There is probably no figure as hated in European history as Hitler. His twisted ideology led to the attempted genocide of an entire race as well as the extermination of countless others deemed to be “undesirables”.
His actions sparked a world war that took the world many decades to recover from. Today a common hypothetical question is if you could go back in time would you kill baby Hitler? This raises another question. Why didn’t anyone assassinate him?
As it turns out there were several plots and plans over the years aimed at taking out one of history’s worst dictators. One of these was Operation Foxley, a plan dreamed up to take out Hitler where he felt the safest.
Plans Prior to Operation Foxley
Operation Foxley was not the first planned assassination of Hitler. The allies had been hoping to take him out for quite some time but the problem was that he was a hard target to get to. Hitler was paranoid by nature and with each failed attempt on his life, he only became more so.
One of the first plots dreamt up by SOE (England’s Special Operations Executive) was to bomb the train Hitler regularly traveled on, the “the Amerika”. The SOE had extensive experience derailing trains with explosives and knew they could get the job done. The problem was Hitler’s schedule was erratic at best and stations were only informed of his arrival a few minutes beforehand.
Hitler’s erratic schedule had a habit of saving him from bombings. On November 8th, 1939 he had survived a bombing attempt at the Burgerbraukeller where he gave annual speeches. Hitler had arrived 5 minutes late and missed the detonation of a bomb set
The next plot hatched by the SOE was to poison the drinking water on Hitler’s train. While it was being cleaned an operative could reach the train’s boiler and slip in an odorless, tasteless poison that SOE’s chemists had cooked up. This plot was dropped because it required at least one inside man, making it too complicated.
