Hitler's Luck

...control exercised by a deity, divine direction"—is as close to being unthinkable as anything Herman Kahn ever thought up Yet nothing is settled or disposed of if one shrugs and lays it all off to sheer chance, since nobody really understands what chance is, either The dictionaries offer the supposition that it is "the quality shared by unexpected, random, or unpredictable events,' which explains and clarifies exactly nothing Philosophers and wits are equally blurry on the subject, though many have made stabs at it Horace Walpole, for one, thought chance was the "instrument" of Providence, while Cham-fort's idea was that it is the "nickname" of Providence But Schiller and others have argued that there is no such thing as chance Still, some agency or element or what was it7 seems to have been at work in the case of Adolf Hitler, guiding or—perhaps better—twisting and distorting the flow of events in his favor for a good, long stretch of his baffling career Consider the following -With exemplary patience and supreme technical skill, a cabinet maker named Johann Georg Elser, working nights when the place is empty, builds a hidden time-bomb into a pillar of the Munich beer hall where Hitler annually speaks in commemoration of his 1923 Putsch The pillar is part of the platform Hitler will speak from the evening of November 7, 1939 The bomb goes off right on schedule at 9 20 p m , inundating the speaker's platform with tons of rafter, rubble, plaster, and masonry But on that night Hitler, against all custom, has cut his speech short to catch a tram He is gone eight minutes before the bomb, which would infallibly have disposed of him forever, explodes ("Nothing, " said Leibniz, "can happen without sufficient cause ") Captain Axel von clem Bussche, a decorated officer in a crack regiment, is revoked by the SS atrocities he has witnessed in the Ukraine He volunteers to assassinate Hitler even at the sacrifice of his own life The Fuhrer is scheduled to inspect new uniforms and equipment, and Captain von dem Bussche will be present Carrying a grenade equipped with a 4 5-second fuse in his overcoat pocket, the Captain will seize Hitler in a bear hug embrace and hold him while the grenade goes off?boom' and Fuhier and Captain together dissolve into flying fragments of flesh and splinters of bone But on the eve of the inspection, an RAF raid destroys the freight cars containing the new uniforms and equipment The inspection is cancelled and is not rescheduled Von dem Bussche packs his gear, including his virgin grenade, and returns to his battalion on the eastern front Saved by an enemy air raid, Hitler continues as before ("Nothing," said Cicero, "has ever happened which has not been predestined, and nothing ever will ") -A group of dedicated and determined conspirators contrive to plant a bomb in the guise of a gift-wrapped brandy bottle in the cockpit of Hitler's private plane They time it so that it will explode somewhere over Minsk, scattering bits and pieces of the Fuhrer over the Russian landscape Thereupon dissident officers and their civilian coconspirators will oust the Nazi regime, take over the government and end the War But Hitler's plane lands safely, no harm done Retrieving the brandy-bottle bomb at terrible risk, the conspirators find that the mechanism functioned perfectly, except for the last split-second stage when the (British-made) detonator proved to be faulty ("Nothing under the sun,' said Lessing, "is ever accidental ") -Calling on technical and organizational resources undreamed of by John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Strhan, or James Earl Ray, let alone Leon Czolgosz, seditious Wehrmacht officers of the highest rank manage to plant a time bomb under the very map table Adolf Hitler is bending ov er m his East Prussian headquarters One of the officers present, lust before the bomb is due to burst, finds the briefcase containing the infernal machine in the way of his foot He pushes it against a thick oaken support that holds up the table Enough of the blast is thereby deflected from the Fuhrer to spare his life, though others in the room are killed and maimed Hitler is again free to continue inflicting his special brand of horror on the world {"Chance, "said Voltaire, "is a word void of sense, nothing can exist without a cause ") These are only a sampling of instances where some inexplicable freak of what shall we say...

...Hitler's Luck To Kill the Devil By Herbert Molloy Mason, Jr Norton 280 pp $9 95 Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author, "Putsch'How Hitler Made Revolution " I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it There are a thousand ways to get at a man if it is desired that he should be killed —Abraham Lincoln If somebody is going to kill me, they are going to kill me —JohnF Kennedy not a soul can cope with an assassin who, for idealist reasons, is prepared quite ruthlessly to hazard his own life 90 per cent of the historic assassinations have been successful —Adolf Hitler Only one attempt was made on the life of Abraham Lincoln, and it succeeded Only one attempt was made on the life of John F Kennedy and, as unlikely and improbable as it was, it too succeeded At least a dozen attempts were made on the life of Adolf Hitler, and none of them succeeded Besides being a curious fact worth noting, this circumstance poses a rather teasing problem for the obscure discipline known as theodicy, which undertakes to vindicate God's sometimes peculiar ways of managing the a (fairs of the universe Hitler's uncanny and unconscious knack for surviving the many efforts to destroy him, most of which missed by no more than the proverbial whisker, must give pause to those who hold that a Providence ot some sort presides over the destinies ot mankind and that the universe is not, after all, governed by blind, senseless, meaningless chance...

...chance, Providence, what was it...

...To think that it was Providence...

...saw to it that Hitler would not die, that the War and the butchery in the concentration camps should continue, and that Hitler's life should end only by his own hand after he had inflicted the full measure of his abominations on the world However, Mason's book, confining itself to assassination attempts, does not cover all the circumstances that combined to preserve Adolf Hitler for us and for history It began almost at birth His mother had three children before him who died in infancy Klara Plozl's fourth child, Adolf, survived and flourished During World War I this same Adolf served for four years in the front lines with a Bavarian regiment notorious for its appalling casualties No fatal Allied bullet found Pfc Hitler, though hundreds on boths sides were falling around him like autumn leaves every day Early in the War, at a place called Wytschaete, he was in an attack with eight other soldiers, three of whom were killed and a fourth badly wounded Afterward Hitler was summoned to the staff tent where possible decorations were being discussed The tent became crowded and the enlisted men were asked to leave Barely five minutes after Pfc Hitler departed, the tent was hit by an artillery shell, killing most of those who were inside and crippling the rest No wonder Adolf became convinced that destiny had chosen him and was preserving him for purposes of her own "I go my way," he said once, "with the confidence of a sleepwalker " He, at any rate, had no doubt that Providence was watching over him To tell his story, Herbert Molloy Mason Jr must out of necessity cover ground that has been well-travelled by others He adds nothing that is starthingly new, yet it is useful to have the various episodes pulled together in one book and told in narrative form Included is an excellent section of photographs, nicely reproduced Some valuable documentation is offered in an appendix, together with a "selected" bibliography that contains no surprises There are more typographical errors than one expects from as good a house as Norton Mason includes a chapter on the rebellion of the Munich students who, under the symbol of the White Rose, made their gallant protest against the National Socialist regime when the millions of their fellow Germans were keeping silent The episode does not seem to fit the title and pattern of the book very aptly, since the students made no attempt to kill Hitler Their story, nevertheless, is well worth telling and the present reviewer has, m fact, told it at rather more substantial length in a book just completed He is in a position to say that Mason's brief chapter gets a surprising number of the names, facts and dates wrong...

...For it blind, senseless, meaningless chance was not at work in the events described by Herbert Molloy Mason Jr in To Kilt the Devil, what was it...