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From Dark Messiahs: Europe and the Age of Charismatic Dictators, Oxford Press, 2008.

"It is widely recognized nowadays that the assassination of Adolf Hitler in late 1938 represents a defining moment of European history in the late Century. Academic history has been debating for decades whether the premature demise of the German leader (differently from Vladimir Lenin, whose career he so eerily reflected on the other side of the political spectrum, he was still relatively young and healthy when fatally shot) prevented his indubitable serious character flaws and political extremism from blossoming fully and leading into a worse ruin the nation he had pulled from the ashes of defeat and chaos, or whether he would just have pursued the same path to ultimate success that his successor followed.

His figure remains to this day quite controversial in his nation and abroad: after the downfall of the Nazist regime and the return to democracy, wholehearted sympathy is only expressed openly in the nostalgic far right, but many still express reluctant admiration for the way he and his successor Goering ruthlessly pursued the way to resurgence after the WWI catastrophe and propelled the German nation into superpower status during and after WWII.

Of course, his legacy draws the maximum antipathy from the Jewish minority, who still blames the Nazi regime for the Great Expulsion, or Russian revisionists, who still resent the way their nation was brought to her knees in WWII, notwithstanding the fact that the genocidal crimes of the Soviet Holocaust draw universal condemnation nowadays and truly have come to represent the essence of absolute evil in popular culture.

Despite endless controversy in academic circles (and wild speculations in popular cultures about alternative outcomes had Hitler lived to fight WWII, including sci-fi stories that he was really killed by time-travelers to save Europe from a savage racial cleansing bloodbath that would have rivaled Stalin's Holocaust), the irrefutable historic reality remains that Adolf Hitler was killed in November 9, 1938 by the shots of Maurice Bavaud.

The motivations of this obscure Swiss theology student have been long since debated. Despite wild speculations about him being the pawn from power-hungry conspirational cliques within the Nazi regime, the international Communist movement, or discontented anti-Nazi minorities, the available evidence (mostly derived from his trial) indicates that he was just what he claimed to be: a lone assassin that developed the motivation to kill Hitler out of his persuasion that the German statesman was a danger to humanity in general, Swiss independence, and Catholicism in Germany. Certainly, had been Nazi police, with its ruthless interrogation methods, been able to extort any evidence linking him to any enemy of their regime, skillful propaganda of Dr. Goebbels would have lionized it. Nor does the evidence made available from Berlin archives since the downfall of Nazism points out to any complicity within the regime.

Probably much of the eagerness to speculate about obscure conspiracies making a puppet out of Bavaud's questionable idealism arises from the eerie string of bizarre coincidences that allowed the assassin to escape the notice of the Gestapo, worm his way undetected with a loaded gun into the front row of the cheering spectators during a memorial march in Munich and shoot Hitler twice, hitting him in the neck and the abdomen and killing him within the hour. Certainly Hitler's habit to travel in open cars during public occasions surely made the task easier for the gunman, but had any one of these bizarre coincidences not occurred, the assassination would have surely failed, and the history of Germany, Europe, and the world would have been different, maybe radically different."
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