Hitler's would-be assassin receives belated honour

May 16 2003

One of history's forgotten heroes, a Swiss student who made one of the first attempts on the life of Adolf Hitler, has been honoured at a German prison on the anniversary of his execution.

Maurice Bavaud was decapitated at Berlin's notorious Ploetzensee jail on May 14, 1941, for attempting to kill the Nazi leader nearly 65 years ago, calling him a "threat to humanity, Christianity and the Catholic church".

The young theology student was among those few "courageous persons, unfortunately too little known, who tried in vain to reverse the course of history," said Emmanuel Jenni, the charge d'affaires of the Swiss embassy in Berlin, during a discreet ceremony at Ploetzensee.

Born to a Catholic family in the western Swiss town of Neuchatel, Bavaud studied for three years at a seminary in western France.

Without a word to his fellow students, he boarded a train for Germany one Sunday in September 1938.

After a stop in Switzerland to pick up a small caliber gun, he arrived in Munich.

On November 9, he slipped into the crowd as Hitler was giving a speech to the party faithful on the 15th anniversary of the Nazi's failed "Beerhall Putsch" and fired a shot.

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This man was a true hero. He didn't wait for some government to come save him from the evil Nazis. He rationally identified a legitimate threat, and was willing to sacrifice his life, without begging for help from other people, to try and destroy that threat.