7. Otto Strasser and the Black Front
Although the Nuremberg bomb plot was not an attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler, there is no doubt that Otto Strasser and the Black Front participated in many such attempts, and instigated a few more. The only question is how many, the conspiratorial nature of such plots has kept many of them hidden from the eyes of investigators. Otto Strasser had many motives for eliminating Hitler. Strasser was a former member of the Nazi party who supported the workers, unlike Hitler, who paid lip service to the workers and the “simple German folk” while gaining the support of wealthy industrialists and the financial sector. When Hitler and Strasser could not reconcile their differences, Strasser was dismissed from the party and went into exile in Prague, where he founded the Black Front. When Hitler eliminated Ernst Rohm and his followers in the Night of the Long Knives, he also eliminated Gregor Strasser, Otto’s brother.
Otto Strasser was forced to remove himself from other places of exile many times, staying just ahead of the SS and the Gestapo before the war began, eventually spending most of the war in Canada. Before fleeing the continent, he directed various plots against Hitler between 1937 and 1940, nearly all of which were infiltrated by the Gestapo and foiled before they could be executed. Goebbels eventually declared Strasser as Germany’s Public Enemy Number One, and placed a half-million-dollar bounty on his head. The exact number of plots against Hitler which were instigated by the Black Front in the last three years of the 1930s will likely never be known, the Nazi security apparatus suppressed public information of the plots against Hitler, not wanting to admit that total support for the Fuhrer was a sham. At least two dozen cases against individuals connected to the Black Front were pursued by the Gestapo during the 1930s.