Adolf Hitler’s plane carried a bomb that never detonated
ON March 13, 1943 Adolf Hitler boarded a plane with a bomb aboard, but the plot to kill him fizzled out in the air.
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AS Adolf Hitler boarded a plane from Smolensk to Berlin, 75 years ago today, one of his entourage, Lt-Colonel Heinz Brandt, was handed a package by Lt Fabian von Schlabrendorff. Brandt had been expecting the package because he’d been asked by Maj-Gen Henning von Tresckow to carry it, who said it contained bottles of French liqueur as payment for a lost bet.
Brandt had no reason to suspect that a fellow officer had anything to hide. But inside the box were two bottles that looked like Cointreau, but packed far more punch. They were filled with explosives. Schlabrendorff had tripped the timers and, if all went to plan, the bombs would explode over Minsk, killing all on board.
It seemed a simple plan and mostly went like clockwork. But Tresckow and his collaborators had overlooked one minor but crucial factor that meant this would be another failed assassination attempt on the life of the German dictator.
Tresckow was one of a group of anti-Nazi officers increasingly alarmed by Hitler’s conduct of the war. Most were career military men who thought the Nazis and most of their policies were barbaric.
Tresckow was born in Magdeburg in 1901, to a family of Prussian nobles. At 16 he joined the army as an officer cadet in World War I, and was commissioned as a lieutenant in June 1918.
He remained with the army after Germany’s defeat in the war, and helped put down the Spartacist revolt by socialist workers in 1919. He resigned his commission in 1920 to travel, and study law and economics. He worked in finance, but in 1924 returned to the army, under the sponsorship of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.
In 1926 he married Erika von Falkenhayn, daughter of Germany’s chief of the General Staff during much of WWI. He continued his rise through the ranks as Hitler rose to power in 1933.
As an officer who served in WWI he would have been sympathetic to the Nazi idea that politicians and communists had stabbed the military in the back at the end of the war and that Hitler would revive Germany’s lost glory. In 1934 he began training for the army’s General Staff, the highest circle of officers, but as the Nazis began to enact their anti-Jewish policies, Tresckow became increasingly anti-Nazi.
Rising to the rank of Lt-Colonel in 1939, he was then involved in the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, France (1940) and the Soviet Union (1941), but was disturbed by the treatment of captured communist soldiers.
He began recruiting like-minded officers into a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, including his adjutant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Colonel Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff and Claus von Stauffenberg. They became known as the Schwarze Kapelle (black orchestra) and began to look for an opportunity to kill Hitler and seize power. The plot was codenamed “Spark” because Hitler’s death would be the spark for regime change.
When Hitler planned a brief trip to Smolensk in 1943 to visit wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front, Tresckow and his co-conspirators discussed ways of using the opportunity to assassinate the Fuhrer.
They rejected plans to intercept Hitler and his escort in the forest on the way or to shoot Hitler in the mess hall. Instead they decided to place a bomb on his plane. Hitler flew in a Focke Wulf Condor — his private plane since 1939 — so it would be relatively easy to put an explosive device aboard and make it look like an accidental air crash.
The detonators and plastic explosives were provided by the British, with whom the Schwarze Kapelle had been in contact, and delivered by parachute.
Schlabrendorff was able to set the fuses in motion and hand the box inconspicuously to Brandt, on March 13, 1943, as Hitler flew to Berlin. But it is thought that the detonation mechanism didn’t work because the temperature dropped too low aboard the aircraft.
Tresckow was able to retrieve the boxes in Berlin, without the conspiracy being detected, but it was a disappointing result.
Gersdorff then offered to sacrifice himself to make sure the next attempt was successful. On March 21 he strapped explosives with 10-minute fuses to his body, planning to blow up Hitler when he visited a Berlin museum. The plan was aborted when it was revealed that Hitler would only spend eight minutes at the museum, which was too quick for Gersdorff’s fuses.
A year later both Stauffenberg and Tresckow would be executed for their part in the failed Valkyrie plot, when Hitler was almost killed by a bomb in the Wolf’s Lair bunker on July 20, 1944. But Gersdorff and Schlabrendorff both survived the war and died in 1980.
Originally published as Adolf Hitler’s plane carried a bomb that never detonated
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