Killing Adolf Hitler

Assassination attempts on Adolf Hilter during World War II were unsuccessful. However, it was the belief of many Allied leaders that this would effectively end the propaganda machine of Nazi Germany. Eliminating Adolf Hitler would effectively end the war with Germany and, thus, assassination attempts were considered a viable option. In particular, should one have been successful, it might have saved many lives and needless casualties in the quest to end the war. Hitler’s suicide marks a huge event in history. When leaders fall, their regime often falls with them. Hitler had a regime that can really only be described as evil. We had to do everything we could to stop that. Assassination is not always a justifiable action, but in this situation, it certainly was. The use of assassination as a means to end a war should only be used against those individuals who are the most inhumane and unreasonable. If there is no other way to stop their mass killings of other human beings, I believe assassination is a viable option. If Hitler had been assassinated early on, it might have even prevented World War 2. And it was clearly his naked aggression that was the causus belli.

I would not normally support the assassination of freely-elected heads of state, but this situation was so stark and so rife with the prospect of giant-scale warfare that one man’s killing would have been morally justifiable. It’s clearly for the greater good to kill one man if that would mean saving millions from a similar fate. From both a legal and a moral standpoint, I think the assassination of Hitler would have been justifiable. While ideally, he could have gone through our legal system and then been punished, it was well known how evasive he was and how capable he was of planning an escape. Capturing him alive was probably not a viable option. He should have been assassinated so he was unable to harm anyone else. it might not have stopped the war, but it would have saved millions.

Russia and Germany were on an impossible to stop conflict between the spread of Communism by tanks and bombers. Hitler rose to power on the credo of protecting people from communism; losing some freedom under socialism was seen as better than total loss of rights. With Hitler dead, the war would have gone on. However, the Holocaust likely would not have continued. Many of Hitler’s compatriots were bent on extending Germany’s power and empire, but they did not require killing the Jews, Roma, Catholic Priests and Poles to do so. Thus killing Hitler wouldn’t stop the war as long as Russia was still capable of war, but far fewer than the 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma and over a million Poles may not have perished. That makes his execution justifiable.