Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

When Americans Thought Hitler Had Been Killed — In 1939

On April 1, 1939, Hitler was in a very bad mood.

The previous day the Führer had learned that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had grown something resembling a spine. After reversing Britain’s policy of appeasement on March 15, following Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia, on March 31 Chamberlain made a pledge of Anglo-French support to Poland should the Nazis threaten the country’s independence. It began to look like the Reich’s plans for unchecked expansion would no longer be tolerated.

Though in a foul temper at that news, on April 1 Hitler was engaged to speak at the launch of a battleship in Wilhelmshaven in Lower Saxony. He appeared in the port town as scheduled but, sensing a tirade coming, ordered the radio broadcast of his remarks cancelled and replaced with a speech to be recorded later.

What happened next, as recounted in William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,” was a nasty April Fools day surprise. While Hitler’s demands were met, the news of the change came too late for the American broadcast.

Instead, the relay to American stations cut off after Hitler had already begun speaking, leading to the false impression in New York that the dictator had been interrupted by a bomb or bullet.

Crazier still, Shirer, who was embedded in Germany for CBS, got a call from his station in New York 15 minutes after the speech gave way to dead air to check in on the status of his Hitler assassination report.

“I could easily deny it because through an open telephone circuit to Wilhelmshaven I could hear Hitler shouting his speech,” Shirer wrote in “Rise and Fall.” “It would have been difficult to shoot the Fuehrer (sic) that day because he spoke behind a bulletproof glass enclosure.”

Hitler would live another six years and 29 days, surviving numerous attempts on his life before ending it himself in a bunker in Berlin. In the intervening years, his military ambitions and genocidal programs brought death to millions across Europe. But, for a brief and shining 15 minutes 80 years ago, Americans tuned into the speech might have believed the outbreak of war had been averted. History is cruel that way.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern. He can be reached at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.