Assassinating Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich: The History of the Attempts to Kill the Nazi Dictator and the Blond Beast

Like other totalitarian regimes, the leader of the Nazis kept an iron grip on power in part by making sure nobody else could attain too much of it, leading to purges of high-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Of these purges, the most notorious was the Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the summer of 1934 that came about when Hitler ordered the surprise executions of several dozen leaders of the SA.

Though the concept of tyrannicide remained so foreign to German culture that the word only appeared in the national language after World War II, as the war progressed and Germany's fortunes faltered, more individuals and groups plotted the death of Hitler. Through it all, Hitler eluded many of the attempts on his life, often without ever realizing his risk. Most plotters escaped undetected, baffled by the randomness and secretive nature of Hitler's movements. The Fuhrer frequently canceled prearranged engagements, arrived at other locations with only a few minutes' advance notice, used different trains than originally planned, and generally proved constantly unpredictable. Beyond all his precautions, the Fuhrer sometimes almost appeared protected by incredible luck.

During the early stages of the war, Heydrich often walked the streets of Prague alone or with just one or two escorts, and he also favored an open-topped Mercedes 320-C convertible, which left him fully exposed to snipers, bomb throwers, and the like. That would be all the good fortune a British-trained team of Czech assassins would need on May 27th, 1942. Even though the assassination attempt was mostly botched (to the extent that the assassins initially assumed they had failed), shrapnel from an anti-tank grenade caused the top Nazi official severe injuries, killing him a little over a week later.

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