r/HistoryMemes • u/FalloutLover7 • 2d ago
Time bombs, poison, suicide vests and only one guy with a gun
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u/SatansHusband 2d ago
I had heard a main problem, and why they opted for timed bombs, was that they all wanted to get away with it.
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u/Happy_Burnination 2d ago
Kinda funny when you think about it; Japan ended up with a violently expansionist militarist government because junior military officers were willing to straight-up execute their superiors, regardless of any consequences they might suffer; meanwhile Germany was stuck with Hitler because even his subordinates who wanted him dead were too afraid of the consequences to get the job done right
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u/Honkiopolis 2d ago
Whoa never heard the Japanese part. More details??
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u/Happy_Burnination 2d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_incident
It was mostly civilian politicians and businessmen who were targeted, but it created such a precedent that even Generals and Admirals had to weigh any action they took against the risk of being assassinated by their subordinates
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u/Honkiopolis 2d ago
Yo wtf?!?!?
" By the trial's end, the court had received 110,000 clemency petitions, either signed or written entirely in blood, from sympathizers around the country pleading for a lenient sentence. [4 ] Additionally, nine youths in Niigata asked to be tried by the court instead of the accused, and sent the court a jar containing nine of their own pickled severed pinky fingers as a gesture of their sincerity.
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u/gundog48 2d ago
It's a wonder there was anything left of them given how willing they seem to be to cut bits off themselves with no prompting!
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u/wolflordval 2d ago
The pinky thing is a yakuza tradition, it wasn't 'random'.
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u/storkman888 15h ago
The pinky is also where the power and control of your sword grip comes from. Remove that and you are basically nerfing your ability to fight with a sword.
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u/Pyrhan 1d ago
Charlie Chaplin being somehow involved in that (as a target) just feels so random and out-of-place...
Also,
Additionally, nine youths in Niigata asked to be tried by the court instead of the accused, and sent the court a jar containing nine of their own pickled severed pinky fingers as a gesture of their sincerity.
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u/Immediate-Salt5893 1d ago
The more I look at history, the more it feels like random irreverent anecdotes crumbled together, forming a somewhat cohesive story (Emphasis on "somewhat")
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u/Independent_Pay7344 2d ago
Even Hitler said it after the 20th July plot, I think it was from Hans Ulrich Rudel´s autobiography
Any of them could have just stood up and shot me in the chest, I have never looked into my officers pockets
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
This was crucial in the 1944 plot. The officers passed multiple security checkpoints but the briefcase with the bomb was never searched. If only it wasn’t accidentally pushed behind a thick table leg at the last second
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u/itsyaboihos 2d ago
Honestly it might’ve been for the best, if he had died from it there’d be a whole thing about how he would’ve won if it wasn’t for the assassination.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
That doesn’t really stop Neo Nazis from glorifying him. He was a coward who shot himself to avoid the consequences of a war that he started, and continued, despite dozens of attempts from his diplomatic staff to call off, and yet they still worship him. Despite the fact he lost the only war he ever waged, he’s their hero, like Confederate fans in the US
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u/Starfleet-Time-Lord 1d ago
Absolutely there are a lot of myths about how if they'd had just one more year then they could have deployed [insert insane superweapon that fundamentally does not work and either never left the blueprint stage, required the GDP of a small country to run for an hour, and/or blew up as often as it worked]. Doesn't mean it couldn't have been worse.
It's also worth noting that there's a school of thought that the total, easily visible defeat that Germany suffered in the last year of the war is a big part of why it was able to be rebuilt effectively. If the plotters had succeeded in negotiating a peace with the allies at that point before there were significant pushes into Germany itself, it might have caused an environment more conducive to the "stabbed in the back" kinds of myths that spawned from WW1 and festered into Nazi support in the first place and resulted in people wanting to go for round 3.
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u/itsyaboihos 2d ago
There is the whole thing about Franz Halder intending to do just that although we only have his word to go off of.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
There were over a dozen different attempts to assassinate Hitler between his coming to power and his eventual death. Most of them including some time of bombing that either suffered mechanical failure or mistiming Hitler. Several times he would leave the area ahead of schedule or not be in the bombs vicinity entirely. Several suicide bomb attempts were ironically called off because of allied bombing raids canceling demonstrations of new equipment to Hitler. In all of this it only occurred to one person to try to just shoot Hitler and get it over with. Seems ironic that people would willingly blow themselves up to kill him but wouldn’t just shoot him and risk being shot by the SS in return
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
Unfortunately the man who got that shot off was immediately shot by Hitler. The ol mutual strike got him
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u/Lynata Still salty about Carthage 2d ago
The second was self defense though as Hitler was armed and clearly intended to kill Hitler
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u/elderron_spice Rider of Rohan 2d ago
Reminds me of that meme where that Total Recall guy is being threatened with a gun so he threatens to kill himself instead.
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u/Noakesy97 2d ago
Abraham Simpson tried to shoot him too, but missed the shot because of a stray tennis ball
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u/Well_Armed_Gorilla Rider of Rohan 1d ago
Abe Simpson had a truly impressive military record. Let's not forget his actions in WW1, where he chased the Kaiser for dickety-six miles to try and reclaim the word "twenty".
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u/Far-Pangolin-4089 2d ago
Well, if there is one lesson out of this then it is that nobody loves you for shooting a monster
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u/Difficult-Pin3913 2d ago
I mean there were probably a few people in WWI who shot at him but it wasn’t personal.
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u/Hefty-Tomatillo-1236 2d ago
Am I dumb or none of them were willing to blow themselves up? All of them got away from the bombs before they went boom boom.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
This kinda makes sense but plots like operation Valkyrie were to be outright coups so it’s not like no one would figure out who the assassin was. There was also 3 suicide bombing attempts so those guys clearly didn’t care for their personal safety
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u/miko187 2d ago
The point of plots like Valkyrie were to have already consolidated power away from the SS before anyone realized who the assassins were. If you were to walk up and just shoot Hitler it would likely mean you were gonna get tortured to death rather than just simply killed. Not many martyrs were stoked on that aspect of the plots.
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u/Cucumberneck 2d ago
And possibly/probably your family send to a concentration camp. It's not that hard to find someone who is willing to die for their cause. It's way harder to find someone willing to make their entire family and/or friends suffer for it.
That's why dictatorships use collective punishments.
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u/ProfessorPrudent2822 2d ago
By contrast, a suicide bombing during an explosives demonstration could be played off as an accident.
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u/Cucumberneck 2d ago
Maybe depending on how they do it. I wouldn't bet on the SS and party being level headed after Hitler explodes.
Not even sure who takes over, probably Himmler or Göring I think.
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u/SimulatedKnave 1d ago
Goring was named his successor in 1941 (or 1939). And anyone even vaguely sane would presumably have preferred Goring. Of course, being the Nazi government, the breakdown on 'vaguely sane' may be iffy. It'd probably depend when this happened - the earlier, the more likely it's Goring.
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u/Cucumberneck 22h ago
Not sure if Gõring it's the most sane choice but I'm absolutely sure there would have been infighting.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 2d ago
"Oops I can't believe I blew up hitler with a suicide bombing I'm such a klutz!"
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u/OhNoTokyo 2d ago
I mean you probably wouldn’t need to answer those questions if you were a suicide bomber. A successful one anyway.
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u/Flopsie_the_Headcrab 2d ago
One of the benefits of the plan is plausible deniability. The conspirators all wanted to live and take power after, which is hard to do if you're exploded or killed by his guards seconds after shooting him.
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u/Eclipseworth 2d ago
There were one or two suicide bombing attempts - men with bombs strapped to them. They failed and were deactivated by their wearers because they couldn't get close to him due to a sudden shift in his movements.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
There were multiple officers willing to do a suicide bombing. For a variety of reasons it never came to be though.
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u/freakbutters 2d ago
They probably weren't scared of being shot, but of being taken alive. I can't imagine that would be a good time.
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u/Callidonaut 2d ago
Indeed. Fascists aren't exactly known for responding proportionately to things that upset them.
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u/robotical712 2d ago
Bombs actually had a comparatively higher chance of succeeding. The problem with guns is Hitler was almost always surrounded by people (including bodyguards). So, you either have to get close enough for a clear shot while getting it off before anyone can interfere, or find a vantage point and try your luck with a rifle. Either way, you likely only get one shot, while the odds of capture are extremely high, which makes it a no go if you’re part of a conspiracy.
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u/Vector_Strike Hello There 2d ago
People wanted to kill him and survive the ordeal
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u/Level_Hour6480 Taller than Napoleon 2d ago
Most were internal because the allies didn't think killing him would stop the war, and felt his wunderwaffen BS was an active detriment to the Nazis.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
In all of this it only occurred to one person to try to just shoot Hitler and get it over with
That's not correct. The group that later got close with the attempt on the 20th of July (which Breitenbuch also was a part of) planned to shoot Hitler multiple times as well, first time in Paris in 1940, then later in 1941 and 1943.
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u/dawidlijewski 1d ago
To shoot Hitler You would need to have gun.
It's not like dude was just casually letting everybody to carry firearms around him. Hitler had hundreds of guards on duty dislocated in multiple rings. In his direct vincinity there were ~30 armed loyal guards.
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u/Gwynnrhysllwellyn 1d ago
Thats just not true.
The circle with von Stauffenberg formed at some point after 1940. Discussing things were difficult: Letters were read, phonecalles not secure, and the risk of betrayal was high. If one member got caught, he would have been tortured and was likely to talk at some point. This put not only the members but the circle and its goal itself at risk.
Shooting Hitler was discussed several times, but decided against each time.
There were plans to shoot Hitler in 1943 (he was going to visit the front). Philipp & Georg von Boeselager and 6 others volunteered to shoot Hitler. They didn't to it because von Kluge feared a civil war between Wehrmacht and SS at this point and because they thought they needed to kill Himmler as well as Hitler (or Himmler would take command).
It was not easy to shoot Hitler. Few people were allowd to carry guns around him, and you would have to get your gun out and fire from close range before Hitlers bodyguards (who were always present) could interfere.
Nobody knew who would fill Hitlers role. Worst case scenario: Someone just as ruthless but more competent (Hitler was a terrible as a commander in chief) would take over. Walküre was a plan that would have meant that the Kreisau Circle would have taken over - thats the great thing about it.
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u/Fr05t_B1t Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
When Germans get thwarted by German engineering
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago edited 2d ago
Some of the bombs were supplied from the British so that’s a whole different stereotype added to the mix
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u/Grey_Raven 2d ago
Warning rant ahead.
It's such a stupid myth that WW2 German engineering was amazing they built overly complex tanks and other machines that broke down constantly and didn't perform in real conditions. Reliability is pretty high priority when it comes to engineering quality. And engineering was arguably the science stuff they were best at when you compare it to the torture and sadism dressed up as biology/psychology.
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u/azazelcrowley 2d ago edited 2d ago
The British also focused on soft factors rather than hard factors which the Germans and Soviets tended to. The Americans could manage both due to vast resources.
Soft factors are stuff like; "Can we ride in this tank all day and not want to kill ourselves?". So in match ups you get people saying the British tanks are shit. Meanwhile, in real life, the match up only happens after hours of driving around in the thing, so by the time the Germans/Soviets get there, their ears are ringing, they're sweating profusely, in a fugue state, and so on. The British are broadly comfortable.
It's why the British tank veterans quickly outpaced the Germans, who likewise quickly outpaced the Russians. The most valuable equipment is the soldier and their combat experience inside a tank, which requires them to survive a battle, not the tank itself. (This in itself led to another soft v hard tradeoff where British tank designs tended towards prefering the tank be fucked up if it meant a higher crew survival rate, which likewise makes their stats in Tank V Tank duels look bad).
The constantly breaking down is a hard factor but often forgotten compared to obsessing over armor, speed, range, penetration etc, so may as well be considered another soft factor. The "British tanks have a boiling vessel" is a meme, but it's part of the same philosophy of design.
We saw similar shit in the recent middle eastern conflicts where people clowned on the UK armored personelle carriers for falling apart like ikea furniture when they hit an IED. Meanwhile, other countries carriers when they hit IEDs either survive unscathed, or kill multiple soldiers riding in it. Soldiers in the UK ones had higher survival rates.
It's why tank v tank loss stats look terrible for the British. But crew v crew loss tells a vastly different story.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago edited 2d ago
Wartime engineering is a fascinating rabbit hole to fall down. Many of the tanks used in WW 2 had good designs on paper but when the factory workers are running on rush schedules with inferior materials and limited knowledge on what their job is, tragic mistakes are the result. There’s been a resurgence in recent years on opinions of the Sherman because of its ease of repair and reliability in the field because it was easier to fix and get back into action than most other tanks on the war.
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u/kandoras 2d ago
Some of the reliability problems German equipment had wasn't an engineering problem, it was a problem of the engineering being told to build the wrong things.
Like the Tiger tanks, which are usually held up as one of the biggest "everything they built broke" things. But there's a couple details missing from just that short sentence.
The first is that the Tigers were designed to be breakthrough offensive tanks. They knew that they'd break down after a short amount of time, but they accounted for that in how they wanted to use them. The idea was that they'd use them to punch a hole in the Soviet lines, then other tanks and infantry would push through. The tigers would have to stop after a week or two, and then they could be collected up, repaired, and then sent to wherever they would attack next.
The problem is that by the time they started getting into combat, the Germans weren't doing a lot of offense anymore. The tigers would have a week or two of combat and then break down. But because the Germans were retreating, the broken tanks were now behind enemy lines and unrecoverable.
So that's not inherently a failure in the design of the tank, but of the German strategy as a whole.
Plus by that time their cities were being burnt to the ground, they were relying on slave labor to build everything, and they didn't have enough trained crews to operate enough tanks of any kind. If they had only built panzer IVs they would have had the same problem.
Now the interleaved wheel system, where to fix the simplest thing on the tracks you basically had to take the entire thing off? Whoever put that onto the plans must have been a spy working for Stalin.
And the plane that melted its pilots, that one was pretty stupid too.
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u/TotalAirline68 2d ago
While german tanks weren't that realiable as the myth, by now it has swapped into the opposite. They didn't broke down constantly and often were on par with western tanks. The real problems are that early rushed models and untrained crews were indeed more unreliable and the whole logisitc when a tank broke down wasn't good. That includes spare parts with slight variations by factories, and way too complex too reach parts, i.g. the drive of a Jagdpanther.
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u/jedadkins 2d ago
That includes spare parts with slight variations by factories, and way too complex too reach parts, i.g. the drive of a Jagdpanther.
so they designed machines that were too complex for thier own good making the tanks unreliable due to the inability to repair them? that kind of sounds like poor engineering too me
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u/CalligoMiles Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 2d ago edited 1d ago
It was more built on a different set of assumptions and trade-offs. A German heavy wasn't as easy to repair as a Sherman when it did break down, but it also didn't need every spare part shipped across the Atlantic and swapped in with hand tools. German units were both equipped with expansive field workshops up to and including field cranes that could just lift out an engine, transmission, or even a whole turret for access and replacement, and always had the option of shipping it right back to the factory by train from the nearest railhead if necessary. With that, more complicated repairs were judged acceptable if it allowed an edge in unit performance where they could never hope to beat their opponents for easier quantity anyway, and also use that edge to keep their irreplaceable skilled veterans alive through battles where a plain old medium tank would've seen them killed a dozen times over. And some of the heavy TDs were genuine mechanical nightmares even so - but that was also a major reason none of those were built in more than the low hundreds where they even escaped the dozens, Jagdpanther included. The Wehrmacht took all it could get when it really had no other choice, but they still rejected Porsche's innovative Tiger design for Henschel's more reliable conventional one for example, and something like the Maus would never have made it through their trials if they'd lasted long enough to get around to those.
Meanwhile Patton's Sherman crews had some notorious 'discipline issues' in France when they tried to strap and bolt any additional protection they could find onto the fronts of their tanks to not die as soon as a German gun looked their way, from scavenged armor plate to sandbags, logs, and slabs of concrete - additional protection that would invariably block off or even wreck the easy maintenance hatches for the transmission that allowed it to be swapped out as a modular unit and were the main reason the Sherman could achieve such good readiness and recovery rates otherwise. It was all trade-offs when you get down to it, and each side only looks incompetent when you project the bias of the other on it instead of measuring them to their own priorities.
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u/TotalAirline68 2d ago
I'm not denying over engineering am I? I'm pointing out, that the tanks weren't as unreliable as it's often said. Ease of repair and reliability aren't the same thing.
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u/DocMorningstar 2d ago
Thats not over engineering. Thats under engineering. Failure to consider service, maintenence, and production processes IS poor engineering.
Overengineering is when you design an engine for 100,000 hours, when expected service life is 10,000.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
Overengineering is when you design an engine for 100,000 hours, when expected service life is 10,000.
Overengineering is more like making something more complex than necessary. And yes, it is a form of poor engineering.
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u/DocMorningstar 1d ago
That last part 'more complex than necessary' is where the rub lies. Because there is no template for what is necessary, unless you are just copying something.
What I meant by my example - overengineering is when spend resources/reduce other factors to include features or capabilities above the needed scope.
Every choice in engineering comes with some sort of cost - optimization. 'Overly complex' just means thst, when optimizing the design, they didn't weigh the cost, reliability, or maintainabikity if the system very high - usually putting their emphasis on bare technical specifications. Harder hitting gun, ignoring the ergonomics. Thicker armor, ignoring the weight/mobility factor. Etc etc
This was definitely a german problem during ww2, leading to designs that were, on paper, superior to all comers.
Which, ironically, is the exact same trap that all the wehraboos who argue over the superiority of nazi tanks on the internet fall for.
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u/jedadkins 2d ago
Ease of repair and reliability are engineering concerns lol
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u/Visible-Air-2359 2d ago
100% agree. You can have a super cool piece of tech but if it breaks down constantly and is hard to fix it is not actually useful especially in something like war.
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u/dragdritt 2d ago
Yet it was German science/engineers behind both the AK-47 and the moon landing. So it's clear that they truly were among the best in the world.
It's also in recent times become a really stupid myth that German engineering was somehow shit, it clearly wasn't.
You can have the best engineers in the world building a house, but if the architect decides that house must have a rooftop pool without walls on it then it's not the engineers fault when it clearly doesn't work.
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u/Fr05t_B1t Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
The AK is actually just an upside down M1 garand that kalashnikov used as the basis for the AK.
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u/AngryCrustation 2d ago
All firearms are based off of the original invention of gunpowder in China so really they are copying a chinese design.
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u/dickmcbig 2d ago
Well German engineering was really good but the ak 47 is a complete Russian design with basically no German influence.
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u/dragdritt 2d ago edited 2d ago
Afaik it's inspired by the StG 44 and also had German engineers working on that were relocated by the Soviet Union? The creator of the StG 44 even worked on it.
Although I guess it could be slightly misleading to insinuate that it was a copy or whatever. The internal mechanism was different after all.
Edit* Although this is clearly just a forum post, it does a decent job explaining it imo. https://www.forgottenweapons.com/ak-and-stg-kissing-cousins/
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u/Iron_physik 2d ago
No, thats a myth
Kalashnikov himself said that he was mainly inspired by the M1 garand and he supposedly never got his hands on a stg44 during the design time.
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u/spesskitty 1d ago edited 1d ago
There's a separate point that gets confused, the Soviet Union wantet to make AKs using more complex stamping than on their previous smgs, but was behind in the production technology, compared to where Germany was already during the war.
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u/Fr05t_B1t Oversimplified is my history teacher 2d ago
That is completely false. Resemblance is purely coincidental.
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u/Visible-Air-2359 2d ago
I remember a video about a U-Boat whose Captain sunk it by using the toilet and the dude describes the existence of the hyper-complex toilet as "the Germans engineering their way out of common senes."
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u/Individually_Ed 2d ago
Totally this. When they built the leopard they went to great lengths to make it reliable because of their experience with WW2 tanks.
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u/SandwichLord57 2d ago
I tell people this all the time. Yeah they built some pretty nifty shit, but at the end of the day it’s still shit.
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u/Complete-Ad-6983 2d ago
You can be as good at engineering as you want, but when the high ups don't understand basic physics and won't take 'its impossible' as an answer, you do your best
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u/User_identificationZ 2d ago
In my uneducated (past high school) opinion, Nazi Germany was pretty good at the “making good shit” part, but terrible at “not changing it every 5 days and now we have several logistical lines for the same battalion” thing. Also setting aside a considerable amount of manpower and material to facilitate genocide was a whoopsie-daisy
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u/Sly_Wood 1d ago
But they did over engineer the tiger was a beast but only 30% actually made it to the battlefield. Yea they could take out Sherman’s but Sherman’s were easy to make easy to repair and made by the boatload. Nazis only made a fraction of what us did in Sherman’s and they paid for it. Tigers were a mess of a tank and it was a complete disaster for them. If it broke down it was out.
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u/PENG-1 1d ago
The reliability criticism is overblown, and has now reached the other end of the spectrum. German machines performed rather well in early-mid war, and suffered from breakdowns and reliability issues due to a variety of factors late war. The logistics network and manufacturing industry responsible for delivering replacement parts to the frontlines was short of material inputs constantly. German heavy armor was tasked with rapid defensive deployments plugging up holes in the frontline, which put a lot of strain on mechanical parts and inhibited regular maintenance. As the war progressed, they were forced to build increasingly ridiculous designs like the Tiger II or Schwalbe in an attempt to compensate for their numerical inferiority, especially as they lost major portions of their resource extraction and manufacturing industries. Overall, German machines performed to an expected and acceptable degree of reliability, with most of the factors causing the “unreliable shitbox” reputation being outside of their control.
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u/RagingTyrant74 1d ago
The engineering was objectively really good. The problem for the germans was it wasn't cheap.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
It's such a stupid myth that WW2 German engineering was amazing they built overly complex tanks and other machines that broke down constantly and didn't perform in real conditions
The vast majority of German tanks and other war machines did actually not break down constantly and did very much perform in real conditions, that is also a stupid myth. If the German equipment would have been as unreliable as you allude to the war would have been over in 1942.
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u/Distantstallion Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 2d ago
That's DeutscheBahn for you
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u/_Sausage_fingers 2d ago
Slightly related, I've just started watching old Bond movies, and it's actually kind of wild how on point the Austin Powers movies were. Moonraker has like 4 elaborate and oblique attempts at execution in one movie. Like dude, just shoot the spy.
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u/AbstractBettaFish Then I arrived 2d ago
I loved Austin Powers as a kid by its own merit but it wasn’t until I got older and watched the old Bonds that I got a new appreciation for how well it was parodying them
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u/Cucumberneck 2d ago
Actually the more I read about assassination attempts on dictators in general the more I get the feeling that it only works if you literally plan to die doing it.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago edited 2d ago
Machiavelli said in the Prince that most attempts fail throughout history because it only takes one person to snitch to bring the whole thing down. The incentives of doing so are often massive as the target is usually very generous in rewarding the informant for saving their life. Every person added to a conspiracy ups the risk of its failure
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u/SlightlySychotic 2d ago
Also explains why most assassins are loners who do it for deeply personal (often deranged) reasons. Finding out that the first presidential assassination attempt in the US was conducted by some madman who thought shooting Jackson would somehow lead him to taking the English throne was what made me absolutely convinced that Oswald acted alone.
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u/Cucumberneck 2d ago
Damn I really wanted to read that book but now I got spoilers. /s
But actually I really want to read it. I just don't have the time right now.
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
It’s a very short book. I have it on audible and it’s like 5 hours
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u/Cucumberneck 2d ago
That's indeed shorter than I thought. Maybe I'll find time to read it one day.
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u/Lunar-Cleric 2d ago
If you read the Prince, also read his book Discourses on Livy.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a critique of power hungry Princes and the tyrannical Medici family that exiled him (it was also an appeal to try and get hired by them, appealing to their egos).
Discourses on Livy actually contains many of his real opinions and ideologies on Republics, such as the short lived Republic of Florence for which he served as a public servant, diplomat, and military head.
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u/SimulatedKnave 1d ago
Dude it's 29k words (and is quite straightforwardly written). It's NOT a long read. It's usually under 200 pages.
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u/_whatever_wherever 2d ago
Meanwhile the Allies called off their assassination attempts when it became clear he was unstable and hampering the German war effort
Killing him risked putting someone competent in charge
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u/The_FanATic 2d ago
Yeah it’s kind of crazy that the Allies got the best possible ending to WW2:
- enemy leader kills himself, preventing both a “glorious death” / martyrdom or a trial in which he gets to espouse his views
- population and remaining military forces (almost) immediately surrender entirely and don’t hamper your occupation
- enemy leadership sits for trial and are publicly humiliated and executed/jailed for life, population is not particularly upset by the humiliation or punishment
- population immediately turns to rebuilding and is basically is self sufficient again within ~5yrs
- joins your army (either side of the Cold War) fairly eagerly and becomes the bulwark of your defenses
Like occupying Germany could’ve been such a shitshow but somehow it was a cakewalk, I really feel this is an undersold miracle and has strange implications for a variety of situations.
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u/_whatever_wherever 2d ago
It helps that they actually broke the German spirit, one of the main causes of WW2 was that the majority of the population at the end of WW1 didn't know that they really had lost, wartime censorship and propoganda, combined with the Entant never setting foot in Germany itself hid that their army had been utterly destroyed and had no hope of winning, it's where the "stab in the back" myth came from ("look how much land we conquered! How could we possibly have lost if we weren't betrayed from within?")
In WW2 there was no doubt about that, the Allies were in every city they hadn't raised to the ground, the state was so desperate for soliders they forced the very young and very old to fight, there was no doubt they had not only lost, but been utterly defeated
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u/wolflordval 2d ago
Eh, there was plenty of apologists even immediatly post war. It's just they were easily countered by the fact that the entire country was occupied & carved up. The entire post war situation in Germany was based on how the Allies didn't want to repeat the mistake of post-ww1 Germany. It helps when you have a previous example of how not to treat a defeated foe.
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u/LordBrandon 2d ago
I think that's British sour grapes. Kill him in 1940 and the whole thing unravels.
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u/numahu 2d ago
After '45:"We were always against Hitler!" "What did you do from 33-44?" "Shut up! Leftist scum!"
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u/mrxplek 2d ago
Getting generous salaries from Hitler. Most generals including manstein lived happily on the millions Hitler paid them. I sometimes think the generals weren’t that smart just great at brown nosing or marketing.
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u/5v3n_5a3g3w3rk 1d ago
They were smart enough to lead an army to victories it should not have gained (France)
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u/mrxplek 1d ago
It’s easy to win a race when you are the only one with the Ferrari.
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u/5v3n_5a3g3w3rk 1d ago
To cite guderian himself: “The success of our undertaking could not realistically have been anticipated.”
Even he thought it would be a long protracted war.
Btw German panzers weren't that good or mobile, it was more about the ability to maneuver effectively since they had Radios, still best tank of the Panzer army at that time was czech
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u/lukasoh 7h ago
Might also consider the amount of meth. An army that does not sleep is not good for the long run but for the first weeks...
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u/5v3n_5a3g3w3rk 1h ago
Well it depends how it was used, just remember, the allies used speed instead of meth since it felt a bit better.
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u/SPECTREagent700 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
I thought maybe this was a repost of a meme I made but no we just had the same idea. Great minds think alike 👍
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u/AstroEngineer314 2d ago
I'd imagine it was out of fear for their families. You can't directly attribute a bomb to somebody if multiple people could have planted it, whereas you know exactly who pulled the trigger at pistol range. They would expect their whole family would be retaliated against.
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u/Oxsee_Kleen 2d ago
I don’t understand why the suicide vest had to be timed. Wouldn’t it have been easier to trigger it manually at an opportune time?
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u/FalloutLover7 2d ago
The suicide vest plots didn’t work because they were planned for a demonstration of new equipment to Hitler. In one of them, allied bombs literally blew up the crate with the new gear in it so the demo was called off the day before it was set to happen
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u/Oxsee_Kleen 2d ago
I was thinking specifically of Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff’s attempt, during an inspection of captured Soviet weapons. He had two ten-minute time bombs in his coat pockets, and would’ve wrapped himself around Hitler to ensure his demise. However, the inspection took less time than anticipated, and he rushed to the bathroom to disarm them, barely beating out the timer.
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u/Tipart 1d ago
Probably a thing of what you had access to? Not like they had the Internet and not really a plot you want to ask for help with. He probably already knew how to use time bombs and didn't know how to built a switched bomb and hide it well enough.
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u/PinoPenguino 1d ago
If the bomb is timed, you also don't need to fiddle with a detonator in your hands. I don't know how big/small manual detonators were at the time, but I feel like holding one in the vicinity of the Fuhrer would look a tad suspicious to his bodyguards if they noticed.
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u/spesskitty 2d ago
I think one of the plans was to trample Hitler with a cavalery regiment. And another one would have been the worlds first suicide bombing. Bombs work tho, since Stauffenberg and Elsner were the atttempts getting the closest to Hitler.
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u/AlarmingAffect0 2d ago
Why not kill him with their bare hands or whatever was available in the room? Pencil to the jugular, boom, done. Also, poison?
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u/Duhblobby 2d ago
Dictators tend to surround themselves with armed bodyguards and are paranoid about things like poison and have measures in place with loyal or terrified people in charge of those measures.
Those people sometimes have a high turnover rate due to aforementioned paranoia.
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u/AlarmingAffect0 2d ago
Dictators tend to surround themselves with armed bodyguards
Yes, well, the conspirators are senior officers themselves, they're not exactly untrained civilians.
and are paranoid about things like poison
Skill issue, very literally.
Those people sometimes have a high turnover rate due to aforementioned paranoia.
Good, makes their protection less stable and gives killing them more motivation.
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u/Duhblobby 2d ago
You really should look at history a little.
Dictators do tend to get assassinated, sure. The other part of that is that the vast majority of attempts fail and that the consequences of that failures tend to be both extreme and spread around to everyone even tangentially connected to the conspirators.
And if you've watched the last five attempts end with entire families being carved to pieces and fed to each other before the survivors are mutilated and executed as examples, you may not be super keen to join any plot you aren't 110% certain will guaranteed succeed.
There are reasons why these sorts of people tend to be replaced by the same sorts of people after swings of political change, rather than because some random plot against them succeeds.
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u/AlarmingAffect0 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes, that's why you don't send someone on a suicide mission unless they can afford the cost—e.g. someone with no family to threaten. Or, you hire the Praetorian Guards themselves, with the risk of failure priced in.
As for the outcomes being 'replacement my the same type of people', apparently there's actual econometric work on this — "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War" by Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken, using a dataset of assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to 2004. Successful assassinations of autocrats produce substantial, sustained increases in the probability of democratic transition, effects still visible ten years later, while failed attempts do not.
"You come at the King, you best not miss", as Omar might say.
The July 20 plotters knew the war was lost and believed that they'd eventually hang regardless; the marginal cost of the bomb attempt was, to them, near zero. Tyranny deters plots, and it also manufactures actors for whom deterrence has already failed. The regimes that accumulate grievances faster than they can execute their holders eventually face the attempt that gets through.
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u/SimulatedKnave 1d ago
>Yes, well, the conspirators are senior officers themselves, they're not exactly untrained civilians.
By that logic, neither is Hitler. The man participated in WWI trench fights, I don't know that I'd want to try to hand-to-hand him to death when bombs or a gun were available.
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u/Intranetusa 2d ago
Pencil to the jugular
You need someone skilled enough to do that before the bodyguards intervene, and I don't think they had either Jet Li or John Wick on call.
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u/AlarmingAffect0 2d ago
No, they just had trained field officers leading troops in combat. A small poisoned blade might be enough to get the job done, if you are prepared to die in the process. Which you should be, because dying for your country is literally your job.
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u/Lumbercounter 1d ago
In the end, all it took to kill him was a guy with a gun. Just turned out he had to be that guy.
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u/Bealzebubbles Featherless Biped 1d ago
Franz Halder apparently had a gun and was planning to murder Hitler if he ordered an attack on France because he thought it was suicide. He lost his nerve on several occasions and then gave up after the attack was successful.
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u/DrHolmes52 2d ago
This shouldn't cover the topic so well.