i also have never heard of an attempt on Hitler's life by anyone other that the germans. the us did, however, assassinate Yamamoto Isoroku, and did a very neat job of it at that. i once read a sci-fi story about time travelers going back to kill Hitler, and the disaster that occured when someone succeeded and Hitler's place was taken by someone even more onerous. in the story there was a group of people whose job it was to prevent this assassination, since so many people in the future had that idea that doing away with Hitler was a good thing to do there was practically a queue of would-be assassins. -paul
From cypherpunks-errors@toad.com Thu Sep 5 03:07:59 1996 X-Sender: jimbell@mail.pacifier.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type> : > text/plain> ; > charset="us-ascii"> Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 16:43:23 -0800 To: libernet-d@listserv.rmii.com, nwlibertarians@teleport.com, dnowch2@teleport.com From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> Subject: Browne and foreign tyrants Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com Content-Length: 2362
From: "George D. Phillies" <phillies@WPI.EDU> Subject: Re: Browne & foreign tyrants There is a section of the Geneva Protocols forbidding actions in occupied territories directed against officers of political parties. Under that section, the actions in Somalia against, e.g., the treasurer of General Aidid's political party, were war crimes. No one seems to get very upset.
If there is such a treaty, the US has a long history of ignoring it.
0) Attempts to kill Hitler. I don't think we ever tried this.
And this was a real shame. Over 30 million people died in WWII, directly or indirectly. We knew that Hitler was going to be a problem well before 1936. Think how many could have been saved...
If anything, WWII is excellent proof that AP is a good idea. Stauffenberg was the German who bombed Hitler's meeting in 1944 but failed to kill him. Stauffenberg knew as early as 1942 that Hitler needed to be killed, and a recent "60 Minutes" episode related how hundreds of people knew about this plot.
The reason he failed was that while he was preparing the two bombs in a bathroom, he was interrupted. (The bomb's delay mechamism was acid dissolving a metal.) Rather than being caught, he left one of the briefcases in the bathroom and went to the meeting with only one bomb. Furthermore, he left the bomb at the meeting, but it was pushed behind the heavy table after he left, which shielded Hitler from much of the force of the explosion.
If AP (or at least, some anonymous reward mechanism for Stauffenberg's family) had been available, he would have done "the honorable thing," and walked up to Hitler with the bomb and instantly detonated it right there, resulting in both Hitler's and Stauffenberg's certain death. At least hundreds of thousands or perhaps over a million people would have SURVIVED. As it happened, Stauffenberg's reticence caused not only his death after torture, but also the deaths of well over a hundred coup-plotters, but also the thousands that were yet to die in the last 6+ months of WWII.
Question: Would you kill yourself to save a million lives? Even if you wouldn't, would you change your mind if your heirs would be anonymously paid an extra $10 million dollars or so? I'd say that's a pretty substantial motivation, wouldn't you?
Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com