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No, not that one (Valkyrie, the von Stauffenberg plot); the Georg Elser attempt.

Georg who?

Georg Elser

Had never heard of this before today. Interesting...

ELB wrote:No, not that one (Valkyrie, the von Stauffenberg plot); the Georg Elser attempt.

Georg who?

Georg Elser

Had never heard of this before today. Interesting...

Never heard of him before, just imagine if he had been successful...

Great story! Thanks for posting.

That's fascinating, and I had never heard of it (or the story went in one ear and out the other years ago).

Hitler was uniquely evil. Period.

But Hitler did not invent post-WW I German nationalism or fascism. If any of these assassination attempts had succeeded or he had choked on a fish bone in kindergarten, probably the German state still would have lashed out at its old enemies. If more intelligent and sane people than Hitler (which there were plenty of) had been in charge, they might have defeated the European powers one at a time instead of launching the disastrous two-front war that Hitler did.

Also they might have had time to devise nuclear weapons before taking on the USSR. I shudder at the thought of the ruthless, amoral Nazis with nukes.

- Jim

I had heard about Elser but, I never knew how much time and effort he put into his plot. It's a shame he missed there may have been millions of people live out a full life.

seamusTX wrote:That's fascinating, and I had never heard of it (or the story went in one ear and out the other years ago).

Hitler was uniquely evil. Period.

But Hitler did not invent post-WW I German nationalism or fascism. If any of these assassination attempts had succeeded or he had choked on a fish bone in kindergarten, probably the German state still would have lashed out at its old enemies. If more intelligent and sane people than Hitler (which there were plenty of) had been in charge, they might have defeated the European powers one at a time instead of launching the disastrous two-front war that Hitler did.

Also they might have had time to devise nuclear weapons before taking on the USSR. I shudder at the thought of the ruthless, amoral Nazis with nukes.

- Jim

OTOH, without ruthless/charismatic Adolf to hold things together, the whole movement might have collapsed and they might have spent their energy fighting each other for control. Seems pretty much every totalitarian regime is barely controlled balance of competing thugdoms, who are only too happy to feed their internal competitors into firing squads and konzentrationlager/gulagss/reeducation camps. Alternate histories are interesting to contemplate.

ELB wrote:OTOH, without ruthless/charismatic Adolf to hold things together, the whole movement might have collapsed and they might have spent their energy fighting each other for control.

There's no way to know, of course.

I'm not a student of mid-20th-century German history, but many authoritarian regimes have emerged without a singularly gifted (if that's the right word) dictator. Germany did it with Kaiser Wilhelm within the lifetimes of most of the later Nazi rulers. There is no shortage of them—Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims in North Korea, Marcos in the Philippines, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, etc.

Something like 200 million people died as a direct result of military attacks in WW II or the starvation, dislocation, and other civil disorder that the war caused. The Japanese caused approximately half of it. There were other actors that were minor compared to Hitler, but took advantage of the opportunity to go on a power grab. A lot of stuff happened in South America, Spain, and Portugal, even though they were not directly involved in the war.

- Jim

seamusTX wrote:If more intelligent and sane people than Hitler (which there were plenty of) had been in charge, they might have defeated the European powers one at a time instead of launching the disastrous two-front war that Hitler did.

Also they might have had time to devise nuclear weapons before taking on the USSR. I shudder at the thought of the ruthless, amoral Nazis with nukes.

- Jim

I don't think that was an option for them, since to assume they could fight on one front is to assume no one else was going to force them to fight on another front. They had to have oil, so essentially they had to either control the Middle East or capture the Russian oil fields. They didn't have the naval power to project or sustain their forces without a land bridge. And it wasn't just oil, they lacked other raw materials they needed to sustain a war against the US.

Their only chance of not being defeated was to keep the US out of the war. Once we entered the war with the will to defeat them, they were doomed: they simply did not have the economic power to sustain a war against the US. We staged a war across an ocean and bombed their cities at will. They couldn't touch the Continental US. They might have been able to hold out longer if they'd managed to invade Britain, but they might also has sustained major losses that blunted their ability to launch a major attack on another front. They probably still would have foundered in Russia.