5. Hitler Assassination plots
During World War II there were German officers and citizens who did not support the Nazi movement and wanted to kill Hitler. To that end there were multiple plots to do just that. The first plot was in 1943 and was called Operation Spark. This was actually a conspiracy by anti-Nazi Germany army officers who believed that Hitler’s death would be the spark that would signal an internal coup d’etat to overthrow the Nazis. The plan was to sneak a bomb onto Hitler’s plane. However, the percussion cap got too cold in the unheated cargo hold and failed to detonate the bomb. The group made other attempts including suicide bomb attempts but none of them were successful.
Another attempt was made on July 20th, 1944 and was referred to as Operation Valkyrie. The idea was to kill Hitler, seize control of Germany from the Nazis and make peace with the allies. The plot was contrived by several different groups within the German Resistance and included high ranking Wehrmacht Officers who wanted to show the world that not all Germans were like Hitler. The final plot to kill Hitler consisted of a briefcase bomb in a conference room that would kill not only Hitler but other high ranking members. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was the only member of the resistance high ranking enough to be invited to the meeting.
However, the meeting was moved to a conference room instead of the underground bunker and only one of the two bombs was primed for detonation. Had either of these things occurred the bomb would have killed Hitler. Another chance of fate was that the bomb was moved behind the leg of the table in the conference room which had the effect of killing Colonel Heinz Brandt (who had moved the briefcase) and shielding Hitler from the blast. Ultimately Hitler survived the coup and the Gestapo arrested 7,000 people in association with the plot and nearly 5,000 of them were executed.