22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Masterful Approach to a Sensitive Subject, March 27, 2006
In Killing Hitler, author Roger Moorhouse does more than outline the several assassinations attempted during the dictator's career. He fills each chapter with detailed historical accounts from the period surrounding the attempts, focusing not on names and dates but on the stories of the individuals involved. He studies how each event unfurls, the motivations behind the would-be assassins, and their place amid the greater events of the rise and fall of the Hitler. The wealth of resources, the masterful prose, and a sensitivity not only to the historical context but to the individuals themselves makes this one of the finest accounts I've had the pleasure to read.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Might Have Been, July 24, 2006
Adolf Hitler was a lucky guy. There were as many as forty-two documented assassination attempts on him (possibly far many more unknown ones), and in the end, he wound up doing the job himself, only under duress. Some of these attempts were poorly thought out while many were intricately plotted. Attempts in both categories were abandoned or executed, with the result turning out to be the same. They are reviewed in _Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death_ (Bantam) by historian Roger Moorhouse. The accounts make for exciting reading, even if it is obvious that each attempt will eventually fail. The chapters are divided into categories by the source of the attempt, such as the German military, German military intelligence, Poland, Russia, and Britain, and in each case, Moorhouse has provided substantial background history so that his book is far more than just a tally of assassination failures but a review of historical forces at play in each one.
In November 1939, Georg Elser placed an intricate clockwork bomb in a Munich beer cellar. The bomb went off at the exact right time, and the interior of the hall was completely destroyed as planned. Hitler, however, had unexpectedly cut his harangue short and had left fifteen minutes before. Elser was caught at the Swiss border. Interrogated under pressure, he finally explained what he had done, but no interrogation could make him rat out his accomplices because he had none. The interrogators could not believe this, and the German propaganda machine simply named some, blaming British agents and thus using the assassination attempt to increase popular wrath against the British. The famous attempt by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg is examined here, of course, as well as other plans. Assassination was part of Soviet life; Trotsky, for instance, was eliminated in 1940. Stalin approved of plans to put agents into regions where they might get a shot at Hitler, or for bombers to attack towns or headquarters where he might be. Once Stalin saw the war swing in his own favor, as in the German defeat at Stalingrad, he shelved such plans. He thought that an assassination would possibly revitalize the German military or lead to a separate peace with other nations, forcing the USSR to fight alone. Before the war, British espionage officers were shocked at proposals of assassination rather than diplomacy, and the word condemning such assassination plans was "unsportsmanlike". Once the war started, such proposals were taken seriously again, but in Operation Foxley of 1944, a feasibility study of Hitler's assassination, the disadvantages of assassination were emphasized. Chiefly, the staff wrote, "Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made." Poland had astonishing espionage successes and some near-misses in killing Hitler, but many Polish attempts may never be known. After the war, Poland was occupied by the USSR, a totalitarian regime that didn't like an underground any more than Hitler's had. Members of the wartime underground were harassed, humiliated, and imprisoned, so there are relatively few memoirs of Polish assassination plans.
Moorhouse helps us look at larger issues rather than (as one German plotter put it) the "guardian devil" that seems to have kept Hitler from harm. He examines the often chaotic protocols that the staff around Hitler had for security, as well as Hitler's neurotic and unreliable schedule that gave plotters fits. Looking back on the horrors of the Nazi regime, we can easily speculate how beneficial Hitler's removal might have been at any point, but Moorhouse makes clear that those at the time did not have the benefit of such unambiguous clarity. Members of the plotters within the German military, for instance, worried that with Hitler gone, power would go to Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann, and perhaps things would actually get worse. For nations on the outside, consideration had to be given to making a martyr of Hitler. The British realized, for instance, that if he were taken out, some Germans would undoubtedly encourage the myth that if Hitler had only lived, all would have been better for them. The "what if" game over the issue of Hitler's assassination is for especially high (if hypothetical) stakes, and Moorhouse has used it in a stimulating history.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and fun, August 14, 2006
In this innovative book th story of those who failed to kill Hitler are brought to life. Most of us are familiar with the famous 1944 bombing of a staf meeting in which Hitler had been present and only narrowly escaped death. This book however iluminates the shear volume of attempts of Hitler's life. Most fascinating it is revealed the many sources of resistance to Hitler not hitherto well known. For instance there is the Catholic assasin who desires to kill Hitler due to the suppression of the church, quite the opposite of what we have read in other places, and there are the assasins led by the British, Polish and Russians.
Of the greatest interest are the assasins who emerged from the regime itself. The book illuminates the role of Albert Speer but more so the gigantic resistance movement within the Abwher and Werhmacht are revealed, perhaps for the first time in one place. Here we see the deeds of the early anti-Nazis such as Canaris and those among the old Prussian aristocracy, a literal catalouge of 'Vons' who turned against Nazism due to the evils of the campaign in Russia. Here, for the first time, we are given insight into the moral character of old conservative Germany and its last gasp to prevent disaster in 1944. In the end thousands paid with their lives for attempting the life of Hitler, but those thousands, the cream of the old German army, dared to try and stop the greatest mass murder in history.
Seth J. Frantzman
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