggling a bomb into Hitler's private study in the Reich Chancellery through an unwitting officer. When this officer lost his nerve, the conspirators considered alternatives including poisoning Hitler's drinking water with bacteria obtained from Abwehr laboratories.
Their most promising attempt came in March 1943 when Hitler visited an exhibition of captured Soviet weapons. Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff volunteered to serve as a suicide bomber, carrying explosives in his overcoat pockets with acid-based detonators set for a ten-minute delay. As he prepared to stay close to Hitler throughout the exhibition tour, Gersdorff activated his bombs-only to watch in horror as Hitler rushed through the exhibition in just two minutes. Gersdorff barely managed to reach a bathroom where he desperately disarmed his explosives.
The Abwehr conspiracy ultimately failed not from lack of courage but from structural challenges. As intelligence professionals, they excelled at gathering information and making contacts but struggled with direct action. Their conservative values made them hesitant revolutionaries-they wanted Hitler removed but feared the chaos that might follow. Most critically, they faced a fundamental contradiction: the very oath of loyalty that motivated their resistance (protecting Germany from Hitler's destructive leadership) also inhibited their willingness to act decisively against their commander-in-chief.
By 1943, the SS had grown suspicious of the Abwehr. After several failed operations, Hitler disbanded the organization in February 1944, absorbing it into the Reich Security Head Office. Canaris was placed under house arrest, and following the July 1944 plot against Hitler, both he and Oster were imprisoned. The discovery of Canaris's diaries documenting conspiracy plans sealed their fate. On April 9, 1945-the same day Georg Elser was executed-Canaris and Oster were stripped and hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp.
Canaris's final message, tapped to a neighboring prisoner, revealed his fundamental patriotism: "Nose broken... Time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German."
Chapter 5
The Polish Underground's Deadly Game
While German conspirators struggled with conflicting loyalties, Poland's resistance faced no such moral ambiguity. Following their country's brutal partition between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, Polish resistance fighters developed Europe's largest and most effective underground movement-the Armia Krajowa (Home Army or AK).
Unlike other resistance movements primarily focused on gathering intelligence or sabotage, the Polish underground explicitly targeted the Nazi leadership for assassination. Their "Operation Heads" program systematically eliminated Nazi officials, most famously SS-Brigadefuhrer Franz Kutschera, the "Butcher of Warsaw," killed in a daring daylight ambush in February 1944.
Hitler himself became a prime target after his triumphant tour through conquered Warsaw in October 1939, when he remarked that the city "ought to be completely destroyed." Polish intelligence developed extensive information on Hitler's movements, security arrangements, and habits through a sophisticated network that included Polish workers at his headquarters and even Warsaw socialite Slawa Mirowska, who visited Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair) while accompanying her lover, Waffen-SS General Wilhelm Bittrich.
Hitler's eastern headquarters, Wolfschanze, presented formidable challenges for would-be assassins. Located in dense East Prussian forest, it sprawled across 250 hectares with three security zones, minefields, and multiple bunkers with walls up to 12 meters thick. Albert Speer described Hitler's bunker as resembling "an ancient Egyptian tomb"-a windowless concrete block with walls sixteen feet thick that "separated him from the outside world in a figurative as well as a literal sense, and locked him up inside his delusions."
Unable to penetrate this fortress, the Polish underground focused on targeting Hitler during his rail journeys between Berlin and the Eastern Front. The Polish resistance excelled at train derailment, having formed specialized units that carried out over seven hundred such operations. However, Hitler's personal train, code-named "Amerika," presented unique challenges-it traveled with an extra locomotive, communications carriage, and two anti-aircraft cars, while being constructed of high-grade welded steel panels robust enough to withstand most attacks.
On June 8, 1942, as Hitler left Rastenburg for Berlin to attend Reinhard Heydrich's funeral, news of his travel arrangements apparently reached local AK commander Captain Stanislaw Lesikowski (code-named "Forest"). He devised an operation code-named "Wiener Blut" (Viennese Blood) and assigned it to Lieutenant Jan Szalewski ("Sable") of the Pomeranian Griffin resistance group.
According to Polish accounts, Sable's team-dressed in stolen Waffen-SS uniforms-allowed a dummy locomotive to pass before dismantling the track. When the train derailed down an embankment, they machine-gunned survivors before being forced to retreat. However, Hitler wasn't aboard, having apparently broken his journey at Marienburg to meet with Danzig Gauleiter Albert Forster.
German sources tell a different story, confirming a derailment but describing it as an attack on a scheduled passenger service costing three lives, not an assassination attempt. The discrepancies highlight the fog of war surrounding resistance operations and the challenges of historical verification.
What's undeniable is the extraordinary courage of Polish resistance fighters who operated under conditions of unparalleled brutality. Nazi occupation policy in Poland was explicitly genocidal-Hans Frank, the German Governor-General, declared: "The Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German World Empire." Despite facing summary executions, concentration camps, and collective punishment, the Polish underground maintained the largest resistance network in occupied Europe, providing crucial intelligence to the Allies while continuing to target Nazi leadership.
The Polish underground's fate after the war proved equally grim. The Soviet occupation proved just as hostile to resistance fighters as the Nazis had been. Sable was arrested by communist secret police in 1946 and again in 1950, sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment, and subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown. Like many resistance heroes, he was written out of official history by Poland's new communist rulers.
Chapter 6
Stalin's Assassins: The Soviet Union's Secret War
While Polish resistance fighters operated from desperate necessity, the Soviet Union developed assassination as a refined instrument of state policy. Under Stalin's direction, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) created specialized departments dedicated to "wet affairs"-assassinations and kidnappings of enemies abroad.
Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the NKVD's Administration for Special Tasks, later revealed that Stalin personally approved all assassination operations, often reviewing multiple plans before selecting the most promising. "Stalin's interest in assassinations was not casual or occasional," Sudoplatov wrote. "He was a connoisseur who delighted in discussing the technical aspects."
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin immediately authorized assassination attempts against Hitler. The NKVD selected an unlikely candidate-composer Lev Knipper, nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov. Despite his public career creating patriotic works like "Polyushko Pole," Knipper secretly worked for Soviet intelligence. In autumn 1941, he was recalled to Moscow and tasked with leading a "battle group" to assassinate Hitler during his expected victory visit to Moscow.
This plan seemed reasonable-Hitler had held victory parades in Warsaw and Paris after their captures. However, Hitler never intended to visit Moscow, instead planning to "turn the city into an enormous artificial lake" or make it "disappear from the earth's surface."
When Moscow didn't fall, Knipper received a new mission. He would pose as a defector, travel to Berlin using his Aryan looks and fluent German, and target Hitler there. His contact would be his sister Olga Chekhova, a successful actress in Nazi Germany who had appeared in over a hundred films and moved in elite Nazi circles. Unknown to Hitler, Chekhova had been an NKVD "sleeper" since 1923.
The NKVD naively believed Chekhova could introduce the assassins to Hitler, though she hadn't seen him since 1940. By 1943, Hitler rarely appeared in public, spending most time with generals at secure locations. In summer 1943, Stalin suddenly canceled the entire operation, recognizing that with Germany retreating after Stalingrad, Hitler's assassination might be counterproductive-potentially revitalizing German military efforts or enabling a separate peace with Western Allies.
Stalin's decision made tactical sense. With Germany's defeat becoming likely, his priority shifted to preventing Germany from making peace with Britain and America. Ironically, Stalin now had a vested interest in Hitler's survival.
Other Soviet assassination plans included Operation Zeppelin, where trained German communist POWs would be parachuted into Germany to kill Hitler, and a plot to poison Hitler's food using agents in the Reich Chancellery kitchen. None progressed beyond planning stages.
The Soviet Union's most successful assassination operation targeted not Hitler but Reinhard Heydrich, the "Butcher of Prague." Though commonly attributed to British-trained Czech agents, recent evidence suggests significant Soviet involvement in the operation that killed the SS-Obergruppenfuhrer in May 1942.
Stalin's assassination efforts reflected his pragmatic approach to warfare-using any means necessary while remaining coldly calculating about strategic outcomes. Unlike the Polish resistance fighting for national survival or German officers struggling with conscience, Soviet operations were clinical exercises in state power, deployed or withdrawn based on geopolitical calculation rather than moral imperatives.
Chapter 7
The Reluctant Assassins: Britain's Ethical Dilemma
While Stalin approached assassination with ruthless pragmatism, Britain's leadership struggled with profound ethical and practical concerns about targeting Hitler directly. This reluctance stemmed not from lack of capability-Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) conducted numerous successful assassinations during the war-but from strategic calculation and moral hesitation.
Early in the war, some British officials advocated immediate action. In September 1939, Lieutenant Colonel Noel Mason-Macfarlane, Britain's military attache in Berlin, proposed using a rifle with telescopic sights to shoot Hitler from his office window, which overlooked the Reich Chancellery garden where Hitler took daily walks. "Mac" was an Olympic-level marksman who believed he could make the 300-yard shot. His proposal reached the War Cabinet but was rejected-Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax reportedly remarking, "It simply isn't cricket."
As the war progressed, British military leaders increasingly recognized Hitler's strategic incompetence as an asset to the Allied cause. Lieutenant Colonel Thornley noted that Hitler's value "has been equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany" by consistently overriding sound military judgment.
Nevertheless, by 1944, SOE had developed detailed plans for Hitler's assassination under the codename Operation Foxley. The operation considered multiple approaches-sniping Hitler during his morning walk at Berghof, poisoning his food or water supply, even recruiting a German officer to shoot him. The most developed plan involved a sniper team of two Polish soldiers and a British officer who would infiltrate the woods near Hitler's Berchtesgaden residence.
SOE assembled extraordinary intelligence for the operation, including Hitler's daily routine, detailed maps of his residence and surrounding area, and even samples of the Berghof's water supply for testing poison effectiveness. They identified Hitler's morning walk as his most vulnerable moment-he strolled the same path daily between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., accompanied only by his Alsatian dog and a single SS guard.
Despite this preparation, Operation Foxley remained controversial within British leadership. Some argued Hitler's death might lead to a more competent military leader taking control, while others worried about creating a martyr. SOE's own assessment concluded: "As a strategist, Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort... his removal might unite the German people."
The ethical dimension proved equally challenging. Despite the brutality of total war, many British leaders maintained that assassination crossed a moral line that distinguished them from their enemies. Churchill himself had privately admitted such an action "would be like anarchy." His enthusiasm for resistance operations had cooled considerably after the Normandy landings, suggesting in Parliament that victory would come not through assassination attempts but through "our own strong arms and in the justice of our cause."
By November 1944, there remained "a grave divergence of views" regarding the "desirability and feasibility" of Operation Foxley. The entire issue was ultimately overtaken by events as Germany faced imminent defeat, with Allied forces advancing on multiple fronts. Foxley was shelved indefinitely and consigned to the archives.
The RAF finally conducted a massive raid on Berchtesgaden on April 25, 1945, using 359 Lancasters and 16 Mosquitoes-a force comparable to one that had devastated Kiel days earlier. The raid caused substantial damage to Hitler's residence, but he was in Berlin at the time. The enormous commitment of aircraft raises questions about the operation's true purpose-whether it was a genuine assassination attempt, an effort to disrupt the rumored "Alpine Redoubt," or perhaps simply a demonstration of what might have been done earlier had tactical considerations and scruples allowed.
Chapter 8
The July Plot: Germany's Day of Reckoning
While foreign intelligence services debated the ethics and practicality of assassinating Hitler, a group of German military officers came to see his elimination as their patriotic duty. Their conspiracy culminated in the famous July 20, 1944 bomb plot-the closest anyone came to killing Hitler during the war.
The military resistance faced unique challenges beyond the practical difficulties of assassination. As conservatives, they worried deeply about what regime might follow Hitler's death. Some bizarrely thought Himmler might establish a moderate Nazi government, but most wanted to eliminate the entire Nazi leadership simultaneously-seeing little value in removing Hitler only to hand power to Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann.
Colonel Henning von Tresckow became the driving force behind this resistance cell. A decorated officer who had earned three Iron Crosses beginning in WWI, Tresckow had initially supported the Nazi regime but turned against Hitler after witnessing illegal actions and atrocities. By 1938, he was telling friends, "Hitler is a whirling dervish. He must be shot down."
The invasion of the Soviet Union further horrified him when he read directives authorizing the SS to take "executive measures vis-a-vis the civilian population." With remarkable foresight, he warned colleagues that these atrocities would haunt Germans for generations: "This will still have an effect in hundreds of years... it will not only be Hitler who is blamed, but rather you and me, your wife and my wife, your children and my children."
Tresckow assembled a network of like-minded officers at Army Group Center headquarters. His first assassination attempt in March 1943 involved smuggling a time bomb disguised as two bottles of Cointreau onto Hitler's plane. Though the bomb's detonator activated, the explosive failed due to the aircraft's freezing cargo hold temperatures.
Another conspirator, Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, volunteered for a suicide bombing during Hitler's visit to a military exhibition in March 1943. Gersdorff armed time-fused bombs in his coat pockets but was thwarted when Hitler rushed through the exhibition in just eight minutes-far less than the ten-minute fuse delay.
By 1944, the conspiracy gained its most dynamic member-Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a decorated officer who had lost an eye, his right hand, and two fingers from his left hand in Tunisia. Despite these injuries, Stauffenberg's extraordinary energy and moral conviction revitalized the conspiracy. He recognized that the same person must both assassinate Hitler and coordinate the subsequent coup in Berlin.
On July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg attended Hitler's military conference at the Wolfschanze carrying a briefcase containing a British-made plastic explosive with a time pencil detonator. He placed the briefcase under the conference table near Hitler before excusing himself to make an urgent call. The bomb detonated at 12:42 p.m., demolishing the conference room.
Remarkably, Hitler survived with only minor injuries. The heavy oak table leg had shielded him from the blast, while the conference was held in a wooden barracks rather than the usual concrete bunker due to the summer heat. Had either of these factors been different, Hitler would almost certainly have died.
Believing Hitler dead, Stauffenberg flew to Berlin to implement "Operation Valkyrie"-the coup plan disguised as a response to internal unrest. However, communication failures, hesitation among key officers, and the news of Hitler's survival doomed the conspiracy. By evening, the coup had collapsed, and the conspirators were being arrested.
Hitler's vengeance was terrible. Nearly 5,000 Germans were executed, many by slow strangulation using piano wire suspended from meat hooks. Stauffenberg was shot by firing squad in the early hours of July 21. His final words-"Long live our sacred Germany!"-revealed the patriotic motivation behind his actions.
Tresckow, learning of the plot's failure while serving on the Eastern Front, walked into no-man's land with a grenade. Before leaving, he told a colleague: "When, in a few hours, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I believe I can with a clear conscience stand by all that I have done in the fight against Hitler... Hitler is not only the archenemy of Germany but the archenemy of the world."
Chapter 9
The Architect's Betrayal: Speer's Eleventh-Hour Plot
As Germany faced inevitable defeat in early 1945, an unlikely figure contemplated assassinating Hitler-Albert Speer, Reich Minister for Armaments and Hitler's favorite architect. Unlike military conspirators motivated by moral outrage or foreign agents following orders, Speer's plot emerged from a complex mix of self-preservation, disillusionment, and belated recognition of his complicity in Nazi crimes.
Speer had enjoyed a meteoric rise under Hitler's patronage, transforming from an obscure architect to one of the Third Reich's most powerful ministers. Their relationship was uniquely personal-Hitler called him "my architect" and spent hours discussing building plans even amid military crises. This special relationship allowed Speer to approach Hitler directly when others could not.
By late 1944, Speer had become alarmed by Hitler's "scorched earth" directives ordering the destruction of German infrastructure before retreating. As the minister responsible for German industry, Speer recognized these orders would condemn the German people to post-war starvation and economic collapse. His initial response was bureaucratic resistance-delaying implementation, issuing counter-orders, and directly appealing to Hitler to rescind the directives.
When these efforts proved futile, Speer began contemplating more drastic action. In February 1945, he developed a plan to introduce poison gas into the Fuhrerbunker's air intake system. The ventilation shaft was located in the Reich Chancellery garden, guarded by SS men who knew and trusted Speer, allowing him potential access.
Speer made inquiries about obtaining the deadly nerve agent tabun from Armaments Ministry stocks. He also recruited Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, who had witnessed the horrors of Auschwitz and warned Speer never to accept invitations to visit camps. Together they discussed various assassination methods, including shooting Hitler during a bunker inspection.
Yet Speer's resolve wavered. During a final visit to Hitler in April 1945, he found himself unable to confess his disobedience regarding the scorched earth orders, let alone implement his assassination plan. Instead, he swore continued loyalty while privately continuing to countermand Hitler's destructive directives.
After the war, Speer revealed his aborted assassination plot during his Nuremberg trial-likely hoping it would mitigate his responsibility for Nazi crimes. While the tribunal sentenced most Nazi leaders to death, Speer received twenty years imprisonment, partly due to his apparent contrition and cooperation.
At Nuremberg, Speer feigned reluctance when revealing his assassination plot, claiming he was no longer concerned with self-preservation and was willing to face the death penalty. This portrayal of the penitent former Nazi minister was deeply unrealistic. In reality, Speer was still very much focused on self-preservation, charming his interrogators and highlighting how his specialist knowledge could benefit the Allies.
Though Speer exploited the assassination story at Nuremberg, he didn't fabricate it solely for that purpose. For all his faults, Speer wasn't entirely deaf to his conscience. His plotting, tentative as it was, represented a desperate eleventh-hour desire to finally do the right thing-"an impulse of despair" that was genuine enough to risk bringing in conspirators and making inquiries about poison gas.
Yet as Speer himself admitted, "from the intention to the deed, is a very long way." Beyond entertaining schoolboy fantasies about ambushes and poison gas, he never developed concrete plans-never setting dates, assigning tasks, or addressing practical details. Compared to Hitler's genuine would-be assassins, Speer was an "absolute beginner" who lacked Stauffenberg's dynamism, Elser's determination, and Tresckow's resolve. He later conceded, "I would never really have done it. I couldn't have."
Speer remained a deeply contradictory figure-cultured, educated and urbane, yet also a war criminal convicted of crimes against humanity for exploiting slave labor. The prison psychiatrist aptly described him as "a blinkered racehorse"-by 1944 his blinkers had fallen away and he clearly saw the madness around him, but his residual loyalty to Hitler had rendered him lame.
Chapter 10
The Dictator's End: When Providence Finally Failed
As dawn broke over Berlin on April 30, 1945, Hitler's Reich made its final stand in a devastated capital strewn with rubble, corpses, and war debris. Civilians faced dire conditions - summary executions for looting, men risked death from both SS and Soviets, while women desperately tried to avoid rape by disguising themselves.
German-controlled territory had shrunk to a corridor from Tiergarten to Friedrichshain, defended by a mix of elite troops, Hitler Youth, Volkssturm militia, and foreign volunteers - the last stand of Europe's extreme right.
In the Fuhrerbunker, eight meters beneath the Reich Chancellery garden, an atmosphere of desperate revelry prevailed. The Goebbels children played while staff drank champagne, discipline collapsed, and military formalities ceased.
Hitler's physical and mental decline was stark. Years of Dr. Morell's drug cocktails - methamphetamines, cocaine, strychnine, and belladonna - had left him trembling and deteriorated. Since the Stauffenberg attempt, he appeared decades older than his fifty-six years. His conversation became fixated on trivial matters, while his paranoia and temper worsened in the bunker's confines.
Though he believed his presence would prevent Berlin's fall and spoke of "wonder weapons," reality proved otherwise. The defections of his lieutenants, particularly Himmler's peace overtures to Americans, struck the final blow to his resolve.
On April 28, Hitler married Eva Braun and dictated his "political testament" - a final anti-Semitic screed and denunciation of "disloyal" officers. Though he had survived numerous assassination attempts through luck rather than providence, his end approached.
On April 30, after a final lunch with his staff, Hitler emerged from his apartment looking drawn and trembling, with Eva behind him in his favorite dress. Following a brief interval, Eva died first from cyanide, convulsing on the sofa. Once she was still, Hitler sat beside her, raised his Walther pistol to his temple, and fired. The man who had escaped countless assassination attempts finally succeeded where others had failed.
