How Many Assassination Attempts On Adolf Hitler Were There? – Mythbusting Berlin

“They failed, and because of their failure, their motives were long distrusted, their characters maligned, and their deeds denied… Yet their spirit survived, and in the end has triumphed.”
German historian, Joachim Fest, in the introduction to Plotting Hitler’s Death

The air in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller was thick with the smell of stale beer, sweat, and fervent expectation.

It was November 8th 1939, the sixteenth anniversary of the failed ‘Beer Hall Putsch’, and Adolf Hitler was in his element.

For an hour and a half, he had held the assembled Alte Kämpfer (‘Old Fighters’) of the Nazi Party in a trance, his voice rising and falling in familiar cadences, recounting the sacred story of their movement’s origins. He spoke of sacrifice, of providence, and of the sixteen ‘blood martyrs’ who fell that day in 1923.

He was a man communing with his own myth.

But as he concluded his speech, something was off.

Instead of lingering to press the flesh with his devoted followers, Hitler made a swift and uncharacteristic exit.

He had a train to catch, a special train laid on to take him back to Berlin.

The fog that had been predicted to ground his flight had forced a change of plans.

At 9:20pm, just as Hitler and his entourage were boarding their train, a deafening explosion ripped through the Bürgerbräukeller. The pillar behind the speaker’s rostrum, where Hitler had stood just minutes before, had been obliterated. The ceiling collapsed, and in the chaos of dust and screams, eight people lay dead or dying, with over sixty injured.

A lone carpenter, Johann Georg Elser, had missed his target by a mere thirteen minutes.

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that a plot to kill Adolf Hitler would be foiled by a matter of minutes, a change of plans, or what many would come to call ‘the devil’s luck’.