“The best plan SOE could come up with involved using a sniper to shoot Hitler on his regular morning stroll.”
By Eric Lee
IT HAS NOW been nearly a quarter century since the British government revealed that in 1944-45 it had ordered the Special Operations Executive to come up with a plan to kill Adolf Hitler.
That plan, known as Operation Foxley, resulted in a 122-page dossier laying out in considerable detail how the Nazi dictator might be killed.
But even now, there is much that remains unknown — and may never be known — about the plan.
Let’s start with what triggered the decision by Churchill’s government to activate planning in June 1944.
By this point, Allied forces had successfully landed at Normandy, the conquest of Italy was proceeding apace and the Soviet armies were closing in on the Third Reich.
Although there is some evidence that the British had been considering killing Hitler earlier in the war, the trigger for the 1944 decision was something we might today call ‘fake news.’
A report came in from Algiers that indicated Hitler was to be found in a chateau in Perpignan, southwest France. If the British acted quickly enough — for example, sending in some RAF bombers — the enemy leader might be killed. The intelligence officer who passed on this information ended his message with the words “WE ARE NOT REPEAT NOT MAD NOR IS THIS A JOKE” — all in uppercase letters.
One historian reading this commented that the agent probably was mad or this may well indeed have been a joke.
In any event, the report proved not to be true — and yet it is what led to SOE being authorized to plan Hitler’s death.
One thing that stands out when reading the SOE dossier is how much the British knew about Hitler’s daily life — essential intelligence for any assassination plot. Yet at the time, Hitler was the most protected individual on the planet, with crack troops guarding him 24 hours a day.
We also learn from the report that the Führer was “extremely fond” of apple juice, and that when drinking tea, he liked to have milk poured into his cup first. It is also revealed that the German dictator’s favourite alcohol-free beer was made at the Holzkirchen brewery in Munich. Monthly deliveries of it were made to his alpine retreat near the village of Berchtesgaden. All of this was useful when considering the possibility of poisoning Hitler.
But the dossier also showed that SOE was not as well informed as it seemed. The report claimed that Hitler had lost the ability to speak (he hadn’t), that Himmler was now running Germany (he wasn’t) and that the Goebbels family had split apart, with Fraü Goebbels taking the children to Switzerland (she didn’t). It also listed many of the members of Hitler’s entourage in 1944, people who might be with him in the Berghof. One of those, Eva Braun, was recorded as his “secretary.” She was, as we know, rather more than that.
The useful bits of information came in large part from interrogations of captured soldiers who had served in Hitler’s headquarters. Later in the war, the German commanders realized that this was a potential security problem and stopped reassigning former bodyguards to the frontlines.
The Foxley dossier is also filled with detailed drawings of the various buildings in which Hitler lived and worked, as well as diagrams showing the layout of his personal train, the Führerzug — also seen as possibly playing into an assassination attempt.
The biggest intelligence failure of all was the fact that the British did not know that Hitler had left Berchtesgaden in the summer of 1944 and never returned. He spent the final year of the war at his headquarters near the fronts, or in Berlin. This was a pity as the best plan SOE could come up with involved using a sniper to shoot the Führer on his regular morning stroll.
Hitler was acutely aware of the fact that he was constantly under threat of assassination. There are nearly 50 attempts that we know of from the early 1920s onward. Some came quite close to success, most notably the July 20, 1944 plot by high-ranking German officers. And Hitler knew that one of the biggest mistakes a leader could make would be to have a regular routine which would allow a sniper, for example, to take a shot at him. He talked about this even in the early 1930s. And yet — every morning when he was at the Berghof, he would take a stroll to the tea house that would last around 20 minutes. During this daily ritual, he would walk alone, unaccompanied by his guards who were instructed to keep their distance.
The idea of a single sniper taking out the Nazi leader was the plot of a best-selling 1939 novel by Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male, which was made into a successful 1941 Hollywood film directed by the anti-Nazi German emigre Fritz Lang. The SOE plan to use a marksman seemed to come straight off the pages of Household’s story — and Household himself was an SOE officer during the war (though apparently was not involved in the planning for Operation Foxley.)
Though the planners went to great lengths to ensure that their sniper could pass as a German soldier and would kill Hitler with a Mauser rifle or a specially silenced Luger pistol, there was a Plan B in case the shooter failed. A team of two SOE operatives — almost certainly East Europeans — would be on the scene with a PIAT gun, a kind of British version of the American bazooka. The PIAT was a uniquely British weapon, designed by SOE, so it was a very odd choice to include it in the plan if one was trying to conceal British involvement.
There seems to have been little effort made to find a suitable marksman, and it was not until early 1945 that a candidate was approached. It was not an SOE officer, not a sniper, not even a native German speaker — instead SOE explored the possibility of bringing in one Captain Edmund Bennett, who was then working for the British in Washington, D.C. The choice of Bennett was a strange one. According to his wife, who was interviewed when the Operation Foxley dossier was first made public in 1998, he suffered from astigmatism in one eye and was a terrible shot.
Foxley would never come to pass. By the time Bennett was even approached the war was nearly over. By then, Germany’s defeat was all but certain. On March 26 — just five weeks before Hitler took his own life — the SOE scrapped the plan. The unit informed its people in New York that Bennett’s services would not be required.
There are many more strange things about Operation Foxley, including the possible use of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, who was in British captivity. Memos were exchanged about the possibility of hypnotizing Hess and sending him back to Germany to kill Nazi leaders. Most historians have considered this idea absolutely crazy, but at the time, some academic psychologists argued that it could be done.
Though nearly 80 years have passed since SOE officers planned the killing of Hitler, today we have more questions than answers about this very strange and intriguing dossier.
Eric Lee is the author of Britain’s Plot to Kill Hitler: The True Story of Operation Foxley and SOE, published by Greenhill Books on April 30.
