Uh, why didn’t anyone kill Stalin or Mao?
Both were equally culpable.
Ask any Ukrainian about Stalin.
No one can see the future, so tyrants usually aren’t killed until the high-sounding rhetoric of change and hope turns into round up and imprison. By then, its too late. But the alternative of assassinating every leader who is leaning towards tyranny is even worse. Humans desperately want to have faith in their leaders and the bad ones exploit that desire.
My guess would be this : "Hitler’s death might lead to a better-led German war machine"
Someone did kill Hitler . . . Hitler did it.
Good history column PING.
Synchronization is important. How to do it right.
The existence of such tyrants and the decline of civilization can both be laid at his feet.
Very few people actually want freedom. What most people want is one or another level of being able to indulge in their own tyranny. That’s why tyrants rise in the first place, promising (usually in openly-secret code words) exactly that to their followers.
So the brutal fact is that the only real difference between any factions, even in the US, is the acceptable level of tyranny and the acceptable cover story. Usually these issues are tempered by a sense of self-preservation, along the lines of any parasite’s need to keep its host too weak to fight back, but still strong enough to not die (and thus end the food feast).
However as this is not a precise science, and as parasites trend to get drunk on their successes, successful collectivist ventures tend to end in total war. Which of course is why it is in big business’s interest to nurture collectivist catastrophes, for as Rhett Butler observed to Scarlett, the two times to make big money is when everything is collapsing, and when everything is being built back up out of the ashes. Which is also why American liberals are at their most absurd when they are hating corporate capitalism, since it is the abiding fuel for their very existence.
It was probably better that Hitler wasn’t killed, he was such an incompetent military strategist. The one who was killed, and had he lived might have actually lead the third reich to victory, was Reinhard Heydrich. He was a brilliant and evil man who was considered the next ruler of the third reich but fortunately was assassinated by a British trained team of Czechs. I highly recommend the book, Hitler’s Hangman, for a great read on Heydrich.
Under the protection of Satan.....
Bookmark.
A couple of opinions:
If Von Stauffenburg had just thought to have placed the unarmed 2nd charge in the briefcase with the armed 1st charge, it would have detonated and surely killed Hitler and probably every other officer in the room.
If Hitler HAD been killed on 7-20-44, I think the new German Commanders would have sued for peace immediately. They knew it was all over. They would most likely have had to go ahead and settle for unconditional surrender, it may have taken a couple of months to effect, but think of the millions of lives and destruction that would have been spared.
The title proposes the question but the article proceeds to explain that yes, in fact, there were a number of people that tried to kill him. They merely all failed.
It’s curious to imagine what the 20th century would’ve looked like if Hitler hadn’t used the German war machine to attempt such a broad conquest. Say, instead somebody else merely developed Germany into a strong economic power. It’s entirely likely then that the U.S. would not have grown into it’s postwar “superpower” status. The U.S. economy would have been strong and recovered fully from the depression but not explosively so as it did after the war. Germany, undoubtedly would have been the major player in Europe. What would have happened in the USSR? Hard to say... they’d have had many millions more people than they did post-war. It’s kind of imponderable what Stalin would have done differently, if anything.
That's an amazing statistic and shows what the Germans themselves lost when Hitler survived that briefcase bomb. Also, I wonder if the Germans had surrendered in the summer of '44 would the Russian Army advance had been halted... or would Roosevelt have encouraged them to continue marching Berlin anyway. After all, FDR was madly in love with Stalin.