I say, old boy, it’s just not cricket to shoot Hitler !!

I say, old boy, it’s just not cricket to shoot Hitler

General Noel Mason-Macfarlane, second from right, in Italy with US officers.

He warned from 1938 that Hitler was bent on war

In March 1939 the British government was presented with two credible opportunities to prevent the looming outbreak of the Second World War. The first was a plan put to the War Office to launch a pre-emptive attack on the Nazi regime by way of a naval blockade of the German North Sea ports.
Adolf Hitler would be caught off guard. The Wehrmacht’s best armoured divisions were mostly scattered across eastern Czechoslovakia after the recent invasion of that country. Germany was then a net importer of food, oil and raw materials, although the resources made available after Hitler’s land grab in the east would soon alter that.
Critically, Joseph Stalin, despite the weakened state of his armed forces after his murderous purges of the officer class, would surely be tempted to join in a war against his most dangerous enemy. Thus Hitler would be faced with the nightmare that his generals feared most — a two-front war against armies to the east and west. This was the logic behind a plan that was dismissed as irresponsible war-mongering by a government in London intent on appeasing Hitler at all costs.
The second plan was both more straightforward and a great deal more practical: the assassination of Hitler on his 50th birthday, April 20, while he reviewed a military parade in the centre of Berlin. The reviewing stand on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, the main east-west avenue in the city, was just 100 yards from the windows of the British military attaché’s first-floor flat.
It was an easy rifle shot and, so the plan went, the noise of the parade and the cheering of the crowds would mask the location of the shooter. By the time the Gestapo did work out who had killed the Führer, the Wehrmacht would have moved against the Nazi regime. The Prussian officer class in the army command had long been distrustful of, and distrusted by, Hitler. This would be their opportunity.
The man who fiercely argued the case for both plans to Neville Chamberlain’s government was the military attaché himself. Colonel Noel Mason-Macfarlane was a decorated veteran of the First World War, an excellent shot and a man who saw all too clearly what Downing Street refused to recognise: that Hitler was bent on war and that the government’s appeasement policy, always a failure, had now become an actual incentive for conflict.
Mason-Macfarlane had taken up his post in Berlin the previous year, 1938, and had quickly made his views of appeasement known. The Nazi leadership was a group of gangsters that had gulled an entire nation with racist propaganda and expansionist claptrap, as far as the attaché was concerned.
The British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, was both an enthusiastic proponent of the “ do nothing to offend Hitler” thinking in London and friendly with leading Nazi figures such as Hermann Goering, whose invitations to the opera or to shooting weekends he would eagerly accept. It was inevitable that the ambassador fell out with his new attaché from the moment they met.
Such was the animosity between the two men that after the war Mason-Macfarlane revealed that he had been forced to deceive his ambassador and smuggle a briefing document into the British diplomatic bag at Tempelhof airport. The document, sent to the Foreign Office with a copy to the War Office on March 28, 1939, argued the case for an immediate pre-emptive war against the Nazi regime.
Although German rearmament had proceeded apace in the 1930s, breaching the terms of the Versailles treaty, the one area in which Britain still held the advantage was naval power. The great German battleships Tirpitz and Bismarck had yet to enter service and the Royal Navy heavily outnumbered the Kriegsmarine in ships and had far greater firepower.
Mason-Macfarlane argued that a blockade of the German ports would be enough to force Hitler to go to war at a time when he was least prepared and militarily and economically vulnerable.
In London the military attaché’s document crossed various Foreign Office desks, no doubt to the amazement of their occupants, before it reached the pinnacle of mandarin authority, William Strang, assistant undersecretary of state. Strang was a powerful figure in Whitehall, who had travelled to Munich the previous year with the prime minister to meet Hitler.
At that point — the end of March 1939 — the document vanished into a bottom drawer. But Mason-Macfarlane’s radical views had attracted the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), led by Colonel Stewart Menzies. Mason-Macfarlane was called to London, and it was there that he presented his carefully worked out plan for the assassination of Hitler.
The attaché was wise enough not to put his plan on paper, and no record remains of several extraordinary conversations that must have taken place at cabinet level and within the intelligence community about the elimination of the German leader.
The details were simple and compelling. On April 20, his 50th birthday, Hitler would mount the reviewing stand on Berlin’s main avenue at 11am. With a high-powered rifle, Mason-Macfarlane would place himself on the landing of his apartment 30ft from the bathroom window to avoid muzzle flash and to blanket the sound. Firing through the window, he would kill Hitler with a single head shot.
As he said at the time, in remarks later reported by his biographer, it would have been “an easy rifle shot. I could pick the bastard off from here easy as winking.”
The Führer’s birthday parade, organised by Joseph Goebbels, was to be the largest Nazi celebration the city had seen. The parade would last for at least five hours. Every leading Nazi was to be present and would remain at Hitler’s side for several hours, all within sight of the British diplomat’s apartment.
Western ambassadors had boycotted the event in protest against the German occupation of Czechoslovakia weeks earlier. Thus there was no danger of the envoys being wounded in the shooting or caught up in the violence that would inevitably follow the assassination. It was an ideal opportunity.
Mason-Macfarlane argued that the risk of ferocious reprisals against British embassy staff should the Gestapo pinpoint the assassin would be nullified by a swift military coup that would remove the entire Nazi regime.
There was strength in this argument. British intelligence had learnt that the German chief of staff, General Franz Halder, had discussed with other Wehrmacht conspirators the idea of removing Hitler the previous autumn. Halder was said to have spoken of the Führer as a criminal and a bloodsucker.
By the spring of 1939 such plans had been put aside as the chief of staff and his senior officers busied themselves planning a short and brutal campaign to eliminate Poland. But Mason-Macfarlane argued that with Hitler dead, the chief of staff would certainly move against the heirs apparent to the Nazi leadership — Goering and Goebbels. Both men, especially the latter, were loathed by the German high command.
Menzies was told in detail of the plan and was said to be “cautiously interested” in such unorthodox methods, despite the code of gentlemanly conduct that had governed intelligence operations in the past.
Whether the plan was ever put to Chamberlain is not known, but senior members of the cabinet were certainly told and were swift in their dismissal. Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, summed up the official distaste for such action, saying: “We have not reached that stage . . . when we have to use assassination as a substitute for diplomacy.”
Behind those words lay the inner thinking of Chamberlain and his ministers. Conditioned by the snobbery of a coterie who were all educated at the same schools, married to the same class of women and members of the same clubs, these were men who met at country-house weekends and believed that Englishmen played the game and did not cheat.
The general view was that the assassination of the German leader “would not be sportsmanlike behaviour”, and it reflected the opinion that no gentleman would have suggested such a scurrilous act. The remark was made dismissively to Mason-Macfarlane, probably by someone in the Foreign Office. He later repeated it to his family.
Mason-Macfarlane returned to Berlin to be told that he was to be replaced and given a staff posting at Aldershot. After 18 months in Berlin the military attaché had in effect been sacked, although his dismissal had been arranged, no doubt by an infuriated ambassador, even before the assassination plan reached Whitehall.
The removal of a military attaché from Berlin was comment enough on the poisonous atmosphere within the British embassy, where Henderson’s cosy relations with the Nazis had alienated many other staff and drawn trenchant criticism from sections of the British press.
The Gestapo were well aware of Mason-Macfarlane’s extreme hostility to the regime and had been working to compromise him and force his removal for some time. In August 1938 a retired captain in a prominent German cavalry unit held a long meeting with the attaché and revealed plans for a military coup in which he tried to involve the British diplomat.
Such crude agent provocateur plots were easily avoided, but there is no doubt that the Gestapo had singled out Mason-Macfarlane as a target for blackmail from the moment he arrived in Berlin.
In fact Mason-Macfarlane remained in the capital long enough to attend the very military parade at which he had intended to shoot Hitler. Goebbels ordered a photographic record of all those present at the birthday parade to be given in a bound volume as a gift to his beloved Führer. Decorated with many honours, including the French Croix de Guerre, Mason-Macfarlane was captured on the reviewing stand, scowling ferociously at the camera.
There the story might well have ended. But the publication of British foreign policy documents by the Stationery Office in 1952 revealed the prewar plans presented to Whitehall for a pre-emptive strike against Germany. In an interview in January the following year, Mason-Macfarlane, then seriously ill, also revealed for the first time how strongly he had urged the British government to seize a golden opportunity to assassinate Hitler.
General Mason-Macfarlane died in 1953, aged 63. In 1969 Der Spiegel magazine in Berlin gained access to the general’s papers in the Imperial War Museum and learnt of the assassination plan. The magazine interviewed his daughter, Mona Macfarlane-Hall, and reported how Chamberlain’s government had spurned the plan because “this would not be sportsmanlike behaviour”.
The story ends with an editorial in The Times on August 6, 1969, under the headline “Should he have shot Hitler?”. The newspaper, then edited by William Rees-Mogg, had picked up Der Spiegel’s story and come up with a very similar conclusion to that reached by Halifax 30 years earlier.
The leading article said: “Even if General Mason-Macfarlane’s shot had gone home, it is doubtful whether the results would have been wholly agreeable. Perhaps the war would have been postponed or changed: one cannot say. But the idolisation of Hitler, struck down from abroad, would have been carried by countless Germans to the craziest of heights. His horrible system might have been given a new impetus. The bullet could have turned events that way as easily as causing the collapse of the regime, and rather more probably.
“No — Britain should not have taken up the general’s idea, but should have done something much more substantial in 1938. It should, against the advice of this newspaper at the time, have stood firm at Munich. That really would have affected history.”

James MacManus is managing director of The Times Literary Supplement. His historical novel Midnight in Berlin is to be published by Duckworth on January 21 at £16.99. It is dedicated to General Noel Mason-Macfarlane, whose courage and vision inspired a story woven round the plan to assassinate Hitler in Berlin in 1939 and the Gestapo’s efforts to compromise the British diplomat who intended to be the assassin