Justification for the report recently published in the London Daily Herald that high Nazi officials were plotting to stage a fake Hitler assassination-attempt and blame a Jew for it in order to divert the public’s attention from the tottering state of the regime, was seen today in reports that Nazi agents were busy tracking down rumors that an attempt on Hitler’s life has been made.
Early this week the Herald in a front-page, heavily headlined story, revealed details of the following plot that was being fomented by the Nazis:
JEW TO BE “GOAT”
A Jew was to be cornered in an “attempt” on der Fuehrer’s life and fatally shot while trying to “escape” capture. The mock assassination, with a live Jew as the fatal prey of the ensuing chase, was to have been enacted this month, according to the story. Its enactment was deferred when the regime decided that the Hitler-Mussolini tete-a-tete, the Goebbels junket to Warsaw and the Hanfstaengl trip to the United States would provide the public with sufficient distraction for the time being.
However, with the sudden sensational turn that events have taken since the von Papen blast at the Nazis, revival of this plot is expected. The original informant who disclosed existence of the mock assassination is a German of importance and integrity, according to the Herald’s correspondent.
GOERING AUTO TARGET
Thus far, however, the reports of the supposedly actual attempt on Hitler’s life has not been connected with a Jew. Tracking the rumors down, they have simmered down to one fact. This is, that an unknown person on Wednesday took a pot shot at one of the automobiles en route to the funeral services of Frau Karin Goering, wife of the Premier of Prussia and a government minister.
The bullet, according to the best information available, was not fired on the road Hitler took to the funeral and was not intended for any high Nazi official.
Whether, from this meagre fact, the Nazi officials who have proved their ingenuity in the past at building ominous mountains out of Jewish molehills, will be able to build up that Jewish-assassin-plot, remains to be seen. Those who are acquainted with their ability in this respect expect the Jewish angle to creep into the affair momentarily.
POGROMS FEARED
What the development of such a plot, which ranks with the best that Herr Julius Streicher has been able to concoct and place at the door of the Jews, would mean to German Jewry is indicated in a statement made earlier in the year by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi secret police.
Himmler declared that if a shot were fired at Hitler, unprecedented pogroms would immediately break out in Germany. According to the Herald story early this week, this statement of Himmler’s would form the basis of the mock assassination. As a result of it, the newspaper declared, the Nazi regime was on the verge of taking measures that such a shot would be fired.
General anti-Semitic hysteria following the slaying of “the Jewish would-be assassin trying to escape” would succeed in rekindling the popular enthusiasm for Hitler and place him at least in the almost-a-martyr class.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
