Here at The Infographics Show, we try to brainstorm
all kinds of topics we think you’ll find interesting. But it’s even better when we get a great
suggestion from our viewers. Viewer Robert suggested we cover the many
attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It’s quite a story, so, Robert, here’s
the video! July 20, 1944, was a sweltering day at Germany’s
Eastern Front headquarters, near the town then known as Rostenburg, East Prussia. Weather is always a factor in war, but even
though there was no battle at Rostenburg that day, the unpleasant heat would alter the course
of history. Someone made the call that it was too hot
to hold the high level meeting in the concrete bunker within the so-called Wolf’s Lair,
or Wolfschanze. Instead they would meet in a wooden room with
windows. You’d think that the Nazi leadership would
be more vulnerable in the less fortified setting, but the change of venue may have saved Adolf
Hitler’s life--at least for a little while. Today was to be the culmination of an assassination
plot by the German resistance, including several high ranking military officers and civilians,
that had been years in the making. Hitler had no idea that there was a briefcase
containing a bomb underneath the oak table, just two seats down from him. Neither did anyone else in the room, save
the man who placed it there, Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who excused
himself on the pretext of making a phone call. At 12:42 pm, the bomb went off, and Stauffenberg
hurried away to set the rest of the plan in motion. The July Plot was only the latest of more
than 30 assassination attempts against Hitler both before and after he’d seized power. The Nazi dictator had literally been dodging
bullets left and right. In 1921 an unknown person in a crowd took
a shot at Hitler as he was speaking. Two more shooting attempts followed in 1923:
the first, also in a crowd; the second, a shot at the car Hitler was in. There were four attempts in 1932. The first, in January, was an attempted poisoning. Others dining with Hitler at Berlin’s Hotel
Kaiserhof contracted severe food poisoning. Hitler took ill as well, but wasn’t as sick
as the others, possibly because of his vegetarian diet. A few months later, someone fired a shot at
the train carriage where Hitler was sitting. In June, a group planned to ambush Hitler’s
car, but without success. At a speech on July 29, several people lobbed
stones at him, one of which did hit him in the head, but not hard enough to take him
out. In 1933, Karl Luttner, a communist and labor
leader, plotted with others to kill Hitler by planting a bomb. The day before the election of March 5--which
brought Hitler to power--he was to deliver a public speech, and Luttner intended to use
the opportunity to assassinate the Nazi leader, before it was too late. But the authorities in what was still the
democratic Weimar Republic found out about the plan and arrested Luttner and his collaborators. Later that year, a separate group, never identified,
dug a tunnel underneath a church in Potsdam where Hitler was scheduled to speak, accompanied
by other Nazi leaders. Presumably the tunnel would have been used
to plant explosives, had security forces not discovered it. As Hitler tightened his stranglehold over
the German government, members of the right wing outside the Nazi circle also began to
plot against him. Helmuth Mylius, head of the Radical Middle
Class Party, joined forces with retired Navy Captain Hermann Ehrhardt to recruit 150 collaborators
to infiltrate the SS. The plan was uncovered by the Gestapo, and
most of the conspirators faced severe punishment. A few avoided discovery, and remained in the
army to continue the internal resistance. The Night of the Long Knives was a deadly
purge of the SA, the Nazis’ original core group, which was being sidelined in favor
of the elite sub-group, the SS. Otto Strasser, a disaffected former Nazi whose
brother was killed in the Night of the Long Knives, led other German exiles in Prague
in the anti-Nazi Black Front. They carried out an unknown number of assassination
attempts in the late 1930s. Joseph Goebbels named Strasser Germany’s
Public Enemy Number One. In 1938, the military intelligence chief Major
General Hans Oster, along with several other military leaders, conspired to arrest Hitler
if he reneged on his commitment not to invade western Czechoslovakia, which the Nazis called
the Sudetenland. They were counting on British support for
this action, which they intended as a prelude to the reinstatement of Kaiser Wilhelm II. But when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
acceded to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, the conspirators lost their opportunity, and
instead of coming across as an illegal warmonger, Hitler gained popular support in the German
public. Members of the Oster plot would also continue
as part of a secret resistance. Also in 1938, Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss national
who held the bizarre belief that killing the Führer would also somehow bring down the
Soviet government and restore Russia’s Romanov dynasty, launched a one-man operation. He planned to gun down the dictator at a party
in Munich celebrating the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazis’ failed attempt
to seize power in 1923. But he couldn’t get a clear shot, and since
he didn’t want anyone else to die, he didn’t fire. Bavaud then traveled to Berchtesgaden, where
he hoped that forged documents might get him close to his target. He learned that Hitler was still in Munich,
so Bavaud tried to make his way back by train. He was arrested, and confessed under interrogation
by the Gestapo. Like several other would-be assassins, Bavaud
was executed by guillotine. The following year, the carpenter Georg Elser
skillfully hid a bomb inside a wooden pillar ahead of time for the Beer Hall Putsch anniversary,
and set it to go off at the customary time of the observance. But Hitler, rushed for time, started and ended
early, and was gone by the time the bomb exploded. Elser was caught, but the Gestapo kept him
alive until almost the end of the war, believing that he must have been part of a conspiracy. If so, he didn’t talk. Over time, the number of upper level military
leaders in the Wehrmacht with grievances against the Führer grew. Henning von Tresckow, part of the leadership
in the German campaign against Russia, became the ringleader for Project Valkyrie, an elaborate
plan to replace all of the Nazi leadership loyal to Hitler, upon completion of an assassination. Following the fall of Stalingrad, Hitler paid
a visit to a site in western Russia. Coup plotters considered simply shooting him
while he was there, but that action was called off, in part because Himmler wasn’t present. But there was a second strike in motion that
went ahead. Tresckow asked Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Brandt,
who would be flying with Hitler back to the headquarters in East Prussia, if he would
deliver a bottle of liqueur to a colleague. Brandt put the bottle in his luggage, unaware
that it was a disguised bomb, which was timed to explode when the plane was over Minsk. But the bomb malfunctioned in the cold cargo
hold. Learning that the plane had landed intact,
Tresckow dispatched an aide to retrieve the bomb before it could be found out. In another attempt, Hitler, along with Himmler
and Herman Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, were reviewing new winter uniforms. The handsome officer Axel von dem Bussche,
who was to serve as model, volunteered for the suicide mission to wear a bomb under the
overcoat. But the planned meeting was delayed. The conspirators continued seeking a chance
to kill all three leaders at a stroke. In the end, Stauffenberg was the only conspirator
who could get close enough to the increasingly wary Führer, who by now had decided it was
a good idea to wear a bulletproof vest. A veteran of both the African and Russian
campaigns, Stauffenberg had lost a hand and an eye in battle. He was to carry out the assassination, but
many others by now were involved in another key aspect of the plan, which required a military
coup by the German Reserve Army. The co-plotters in Berlin would use the assassination
as a false flag operation, accusing the Nazi leadership of taking out Hitler themselves,
providing a pretext for the overthrow, after which they would sue for peace, and restore
civilian government and the rule of law. But first they had to kill the man who had
led Germany down the ruinous path of war. Friedrich Fromm, the Reserve Army’s Commander
in Chief, had agreed to turn a blind eye to the actions of the conspirators. But he appointed Stauffenberg as his chief
of staff, enabling close access to Hitler during meetings, without understanding his
new subordinate’s intentions. Stauffenberg was to carry a British-built
briefcase bomb to the meeting at the Wolf’s Lair. It was equipped with two explosive devices. After arriving at the fortress, Stauffenberg
ducked away, saying he needed to change his shirt. But interruptions prevented him from arming
both devices. He went ahead with the single bomb, though. The physics of a wooden, porous room would
make for a less deadly blast than one that was sealed and concrete. So Stauffenberg made sure to sit as close
to Hitler as he could, just one seat over. But this wasn’t to be a suicide mission. After placing the briefcase under the table
as close as he could manage, Stauffenberg slipped out. But once the spot at the table was empty,
a colonel came in to fill it, wanting a closer look at the maps being reviewed. Unknowingly, he kicked the briefcase behind
a table leg. When the bomb went off, that made the difference. One person was killed instantly; three others
later died of their injuries. Hitler was wounded. He suffered temporary paralysis and a dislocated
arm. His buttocks were bruised, and he had a broken
eardrum. His pants were torn to shreds, and his hair
was a mess. But he lived. And that message was relayed to Berlin, preventing
the coup. Hitler, who now boasted of being immortal,
gave the order that the conspirators should die like animals. They were hanged with meat hooks and piano
wire. One account describes a prolonged torture,
with the condemned repeatedly taken to the edge of death and then revived. The following year, the nightmare of Nazi
rule would end with the Soviet capture of Berlin, and Hitler would become his own last
victim, shooting himself in the head rather than face justice for his crimes. In the early post-war years, German public
opinion remained hostile to the conspirators in Operation Valkyrie, with most people considering
them traitors. Meanwhile, following the Nuremberg trials,
many rank and file Nazis received amnesty from the West German government. It took time, but Germans did come to confront
their complicity in Nazi atrocities, and the view of the German resistance began to change. By the early 21st century, only a small minority
of Germans polled held negative views of the resistance, who are now officially memorialized. Perhaps the greatest symbol of respect for
the resistance fighters comes in a ceremony every year, when new recruits to the current
German military are sworn in on July 20. Are there any other moments in history you
think could have changed things as dramatically as if one of these assassination missions
was successful? Let us know in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other video
called “What If Hitler Had Won?” Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t
forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!
