On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stuaffenberg tried to assassinate Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, with a time bomb.       

Stauffenberg appeared at Hitler’s well-guarded military headquarters in East Prussia.  Like all his other outposts, Hitler had named it—appropriately enough—“Wolf’s Lair.”

While a war conference was in session, he placed his yellow briefcase next to Hitler—who was standing with his generals at a heavy oaken table. Then he excused himself to take an “urgent” phone call.

“Wolf’s Lair”

But after Stauffenberg left the room, Colonel Heinz Brandt, who stood next to Hitler, found the briefcase blocking his legs. So he moved it—to the other side of the heavy oaken support, thus unknowingly shielding Hitler from the full blast.

At 12:42 p.m. on July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb erupted.

Brandt died, as did two other officers and a stenographer.  Hitler not only survived, but the plotters failed to seize the key broadcast facilities of the Reich.

This allowed Hitler to make a late-night speech to the nation, revealing the failed plot and assuring Germans that he was still alive. And he swore to flush out the “traitorous swine” who had tried to kill him.

Mass arrests quickly followed. Among the first victims discovered and executed was the conspiracy’s leader, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Standing before a makeshift firing squad at midnight, he cried: “Long live our sacred Germany!”

Claus von Stauffenberg

At least 7,000 persons were arrested by the Gestapo. Of these, 4,980 were executed.

If the conspiracy had succeeded and Germany had surrendered in July or August, 1944, World War II would have ended eight to nine months earlier. This would have meant:  

• The Russians—who didn’t reach Germany until April, 1945—could not have occupied the Eastern part of the country.
• Millions of East Germans would have been spared the misery of living under Communist rule for 44 years.
• Many of the future conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union over access to West Berlin and/or West Germany would have been prevented.
• Untold numbers of Holocaust victims would have survived because the concentration camps would have been shut down far earlier.

Yet history notes other tyrants whose evil reigns ended prematurely—such as that of Gaius Caligula.

Caligula became Emperor of Rome in 37 A.D. after succeeding the Emperor Tiberius, his uncle.

For three years, he held—and exercised—life-or-death power over the citizens of Italy and beyond. His attitude toward humanity was best summed up by his remark: “Bear in mind that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” 

Gaius Caligula

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Among his litany of crimes, according to his biographer, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus:

• He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons, sending a litter for one man who pleaded ill health. He invited another to dinner immediately after witnessing the execution, and trying to rouse him to gaiety by a great show of affability.
• He watched for several successive days as the manager of his gladiatorial shows was beaten with chains, and ordered him killed only when he was disgusted at the stench of his putrefied brain.
• He appeared at the temple of Castor and Pollux to be worshiped as Jupiter Latiaris.
• He lived in incest with all his three sisters. At a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above.
• He intended to promote his favorite racehorse, Incitatus (“Swift”), to consul.

Like all Roman emperors, Caligula was constantly protected by the Praetorian Guard, an elite unit of the Roman army comprised of tough legionnaires—especially German ones.

There had not been an assassination of a Roman emperor since the death of Julius Caesar almost 100 years earlier.

The assassins in that case had been motivated by a mixture of

• Personal animosity toward Caesar’s increasing arrogance and
• Genuine fears that he intended to abolish the Roman Republic and set himself up as a dictator.

And Caligula intended to keep a similar fate from overtaking him.

For all his cruelty and egomania, the trait that finally destroyed Caligula was his joy in humiliating others.

Among those he taunted was Cassius Chaerea, a member of his own bodyguard.

Two different historians give two different motives for his decision to assassinate Caligula.

The Jewish historian Josephus claimed that Chaerea was a “noble idealist” deeply committed to “Republican liberties.”

But Suetonius wrote that Caligula considered Chaerea effeminate because of a weak voice and gave him such mocking watchwords as “Priapus” and “Venus.” Whenever Caligula had Chaerea kiss his ring, the emperor would “hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an obscene fashion.”

On January 22 41 A.D. Chaerea and several other bodyguards hacked Caligula to death with swords before other guards could save him.

The assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler and the successful assassination of Gaius Caligula demonstrate that the greatest danger facing a tyrant is people who:

• Are in frequent and highly personal contact with him; and
• Keep their animosity toward him a secret—until the moment they wish to strike.

Had Secret Service agent Kerry O’Grady kept her revulsion toward Donald Trump to herself, she might now be hailed as an American traitor—or as democracy’s savior.