The Foxley Report: Secret Operations in World War Two

Total war

Geoffrey Household's popular thriller Rogue Male, concerning an Englishman's attempt on Hitler's life, was published as early as 1939. As it turned out, World War Two witnessed only a limited number of such political assassinations, which is perhaps surprising considering the immense scale and barbarity of the conflict.

This was a war of nations, but also of personalities, and with states fighting for their very existence, one might have expected a greater incidence of leading political and military figures being targeted for elimination. The British Commando attack on General Rommel's headquarters in North Africa in November 1941, and the US fighter ambush of the aircraft carrying Admiral Yamamoto in April 1943, however, emerge as exceptions to the general rule.

Nevertheless the removal from the war of pivotal figures - such as Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler - frequently feature among the most popular 'What Ifs' of history. And during the war assassination plans were frequently prepared - notable among these was a German scheme to attack the Allied leaders when they attended a conference in Teheran in November 1943.

Killing Hitler?

The Foxley Report illustration that traces Hitler's walk from the Berghof to the Teahaus  © The Allied leaders in general had little experience of being an assassin's target, but Hitler's long background of political violence resulted in his being the subject of some 30 assassination plots before 1939, and there were more than a dozen planned or attempted during the war. These ranged from the attempt of the quintessential lone gunman, Maurice Bavaud, in 1938, to complex conspiracies such as the July Plot of 1944, organised by German military leaders, which came within a hair's breadth of success.

Both before and during World War Two it was Hitler's fellow countrymen who strove hardest to eliminate him. His British, American and Soviet foes seem to have devoted little thought, and even less action, to planning the assassination of their nemesis. Since such a project had not secured support when Hitler was in the ascendant, and when Nazi Germany's fortunes seemed to be boundless, it might have been expected that as his political star waned and the Allies grew closer to winning the war, the Führer's fate would be decided by a war trial, or by his suicide.

This expectation seems to have been confounded, however, in June 1944, when a confused and inaccurate Allied intelligence report made the prospect of a pinpoint bombing raid on Hitler's lair in occupied France seem a possibility. The plan never got off the ground, but it raised the question of an assassination and as a result of this misbegotten (Hitler was never there) project, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was the secret British organisation that co-ordinated resistance and subversive warfare, was instructed to address two questions: do we want to kill Hitler, and do we have the means to do it?

The first of these questions was never adequately answered, with various conflicting opinions being voiced within SOE. These included a belief that as Hitler's present conduct of the war was so bad, there was the risk that his successor might actually improve Nazi fortunes. On the other hand there was also a discernible inclination amongst some SOE officers to be associated with a spectacular, war-winning coup de main operation.

The plan

Vital information on Hitler's Berghof routine was provided by the guard on Hitler's immediate left. He stands with his back to the camera.  © While indecision, dissent, argument and prevarication prevailed as this question was discussed, a rather more pragmatic attitude was taken when considering the second. An unnamed (perhaps fortuitously) SOE staff officer of the German Section was asked to prepare an operational plan for an assassination of Hitler, and this plan was given the codename Foxley. The original document is amongst the files of SOE, now available in the Public Record Office at Kew.

The product of the officer's deliberations is an impressively bulky file. Copious detail is provided on Hitler's alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, extensive documentary and photographic evidence is provided concerning his limousines and trains, and there are even colour sketches of the uniforms worn by his bodyguard.

In addition to the background, the author outlines the recommended methods for an assassination attempt in Bavaria - these consisted of a shooting, by one or more snipers, a bazooka attack, and the poisoning of the water supply on the Führer's train. The author contemplates several even more speculative options, such as flinging a suitcase full of explosives under Hitler's train as it passed through a railway station.

The process of identifying and recruiting the would-be perpetrators of what would surely have been the most notorious assassination of modern times is rather glossed over. Various groups are mentioned; perhaps they might be anti-Nazi Germans, perhaps Czechoslovaks, perhaps French forced labour workers and perhaps even a party of SAS.

How the agents/soldiers were to arrive in Bavaria and, just as importantly (at least for the assassins), how they were to make their escape are not discussed. Undismayed by the vagueness of the Foxley plan, SOE went on ambitiously to ponder additional schemes - known as little Foxleys - plans to liquidate other leading members of the Nazi hierarchy.

Whatever the inadequacies of the main Foxley plan - there is no room in a brief article to enumerate them all - there is one flaw that clamours for attention amongst a plethora of redundant data about things like the intricacies of collar insignia, or the design of railway carriages (a decade out of date). The bottom line in any assassination plot is that you cannot kill someone if you do not know the whereabouts of your intended victim.

Rivalry

The Berghof - Hitler's Bavarian home.  © SOE was not an intelligence-gathering organisation, and therefore was reliant upon the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) for information on Hitler's whereabouts. While SIS ran its own networks of human sources throughout Europe, it also controlled the dissemination of signal intelligence derived from intercepted German wireless traffic. A designated SIS officer was promised to the Foxley project to assist in its planning, but there is little evidence of SOE having received any worthwhile intelligence on Hitler's movements.

Thus there were many major gaps in the knowledge of SOE, and closer examination of much of the background information in the Foxley file reveals that it is merely out-of-date 'padding', that seeks to obscure fundamental shortcomings by giving an impression of comprehensive detail.

The beguiling question, however, has to be asked, could Foxley have worked? If one looks purely at the draft plan presented to SOE's hierarchy, the answer must be an emphatic 'no'. On the other hand, if one wishes to embark on an excursion into the world of counter-factual history and speculate about a re-worked Foxley, buttressed by better intelligence, then the answer perhaps becomes a tentative 'yes'.

If Whitehall had shown greater interest in the plan, and if Hitler's location and daily routine had been known, then the prospect of a pinpoint air raid (similar to the initial aborted proposal, in France, that had sparked the whole thing off) would have arisen again.

Chances of success?

Such an operation had been attempted before, without success, by the Soviet air force in November 1941 using intelligence supplied by the British. By 1944, however, the RAF had managed to achieve remarkable accuracy with their low-level pinpoint raids against targets in occupied Europe. Similarly, with pre-knowledge of Hitler's itinerary, arrangements might have been made to attack his train through the use of aircraft, sabotage the railway line, or even put poison in the water system of his train. Finally with good information about the victim's whereabouts, assassins might have been recruited, trained, infiltrated and put in place to await the right opportunity.

The attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944 (see above) had shown that even close access to the Führer's headquarters did not ensure success. So there was no hope of an outsider bluffing their way into Hitler's entourage to carry out the deed. On the other hand, if Hitler had decided to return to his Bavarian retreat (in fact he left it on 14 July 1944, never to return), a dedicated assassin or team of assassins might well have stood some chance of success.

After this flight of fantasy, one might do well to consider the course of events that resulted in the assassination of the leading Nazi official SS-Obergrüppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. In December 1941 Czechoslovak agents trained by SOE were parachuted into their own homeland on Operation Anthropoid. It was not until six months later, on 27 May 1942, that they were able to mount the attack - with the result that their quarry died of his wounds a week later.

One wonders how closely the Foxley author had studied SOE's Anthropoid files. If he had, the evidence of the Czechoslovak agents' patience, dedication, commitment, training, professionalism and, crucially, local support, might have revealed the immense contribution made by these attributes to the success of the operation. By learning these lessons Foxley might have developed into a sensible operational schema, rather than resembling the first draft of a thriller by Geoffrey Household.

Find out more

Books

Hitler's Personal Security by Peter Hoffman (Macmillan, 1979)

Operation Foxley: The British Plan to Kill Hitler by Mark Seaman and Ian Kershaw (PRO, 1998)

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (Penguin, 1984)

About the author

Mark Seaman is an intelligence historian and has written extensively on the Special Operations Executive. His Bravest of the Brave is a biography of the celebrated agent Wing Commander FFE Yeo-Thomas GC.

About the author

Mark Seaman is an intelligence historian and has written extensively on the Special Operations Executive. His Bravest of the Brave is a biography of the celebrated agent Wing Commander FFE Yeo-Thomas GC.