Killing Hitler (6 page)

It pleased Hitler immensely to see organisations which dealt with similar issues engage in feuds with one another. For only in such circumstances, so he believed, would he be able to maintain his independence from the specialised ministries…. Those who became too powerful he gladly cut down to size; to those who were stranded out on a limb he extended a hand and helped them back onto their feet.
⁵⁵

This practice may have been beneficial in politics, but in the security sphere it did little but sow confusion and, of course, violate the
golden rule: that of making one authority solely responsible. In one instance, Hitler ordered his driver to accelerate to escape a strange car that had attached itself to his motorcade. He was unwittingly escaping from yet another set of his own bodyguards.
⁵⁶

The result of all this was that despite huge advances in personal safety, surveillance, and what in modern parlance one might call counterterrorism, Hitler’s security regime of the late 1930s still offered tantalizing opportunities to a would-be assassin. The regime was certainly not as refined and practiced as it would later become. And until 1938, the threats to Hitler’s person remained largely theoretical. His bodyguards—larking in the lifts and making faces in the windows—were probably bored of chasing phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps.

In addition, Hitler was reveling in his overwhelming popularity. The year was studded with numerous public appearances that had become enshrined in the Nazi calendar, including the “Day of the Seizure of Power” in January, Hitler’s birthday in April, the Bayreuth Wagner Festival in July, the Nuremberg Rally in September, and, of course, the commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich every November. Moreover, Hitler busied himself in the early years with speaking tours, election campaigns, and military reviews, shuttling up and down the country between highly publicized events. In short, he was far from being the recluse that he would become in his later years. He was a regular at numerous cafés and restaurants in Berlin and Munich, with a table perpetually reserved should he choose to stop by.
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And in 1936, he attended almost every day of the Berlin Olympics, much to the frustration of his security personnel.

For the determined assassin possessed of a modicum of ingenuity, Hitler must have offered a number of possibilities. He would have recognized that, despite its perpetual revisions and reorganizations, his target’s security apparatus was still feeling its way to genuine effectiveness. He would have seen how his target’s routine included a wealth of public appearances, where the throngs of believers could create confusion and facilitate an escape. His chances of success, he might have concluded, looked promising.

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Maurice Bavaud was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in January 1916. The eldest of seven children from a middle-class, devoutly Catholic family, he underwent a conventional education, leaving school at the age of sixteen to be apprenticed as a draftsman. The young Bavaud inherited the strict Catholicism of his parents and was briefly active in a church youth group before deciding, in the spring of 1935, to become a missionary. That autumn, he enrolled in a four-year course at a French seminary, the École Saint-Ilan Langueux at St. Brieuc in Brittany.

Fellow students from Saint-Ilan remembered Bavaud as a calm, sensitive young man of average intelligence with a tendency toward mysticism. He read philosophy and was a keen singer, joining the Gregorian chant in the church and often reciting traditional Swiss songs. He enjoyed his classes and relished the relaxed atmosphere of the seminary. But one colleague was to exert a decisive, even fateful influence on him. Marcel Gerbohay was highly intelligent and charismatic. But he was also a fantasist, and possibly a schizophrenic. Despite being born in the most modest of surroundings, he convinced himself that his mysterious father, who had died in his infancy, was related to the Romanovs.
⁵⁸
(He would later claim to be the illegitimate son of Charles de Gaulle.) While studying at Saint-Ilan, he suffered hallucinations, delusions, and disorientation, and was held back a year following what appears to have been a minor nervous breakdown. Returning to the seminary in the autumn of 1935, he met Maurice Bavaud.

The relationship that developed between the two has invited much speculation. It may, for example, have had homosexual overtones.
⁵⁹
Certainly Bavaud’s later prison correspondence indicated that, at the very least, he had an extremely intimate friendship, if not an infatuation, with Gerbohay.
⁶⁰
It has also been shown that the developing friendship coincided with a renewed crisis in Gerbohay’s mental condition.
⁶¹

Bavaud and Gerbohay formed a student group, the
Compagnic du Mystère
, where current affairs, among them the merits and demerits of communism and Nazism, were keenly discussed.
As the
soi-disant
son of émigré Russians, Gerbohay was a passionate anti-communist. Bavaud, for his part, had flirted in his youth with the Swiss fascist movement, the
Nationale Front.
⁶²
Yet, peculiarly perhaps, the result of their discussions was that not Stalin but Adolf Hitler was the primary danger to mankind, even an “incarnation of Satan.”
⁶³
Within the group, a number of opinions were represented. Bavaud, for example, appears to have been concerned about Hitler’s persecution of the Catholic Church and the neo-paganism then fashionable in the Nazi movement. Gerbohay, meanwhile, considered Hitler to be too soft on the atheist Soviet Union and longed for him to declare war on Stalin. On one thing they both agreed, however: Hitler had to be removed.

It is unclear at which point the plot graduated from mere student pontificating to become a genuine conspiracy to murder Hitler. But in the summer of 1938, Bavaud left Saint-Ilan for the vacation. He traveled to his family in Neuchâtel and informed them that he would not be returning to Brittany at the end of the summer. He then sought work as a draftsman, read
Mein Kampf
, and began learning German. His plan was to gain access to the Führer by posing as an enthusiastic National Socialist. Later that year, he began to put it into effect.

On 9 October 1938, Maurice Bavaud caught the early morning train out of Neuchâtel. At the family home, he left a short and somewhat Delphic note for his parents, which read: “Do not worry on my account. I am going to make a life for myself.”
⁶⁴
Armed with his copy of
Mein Kampf and
600 Swiss francs stolen from his mother, he was heading for Baden-Baden and the home of distant relatives, the Gutterer family.

He found a cautious but welcoming reception. After looking, in vain, for work, he would go for walks in the neighborhood and write postcards to Gerbohay. Though he posed as an ardent admirer of Hitler, his presence had nonetheless raised eyebrows. His cousin Leopold Gutterer was a senior official in the Propaganda Ministry, and he had told the family to keep clear of the new arrival and had warned that Bavaud was under no circumstances to use him as a reference in his search for work. He also informed the local Gestapo of Bavaud’s arrival.

Whether Bavaud had indeed planned to use cousin Leopold as his entrée to Berlin society—and to Hitler—is unclear, but the latter’s frosty attitude toward him would have convinced him that it was time to move on. So, after only ten days with the Gutterers, Bavaud left Baden-Baden, sending his luggage on to Berlin before taking a train to Basle, where he bought himself a 6.35 mm pistol and ammunition. He then proceeded to Berlin, arriving on the twenty-first.

After finding lodgings, he began his surveillance of the government district, but soon learned that Hitler was at his residence at Berchtesgaden at the time, more than 550 kilometers distant. He then hurried to Upper Bavaria, only to discover that his quarry was now in Munich. Nonetheless, Bavaud spent a couple of days in the region of Hitler’s Berghof, making subtle inquiries about the security of the area and practicing his marksmanship in the woods. By chance, he met a senior policeman, Karl Deckert, who suggested (in all innocence) that, though a personal interview was out of the question, the best opportunity to get close to Hitler would be at the Commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 8 and 9 November.
⁶⁵

Bavaud’s plan was taking shape. On 31 October he traveled north again to Munich, found lodgings, and went about trying to secure himself a seat in one of the temporary grandstands overlooking the procession route. After numerous requests, he finally obtained a complimentary ticket by posing as a Swiss journalist. In the remaining days before the celebrations, he walked the procession route and considered his options. He toyed with the idea of choosing a vantage point and rushing directly into the street to shoot Hitler at close range, but finally opted to remain in the grandstand. Thereafter, he purchased more ammunition and traveled to the Ammersee, west of Munich, to practice his gun skills again.

On the morning of 9 November, he arrived at the grandstand early and found himself a seat in the front row. In his overcoat, he would have felt the cold steel of the loaded pistol. The parade was just hours away.

The parade was a commemoration of the failed Beer Hall
Putsch of 1923. The festivities had begun the previous night with a Hitler address to his veteran comrades at the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall, where the putsch attempt had started. The following morning, just after midday, a procession retraced the steps of the putschists. At its head marched the
Gauleiter
of Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, followed by the
Blutfahne
or “Blood Standard,” a swastika flag from 1923 that had been soaked with the blood of the fallen. Then followed two ranks of the most senior Nazi leaders, with Hitler among them, marching ten abreast. Behind them were arranged thousands of uniformed marchers: groups of “Old Fighters”
(Alte Kämpfer)
and honor guards from the SS, SA, and Hitler Youth. The procession made its way slowly along the prescribed route from the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall to the Feld-herrnhalle, where the putsch had been bloodily halted. As it progressed, it passed numerous pillars, specially erected along the route, bearing the names of the Nazi fallen and topped with an eternal flame. At each one, the procession halted. Heads were bowed, shots rang out, and the names of the movement’s martyrs were solemnly invoked.
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At its climax, the procession reached the Feldherrnhalle, where an honor guard fired sixteen shots. There, Hitler laid a wreath, consoled the widows, and observed a minute’s silence. Then the procession moved on to its final act of homage, at the nearby Königsplatz, where the bronze sarcophagi of the sixteen dead of 1923 were displayed in two classical pantheons. There, Hitler would walk alone among the tombs.

The crowd that gathered to witness this spectacle would have known the exact course and program of the procession from their experience of previous years. They would have gathered many deep at salient points along the route and would have jostled for the best positions. They would have been moved by the military band of the
Leibstandarte
, playing all the Nazi favorites: the “Horst Wessel Song,”
“Das Deutschlandlied,”
and
“Ich hatt’ einen Kamaraden.”
They would have seen the flags fluttering, observed the uniforms and medals gleaming, and heard the incessant drumming of the Hitler Youth. Separating them from the procession was a rank of SA men lining the route and teams of security men flanking the procession itself.

Bavaud had chosen his position well. He was located close to the Holy Ghost Church, at a juncture on the route where the procession slowed to pass through an archway and then turned north toward the Feldherrnhalle. He would have heard the funereal drumming and the blare of the military band, all relayed across the city by loudspeaker. The cacophony would have increased as the head of the procession approached. A ripple of excitement would have passed through the crowd, followed by a hush of expectation.

Bavaud watched as the front rank drew near. He saw Hitler and reached for the weapon in his pocket, poised to fire. But as the crowd around him grew more animated, a forest of right arms was raised, briefly obscuring the target. He tried to pick his moment, but Hitler was closely flanked by Göring and Himmler, and he was denied a clear shot.
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The crowd, the SA guard, and the shifting group of marchers presented him with no opportunity to fire. He thought briefly of rushing the parade, but he doubted that he would get clear of the grandstand before being intercepted. He watched, in pained impotence, as the procession continued past the tribune and turned the corner into the Marienplatz. The chance was gone. Hitler, like history, was turning his back on Maurice Bavaud.

Though thwarted, Bavaud continued to look for an opportunity. That afternoon, he returned to his hotel and forged himself a handwritten letter of introduction from a former French prime minister, addressed to the
Reichskanzler.
The following morning, he set off again for Berchtesgaden armed with his letter and a loaded pistol. Arriving in the early evening, he was stopped at the outermost security picket, at the foot of the Obersalzberg, and asked his business. He duly produced the letter and announced that he had to deliver it personally to the Führer. The guard explained that he would not be permitted to pass, and that in any case Hitler was not in residence. Bavaud returned to Munich the same evening.

The next day he tried again, this time forging a letter from the French nationalist leader Pierre Taittinger on a hired typewriter. On the morning of 12 November, he took the letter to the Nazi
Party headquarters in Munich, the Brown House, where he again asked to see Hitler. He was then accompanied into the building to the office of a party official, who politely but firmly informed him that a personal meeting with Hitler was out of the question, and suggested that he leave the letter with him or send it through the post.