soc.history.war.world-war-ii

"Rich Rostrom" wrote in message
news:rrostrom.21stcentury-7D5584.17255003042008@news.isp.giganews.com...
> "rhino" wrote:
>
>>While all of the major wartime leaders faced issues of personal security,
>>how many assasination attempts initiated by foreign governments did each
>>major leader experience?
>>
>>I know that Hitler, for example, was the target of several assasination
>>attempts, the best known of which is Stauffenberg's July 20, 1944 attempt.
>>But all the attempts I've ever heard about were by Germans. Were there any
>>concerted efforts by foreigners - or Germans acting on behalf of
>>foreigners - to kill Hitler?
>
> According to Stanley Lovell in _Of Spies and Stratagems_,
> the OSS had access to the supply of vegetables to Hitler's
> household at Berchtesgaden. The OSS had a plan to get an
> agent in place to spike Hitler's produce with female hormones
>
> and just for variety's sake, now and then a carbamate
> or other quietus [lethal] medication...
>
> (The hormones attack was inspired by an OSS evaluation
> which described Hitler as "close to the male/female
> line", based on his emotionality, rages, association
> with Rohm, and so on.)
>
> Nothing happened - Lovell concluded that the agent
> never carried out the plan. It should be noted that
> Hitler's doctor, Morell, also served as the Fuhrer's
> food taster. Fabian von Schlabrendorff observed this
> practice during Hitler's visit to Army Group Center
> in 1943.
>
I'm surprised that Hitler would risk someone he valued like Morell as a food
taster. Don't rulers who are worried about poison normally rely on
"disposable" people - prisoners or captives - to taste their food?

Did Morell survive the war? If yes, when he was captured, did anyone bother
to give him a physical exam? It would be interesting to know if he'd grown
breasts or showed other signs of having eaten female hormones :-)


> On another occasion, the OSS learned of a planned
> meeting between Hitler and Mussolini at the Brenner
> Pass, and the Special Operations group said
>
> Let us parachute a cadre of our toughest men
> into the area and shoot up the bastards!
>
> Lovell suggested that instead, the OSS infiltrate
> an agent who would leave a "nitrogen-mustard gas"
> bomb in the conference room that would blind anyone
> present. He even suggested that if possible, the
> Pope might then declare this to be Divine punishment,
> and call on all Catholics serving the Axis to surrender.
>
> Lovell is not the most reliable memoirist. In these
> cases he claims personal involvement, but I would
> stil take a grain of salt.
>
> Another case involved the Russian actress Olga Chekhova.
> She was a niece by marriage of the playwright Chekhov,
> and well acquainted with the Russian theater world,
> but fled to Germany after the Revolution. She became
> a star in the German film industry, and a favorite of
> Nazis such as Goebbels after 1933. However, she also
> apparently had contacts with Soviet intelligence. Her
> brother, composer Lev Knipper, was also a Chekist,
> and at one time the NKVD suggested that Knipper go to
> Germany to assassinate Hitler with Chekhova's help -
> it being believed in Moscow that she had access to
> Hitler's circle.
>
> See Antony Beevor, _The Mystery of Olga Chekhova_.
>
> It can also be said that literally thousands of
> American and British airmen tried to kill Hitler -
> my own father being one of them. Dad told me that
> on his missions to Berlin as a B-17 bombardier,
> the target point was the Fuhrerbunker complex.
>
> I'd say dropping 1,000 lb bombs on the bunker
> was "concerted effort", if ineffectual.
>
Good point! I can't deny that bombing the spot where your archenemy is
standing is a homicidal act :-) It's unfortunate that those efforts were
not successful but you have to give the Allies "A" for effort.

>>The same question applies to foreign-driven attempts on Churchill,
>>Roosevelt
>>and Stalin. I'd also be curious about attempts on lesser figures like
>>Eishenhower, Molotov, and similar figures who weren't quite in charge but
>>were certainly very influential in their own right.
>
> There were a few assassinations here and there.
>
> Off the top of my head, I know of
>
> French Admiral Francois Darlan, killed in December 1942
> by an agent of some rival French faction. (The assassin
> was executed almost at once, and there was no record of
> who he was acting for.)
>
> Heydrich, killed in May 1942, by agents of SOE.
>
> Lord Moyne, British Resident Minister of State for
> the Middle East, by the ultra-Zionist "Stern Gang"
> in November 1944.
>
> At least one senior Vichy police official by the
> Resistance, but I can't track down the ref.
>
> The Germans allegedly shot down a passenger seaplane
> from Gibraltar to Britain because of a report Churchill
> was on board. (They didn't bother otherwise.)
>
> Lovell also reports (at second hand) that a team of
> German commandos parachuted into Iran in 1943, with
> the object of assassinating Allied leaders in Tehran.
> According to Lovell's romantic account, the Germans
> hired as their local guide OSS agent "C-12" who was
> working undercover in the mountains. He led them to
> Tehran and let them plant explosives under the
> street where Roosevelt and Churchill passed each
> day, so they would be thoroughly incriminated (he
> having stolen the detonators). Even Lovell admitted
> there is no supporting evidence, and C-12 himself
> denied the story to him.
>
> As for military leaders:
>
> The chief object of the Keyes Raid in North Africa
> was to kill Rommel.
>
> The U.S. sent a long-range P-38 strike to "get Yamamoto".
>
>>This is basically a question about morality vs. pragmatism. Given the
>>West's
>>official abhorrence of murder, were they willing to let pragmatic
>>considerations persuade them to hold their noses and condone assasination
>>attempts?
>
> Apparently so, if Lovell is to be believed. Lovell
> waxed eloquent on the subject, asserting that it
> was far _more_ moral to strike at the king and spare
> the pawns, who would surrender anyway.
>
It's certainly tempting to agree with this reasoning. I've often thought
that if I had a time machine and the necessary access to the leaders, it
would be very hard to resist the temptation to kill some of the more heinous
villains in history before they had done the bulk of their damage.

>>And given the dictatorships' relative lack of moral restraints,
>>did they take advantage of that to try to bump off their enemies? If not,
>>why not?
>
> The Axis had little or no opportunity to assassinate
> any Allied leader. There was no Axis apparatus in
> Britain or the U.S. to support such attempts.
>
It doesn't necessarily take a large apparatus to kill someone. The
pro-German Bund in the US might have furnished some Germanophile who could
have infiltrated close enough to Roosevelt to kill him. Mosely's Fascists
might not have had too many compunctions against bumping off Churchill.

And Stalin surely had the potential to recruit German or British Communists
that were sheltering in the Soviet Union to go back to their home countries
and get close to their respective leaders. Or maybe Philby could have been
maneuvred close enough to Churchill or Roosevelt to do the dirty deed, if
that's what Stalin felt expedient.

>>After all, if Hitler was seen as the main problem, why wouldn't Churchill,
>>Roosevelt, or both have simply conspired to kill him, rather than taking
>>on
>>the entire military might of the Axis?
>
> The Allies, to a substantial degree, regarded Hitler
> as being as much a symptom as a cause. There was a
> wide belief that Germany was controlled by a semi-
> secret cabal of "Prussianist" military men and wealthy
> arms manufacturers. The Nazis were merely the current
> face of this group - the same group that had started
> World War I. The General Staff was particularly
> demonized.
>
> Thus removal of Hitler, by itself, was not considered
> sufficient. Germany had to surrender, and the German
> army had to be dismantled completely. Many also believed
> that the German arms industry had to be dismantled, or
> even that Germany had to be stripped completely of all
> industry with any military potential.
>
But if Hitler were killed his successor might be more easily manipulated to
do the other steps that would lead to the neutralization of Germany....

>>Why wouldn't Hitler try to get Stalin or Churchill killed?
>
> How?
>
Hitler saw the German troops being welcomed as liberators, especially by
Ukrainians, when he launched Barbarossa. Surely that was all the proof he
could need that Stalin was _not_ appreciated by many of his subjects. Given
that, couldn't he have found a few minions amongst the "liberated"
Ukrainians who could be moved closed enough to Stalin to kill him somehow?

>>Or did they think the enemy regimes would simply
>>continue more or less unchanged under new leaders if the
>>assasinations were successful?
>
> Hitler certainly imagined that personalities
> were of vast importance. In 1945, when he was
> closeted in the bunker with Goebbels, they read
> Carlyle's _Life of Frederick the Great_, in
> particular the section on the "Miracle of the
> House of Brandenburg". In 1762, with Russian,
> Austrian, and Swedish forces closing in, Frederick
> was about give up and kill himself, when the
> Tsarina Elizabeth died. Her successor, Peter III,
> admired Frederick and so Russia immediately changed
> sides. When Roosevelt died, Goebbels seriously
> suggested that it could have similar effects.
> (Not that even he thought Truman would be a Nazi,
> but that the American-Soviet alliance would now
> rupture.)

I don't doubt that there was a major element of "clutching at straws" here
but,. given the historical precedent, you can't entirely blame them for this
reasoning. Certainly, Allied war plans _had_ moderated in Germany's favour
to the extent that one of the original plans - to completely
de-industrialize Germany after the war - had already been abandoned. That's
at least a step in the right direction, as far as the Germans were
concerned.

Imagining that a new US president would make common cause with Germany and
allow the Nazis to stay in power would seem very naive, at least by 1945,
but might not have seemed quite so far-fetched a few years earlier.

--
Rhino