Newly released top secret documents reveal the British seriously considered assassinating Hitler

By WENDELL STEAVENSON /LONDON

he second World War in Europe has always seemed analogous to its instigator. Hitler was the war; without him there could have been peace. It was a view even a section of the German army appeared to subscribe to when a group of officers tried to assassinate him with a suitcase bomb in July 1944. Get rid of the problem and the war will be solved. It was also a theory the British considered--apparently seriously--as revealed in documents released by the Public Records Office in London last week.

The documents, comprising some 1,000 top secret files of the Special Operation Executive (SOE), paint an extraordinary picture of the low-tech ingenuity of British efforts to destabilize the Third Reich. In addition to Operation Foxley, which catalogued ways of killing the Fuhrer, the files contain scurrilous reports on the sex lives of leading Nazis, one on a German Jew parachuted into Germany to sabotage a factory making components for the V-2 rocket, and forged official letters sent to ordinary Germans with false reports of the deaths or difficulties of their sons in the army. One scheme involved mailing letters with a stamp featuring the face of Heinrich Himmler instead of Hitler's to discredit the Reich's Minister of the Interior. The world's newspapers picked up on the anomaly and suggested the stamps had been part of preparation for a coup. The Nazi regime was forced to announce that the stamps had been issued "in error"--blaming the British would have sounded incredible.

The 120-page dossier outlining Operation Foxley reads like an implausible thriller. Poisoning Hitler's milk was considered, then discarded because of the danger that someone else might drink it first. There were proposals to blow up his train, hit his bulletproof Mercedes with a bazooka or send a sniper to shoot him as he took his morning walk at Berchtesgaden, his Bavarian mountain retreat. Pages of intelligence on his routine and his security measures include minutiae such as "The posthouse is run by a Party member (who wears a gold party badge) with three girl assistants, one clerk and a postman who lost his arm in the last war."

Winston Churchill was kept informed, but there was continuing debate as to whether killing Hitler was a good idea. Major General Colin Gubbins, who instigated Operation Foxley in June 1944, found that the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, was lukewarm. Other members of SOE were divided. Air Vice Marshal A.P. Ritchie argued that Hitler's almost mythical persona sustained the German people, writing, "Remove Hitler and there's nothing left." But a Major Field-Robinson felt there would be a danger of making Hitler a martyr, and that he was such a disastrous commander that it was in the Allies' interest to keep him in power. "As a strategist," he commented, "Hitler has been of the greatest possible assistance to the British war effort." His replacement by competent generals could be counterproductive. As plans for organizing a successful assassination became bogged down and the internal debate raged, the war ended in on Berlin. Hitler ultimately committed suicide in his bunker as the Soviets approached, and historians can only ponder the hypothetical. How different an enemy would Germany have been without its Fuhrer?