Top 10 Failed Plots To Assassinate Adolf Hitler

It is one of our favorite fantasies: what if someone had killed Adolf Hitler? How different would the world be if somebody had just taken out the future Führer before he could plunge the world into war and horror?

But it’s not as if nobody ever tried. More than a few people did their best to take out the leader of the Third Reich—but Hitler, as it turns out, was surprisingly hard to kill. Dozens of people tried to take out Hitler—at least four before he became Chancellor and more than 40 afterward—but nobody ever pulled it off.

It’s one of the forgotten stories of history: the many, many plots to take out Hitler. Some are stories of heroism, some of madness, and some are just downright strange—but if any one of them had succeeded, the world would have completely changed.

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10 Johann Georg Elser Missed Hitler by Minutes

On November 8, 1938, Hitler came within inches of death. He was scheduled to make a speech at the Munich Beer Hall, but, worried about the bad weather, decided to rush out 30 minutes early to catch a train back home. And if he hadn’t, he would have died that night.

Less than ten minutes after Hitler left the building, a timed explosive in the column behind his podium exploded.[1] It killed eight people, wounded sixty, and undoubtedly would have incinerated the Führer if he had not just snuck out of the building.

The bomb had been planted by Johann Georg Elser, a carpenter, a union member, and a communist. He had told a friend a few days before that Germany would never get back on track unless someone brought down Hitler. With him out of the way, Elser believed, the Communist revolution could begin.

Hitler survived because of what is tempting to call an act of God, and Elser was caught trying to flee into Switzerland. He was tortured, sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp, and ultimately killed.

The very day after his plot failed was the Kristallnacht—the day Jewish businesses and synagogues across Germany were burnt to the crowd; the day, some would say, the Holocaust began.

9 Maurice Bavaud Tried to Kill Hitler the next Day

Hitler would not have survived another 24 hours if Maurice Bavaud had been a better shot.

Bavaud was a theology student from Switzerland who, whether in a fit of madness or wisdom, convinced himself that Hitler was the antichrist. Hitler, he believed, was a threat to the Christian faith and to humanity itself—and it was his divine duty to kill him.

Bavaud packed a pistol and headed into Germany, where he desperately tried to arrange a meeting with the man he planned to murder. When he realized it would fail, he joined a crowd of eager of Nazi supporters watching Hitler parade down the streets of Munich, his pistol hidden in his pocket.

When Hitler came his way, though, the crowd threw up their hands in salute, blocking Bavaud’s shot. He only had a few seconds to decide whether he should fire and trust that God would lead bullet safely through the crowd and to his target—or if he should put his gun down and be sure he did not accidentally end an innocent’s life.

Bavaud decided not to risk it and ran. Shortly after, on a train ride to France, he was caught using a fake ticket. When the guards looked through his things, they found the gun and a map of Hitler’s vacation home.[2] For Bavaud, it was all over.

Bavaud was executed by guillotine in May of 1941. “I want to cry, but I can’t,” he wrote his parents on the day before his death. “I feel my heart would explode.”

8 William Seabrook Tried to Kill Hitler With Voodoo Magic

While the Germans and the Swiss were trying to take out Hitler with guns and explosives, an American writer was taking a slightly different route. He was going to take out Hitler, William Seabrook resolved, with black magic.

On January 22, 1941, Seabrook gathered a group of friends together in a cabin in Maryland for a “hex party.”[3] Until the break of dawn, they would drink rum, pound on drums, and try to summon pagan gods to take out the leader of Germany.

They dressed a dummy up in a Nazi uniform, chanting at it, “You are Hitler! Hitler is you!” Then Seabrook led his followers to call the pagan deity Istan to transmit the dummy’s wounds to Hitler while they spat at it, “We curse you!”

With the pounding of drums around them, the drunken occultists hammered nails into the dummy’s heart. Then Seabrook chopped off its head with an ax and buried it deep in the woods, leaving it for the worms to devour.

Hitler, somehow, survived this attempt on his life. Historians remain at a loss to explain how this plan could have failed.

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