Kill the Führer: Section X and Operation Foxley

by Denis Rigden

During the Second World War, Britain's top secret Special Operations Executive plotted to assassinate Hitler. A small department of SOE known as Section X had the tantalisingly complex task of investigating how, when and where their plan could be executed. The section also plotted the killing of Goebbels, Himmler and other selected members of Hitler's inner circle. Only Section X and a handful of other SOE staff had any knowledge of these projects, codenamed Operation Foxley and Operation Little Foxleys. As history has shown, these schemes turned out to be pipe dreams. Even so, Section X, renamed the German Directorate in 1944, made a huge contribution to the Allied war effort through their organised sabotage and clandestine distribution of black propaganda. Denis Rigden describes Section X's efforts to discover as much as possible about the intended assassination targets, and questions whether a successful Operation Foxley would have helped or hindered the Allied cause. Based on top secret documents and private sources and illustrated with archive photographs, ' Kill the Fuhrer ' is an intriguing insight into the shadowy world of Britain's wartime secret services.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[George Siehl]

The most exciting thing in this book is the main title: Kill the Fuhrer. The substance of the book derives from its subtitle: Section X and Operation Foxley. Section X was a small component of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the secret service organization established by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to "Set Europe Ablaze." Plotting to kill Hitler seems to be the major task of Section X, along with the subsidiary operation, Foxley II (the Little Foxleys), the plans to kill other high ranking Nazis. Hitler and some of the little Foxleys did indeed die in World War II, but they died by suicide.

Section X collected much practical information, but always seemed to need more, especially detailed operational intelligence, before a specific plan for assassination could be developed. They continually placed very optimistic estimates that everything might, perhaps, work out for the best. One agent weighing over 200 pounds, above the usual weight for parachutists (the means of entry to wartime Germany), is a case in point. His Section X evaluation found him "a reasonable risk under good conditions." He made two jumps into Germany and returned to London, but failed to complete either of his missions.

Section X did carry out some lower profile programs that worked. These included a very useful system for producing counterfeit documents for agents to use in Germany, and black propaganda designed to dispirit German civilians and servicemen. Submarine crews were a continuing focus of such efforts so as to hamper the very effective U-boat attacks on Allied shipping. Documents were prepared urging the men to malinger, apply for leave, or desert their units.

The book is drawn largely from the records of Section X, which were declassified several decades after the war. There is much useful information here, but little drama. Ridgen provides potted biographies of the small staff, 15 persons at war's end, information on organizational changes over the years, and a chronology of the war in Europe with emphasis on the various threats against Hitler from abroad and from within Germany.

Those interested in the wartime intelligence/espionage operations of the Allies may find this detailed view of one section of the SOE valuable. For the general reader, not so much.

[Eric Lee]

The revelation in the late 1990s that the British had seriously considered assassinating Hitler was a journalistic bombshell. Very quickly, the National Archives (then the Public Records Office) published the entire Operation Foxley dossier with an introduction by Mark Seaman. Denis Rigden’s book, written one year later, unfortunately, has little to add to that story — and is padded out with much extraneous information after running out of things to say about Foxley. Do we really need to know how well or how poorly the young Hitler performed in school? Or that he was lucky to have wound up with the name ‘Hitler’ rather than Schicklgruber, which the author finds amusing. The one truly interesting revelation — for this writer, at least — was the close cooperation between Section X, which was the part of the Special Operations Executive which dealt with Germany, and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF). Surely there’s a book there waiting to be written.