As for a young Britisher or Frenchman killing Hitler, before the war began, as I have said, it would have been easy, but consider if a man had killed Hitler before the war, what would the world have said? What sort of judgment would the world have delivered on the assassin? Would he have been considered a hero, a savior of mankind? Not at all, because Hitler up to that time was only a potential menace to Britain, France, and the other peaceful states. If he had been killed, his assassin would have been declared a madman, and his act would have been condemned by all save the small group of persons who perceived the inevitability and the catastrophic course of the war Hitler planned against the world. No assassin kills out of pure idealism. A man who killed Hitler would want a little credit for it, and until the war began he would have received none.
Q. He would receive plenty of credit now. Why doesn’t the British government organize the killing of Hitler? Haven’t they plenty of agents in Germany?
A. I have no doubt the killer of Hitler would be decorated by fifteen governments or more, but there are still millions of muddled sentimentalists in this country who would shudder at the thought of assassination. There were few, I suppose, who objected to the G-men shooting the rabid Dillinger, but millions denounced the little doctor, Weiss, who shot the far more dangerous criminal, Huey Long. So it would have fared with anyone who would have assassinated Hitler. Imagine how different the history of Germany and of the world might have been if Hitler had been among the victims of the machine gun which fired on him on the morning of November 10, 1923, on the Odeon’s Platz in Munich.
Before this war there were just as many sentimentalists in England, but you would have to look a long time to find one now. During an air raid in London I asked an old English lady, one of the gentlest creatures I have ever known, what she would do if she were driving an automobile and suddenly Hitler were to appear in front of the car. Would she turn and save him, or would she drive ahead and hit him? “I would press the accelerator and drive straight over him,” she said firmly.
Q. What was the explanation of the bombing attempt on Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall?
A. It bore every earmark of being an admirably well thought-out and executed plan by the British which just failed by a few minutes. I should think the British government has done all it could to have Hitler killed. Certainly the British know how supremely important it would be to do away with the heart and brains of Nazidom. The bomb attempt on Hitler in the Buergerbraeu Keller in Munich, November 8, 1939, the anniversary of the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch, nearly succeeded. To refresh your memory: Hitler and his “Old Fighters” left the beer hall twelve minutes before a time bomb exploded, killing seven persons and wounding sixty-three. The Germans blamed it on the British secret agents, and announced they had captured two such agents, a Mr. Best and a Captain Stevens, on the day after the bomb explosion.
The Gestapo had gone over into Holland to kidnap the two Britishers who incautiously made a rendezvous close to the frontier.
Some persons analyzed this affair thus: The Gestapo itself arranged the bomb to go off after Hitler left. The Gestapo did it for one of two reasons. Either Himmler wanted to kill Hitler, or Hitler wanted the bomb attempt in order to arouse sympathy for himself among his people, and hatred of the English. Neither of these explanations makes sense to me. No Nazi leader in his right mind wants Hitler to be killed, because every Nazi is aware that his party, his job, and his very life are dependent upon the continued existence and leadership of Hitler. I will not say anything further about the plain fact that most of Hitler’s subordinates literally worship him. Just on the basis of individual self-interest, it would be unlikely that any Nazi leader should wish to weaken the Nazi position so disastrously.
I do not believe Himmler or any other Nazi was behind the attempt. Nor is it credible that Hitler planted the bomb to arouse sympathy for himself among the German people. He has all the sympathy he needs, and German hatred for the English is quite adequate. Neither of these two reasons could balance the danger involved in the infectious quality of a public attempt at assassination such as this was. This attempt, which took place before a large public, could not be concealed.
Finally, it seems that the German capture of the two British secret agents crippled the British Intelligence Service in Germany for many months. They were men high in the service and could be presumed to have known a good deal about the whole Intelligence Service setup in Germany. With the Gestapo at work on them in the approved style recently made so vivid and bloodcurdling by Jan Valtin in Out of the Night, it is not likely that many British Intelligence agents in Germany remained unidentified. At any rate there have not been any further attempts on Hitler, at least none that we know about.