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| By Ynetnews January 9, 2007 |
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According to a report Tuesday in the London Times, a British secret agent who offered to blow up Adolf Hitler at the height of the Second World War was dissuaded from carrying out the assassination by MI5.
The report was based on newly released documents from the war.
The report said that the offer to kill Hitler in a suicide mission was made by Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal and safe-breaker who was trained by the Nazis as a spy and went on to become one of Britain's most successful double agents, codenamed Agent Zigzag.
When the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands in June 1940, Chapman was recruited by the German military intelligence while he was serving a sentence in Jersey prison near France for burglary. Chapman arrived in Britain in December 1941 and immediately went over to MI5, the British security service.
During his investigation in MI5, the 27 year-old Chapman said he was interested in returning to Germany as a double agent, and that he wanted to kill Hitler during a Nazi rally using explosives.
Documents which have been classified since the war have recently become accessible, and reveal a conversation between Chapman and British officer Ronnie Reed.
During their conversation, Reed warned Chapman that any attempt to kill Hitler would be suicidal. "Whether or not you succeeded, you would be liquidated immediately," he said, to which Chapman replied, "Ah, but what a way out."
According to the documents, Chapman told Reed that his German commander, an officer he knew only as "Dr. Graumann," had promised to take him to a Nazi rally if he completed his mission in Britain successfully, and place him "in the first or second row," near Hitler's podium.
'British government preferred Hitler alive'
"He believes I am pro-Nazi," Chapman told Reed. "I believe Dr. Graumann will keep his promise. Then I will assassinate Hitler... with my knowledge of explosives and incendiary material, it should be possible."
Reed told his superiors at MI5 about Chapman's offer. "He can think of no better way of leaving this life than to have his name prominently featured throughout the world's press, and to be immortalized in history books for all time," he said.
The Times pointed out that the offer would certainly have been brought to the attention of the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who took a personal interest in the Zigzag case. However, the offer to kill Hitler was rejected for reasons that have never been fully explained.
British historian Professor M.R.D. Foot believed that the decision may have been due to a number of factors, including Britain's longstanding policy against assassinating foreign heads of state, and a mistrust of Chapman.
"SOE (Special Operations Executive) hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, but that, too, was rejected," Foot said.
"Partly because it was believed to be impossible to get an armed agent into Hitler's presence, and partly because it was thought that Hitler was more useful alive than dead, since at that point his strategy was clearly so erratic," he continued.
According to the report, Chapman returned to Germany as a double agent, but was expressly told "not to undertake any wild enterprises" by his British spymaster, Colonel Tommy "Tar" Robertson.
MI5 has now released 1,800 pages of documents from the Chapman case which were transferred to the National Archives last month. Chapman survived the war, received a pardon for his crimes prior to the war, and died in 1997.
This article was reprinted with permission from Ynet. |
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