How many assassination attempts were there on Hitler?

During the early years of Nazi rule, assassination attempts generally remained limited in scope and often relied on chance rather than organisation.

In 1938, Maurice Bavaud was a 22-year-old Swiss theology student who travelled to Germany with the intention of shooting Hitler during a parade that honoured the Beer Hall Putsch.

Bavaud appears to have fallen under the influence of a small Catholic sect associated with a mystic named Marcel Gerbohay, who claimed Hitler would destroy Christianity.

After he positioned himself along the parade route in Munich, he found that Hitler’s position within a group of Nazi officials blocked any clear line of fire.

Eventually, Bavaud abandoned the attempt, though police arrested him days later while he tried to cross the border into Switzerland.

During interrogation, authorities discovered the true purpose of his trip, and the Nazi regime executed him in May 1941 after holding him for nearly two years.

Soon after, a more complicated attempt appears to have unfolded. In 1939, Johann Georg Elser was a carpenter from Württemberg who acted entirely alone and spent several weeks in hiding inside the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, where he secretly installed a time bomb behind the speaker’s podium.

Elser had constructed a mechanical timer that used clock parts, and he hoped that the killing of Hitler would stop the war before it reached the rest of Europe.

Hitler gave his annual address at the site on 8 November, but he unexpectedly cut his speech short and departed thirteen minutes before the bomb exploded.

The blast killed eight people and injured dozens more. That same evening, guards arrested Elser near the Swiss border.

After a long period of solitary confinement and interrogation, he was held without trial until his execution at Dachau in April 1945, just days before the Americans liberated the camp.

By the early 1940s, conspiracies against Hitler had become more carefully organised in several parts of the German state.

From inside the German military, members of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, began to develop coordinated plans that involved senior figures who were increasingly dissatisfied with Hitler’s leadership.

Officers such as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Colonel Hans Oster secretly recruited like-minded colleagues who increasingly believed that Hitler’s continued rule threatened Germany’s survival.

Although many early plots remained in the planning stages, others progressed far enough to place Hitler’s life in direct danger.

Resistance groups also included figures like Helmuth Stieff, who hesitated to act during a key briefing in 1944, and Axel von dem Bussche, whose planned bombing was cancelled when the scheduled demonstration was postponed.

In March 1943, Colonel Henning von Tresckow attempted to assassinate Hitler when he hid explosives inside a box disguised as a gift of Cointreau, and then he placed it on the Führer’s plane after a front-line visit near Smolensk.

Despite careful timing, the device failed to detonate because the cold temperature in the cargo hold slowed the chemical reaction in the British-made pencil detonator.

Once the flight landed without incident, Tresckow and his team retrieved the package before the deception was exposed.

Only days later, a second opportunity arose when Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff volunteered for a suicide bombing attempt during a military exhibition that Hitler attended in Berlin.

As he waited for the ten-minute fuse to trigger, Hitler made a sudden exit after just two minutes.

Gersdorff remained in the hall and defused the bomb inside his coat pockets to avoid detection.

By 1944, as Germany’s military situation grew worse and the Allied invasion of France threatened collapse on the Western Front, anti-Hitler sentiment among senior officers hardened into action.

At the centre of this growing network of conspirators stood General Ludwig Beck and former Mayor of Leipzig Carl Goerdeler.

Another central figure was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a wounded veteran who lost an eye and a hand in North Africa.

Together, they had constructed a plan to remove Hitler and seize power with a modified version of Operation Valkyrie, an emergency continuity-of-government plan that Hitler had authorised primarily to contain civil unrest by foreign labourers or in response to bombing raids.

Their strategy relied on Hitler’s death triggering the rapid occupation of key ministries in Berlin before loyal forces could respond.

On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg carried a briefcase that contained high explosives into the Wolf’s Lair, which was Hitler’s fortified Eastern headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia.

After he armed the device, he placed it under a heavy oak table beside Hitler and left the room.

The bomb detonated at 12:42 p.m., killing four men and severely injuring others.

However, the thick table leg shielded Hitler from the worst of the blast, leaving him shaken but alive.

Because he believed that the explosion had killed Hitler, Stauffenberg flew to Berlin and attempted to activate the coup.

Due to delays in communication and swift confirmation that Hitler had survived, the coup unravelled within hours.

That night, Stauffenberg and several fellow conspirators were arrested and shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock.

In the aftermath of the failed July Plot, the Nazi regime launched a wave of brutal purges.

Over the following weeks, more than 7,000 people were reportedly arrested, many of whom had only indirect connections to the conspirators.

Modern estimates usually place the number of executions or deaths in custody between 4,000 and 5,000.

Trials before the People’s Court turned into shocking performances, where Judge Roland Freisler mocked the accused as they stood before a court that offered no hope of acquittal.

Freisler had become a central figure in these show trials and died during an Allied air raid on 3 February 1945 when a bomb blast hurled a door off its hinges and struck him fatally.

Prominent members of the military resistance, including Oster, Beck, and Canaris, were executed by hanging, strangulation, or firing squad in prisons such as Plötzensee and Flossenbürg.

In the final months of the war, the last attempts to assassinate Hitler never progressed beyond discussions, and by early 1945, he had withdrawn entirely to the Führerbunker in Berlin, surrounded by bodyguards and cut off from direct public exposure.

Earlier volunteers like Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist were people who had offered to carry a suicide bomb in their briefcases and no longer had access to the inner circle.

Although some resistance circles continued to consider last-minute plots, none advanced to action.

As Germany’s military position collapsed and conspirators lacked both time and means, Hitler died by suicide on 30 April 1945 alongside Eva Braun, ending the sequence of failed plots that had tried and failed to reach him.

Across the twelve years of Hitler’s dictatorship, historians have confirmed at least 42 separate assassination attempts, though some scholars argue the total exceeds fifty, which depends on how one defines the seriousness of each effort.

Some originated from lone actors motivated by conscience, while others came from networks of officers and civil servants, along with conservative politicians who believed that Hitler’s removal was the only path to peace.

While none succeeded, each attempt helped to highlight a persistent pattern of resistance that challenged the myth of total loyalty within Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s death came by his own hand, but it followed years of survival that depended less on planning than on remarkable luck and human error.