May 14, 1941. Descent

On this day in 1941, 3,700 foreign Jews were rounded up by the Germans in France to be sent to internment camps in France.

By this point in the war Germany was acting in a full scale genocidal way against the Poles.  It was, moreover, openly oppressing the Jews everywhere it occupied territory.  It had already engaged in, and failed in, a terror campaign against British cities.  It's descent into evil was very far gone already, and getting worse.

This should have been, and frankly likely was, obvious to the Germans themselves.

It was definitely obvious to others.

One of those people was Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss Catholic theology student, who was executed in Germany on this day in 1941 for attempting to assassinate Adolph Hitler in November, 1938.

Bavaud had been studying theology in France when he fell under the influence of an anti communist figure who claimed to be a Romanov who asserted that family would be restored to the Russian thrown following a communist downfall. While it's exceedingly complicated, the belief was that assassinating Hitler would somehow bring this about and, further, Bavaud rightly judged Hitler an enemy of faith in Germany.  He planned to shoot Hitler as the annual gathering of those who had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch but a combination of bad planning and events frustrated his plan and he was ultimately arrested.  He confessed to his intent as a captive.

Bavaud's unilateral attempt on Hitler's life was far fetched and lacked funding, a fact which in part ended up in his having to abandon the effort after a selection of failed planned rendezvous with Hitler failed.  Indeed, Bavaud's actions were so flighty that it isn't too much to ponder the degree to which he was an unstable thinker, and certainly believing that assassinating Hitler would do anything for the Romanovs as nonsense.  But that somewhat clouds the often forgotten fact that the July 20, 1944 plot was far from the only serious attempt on Hitler's life.  Indeed, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 was equally whacky and it succeeded.

Hitler was in fact the target of forty-three attempts on his life, the first coming in 1932 and the last one in July, 1944.  Some were one off attempts, like that of Bavaud's, but others were well thought out plots by organized men, including more than one by members of the German military.  Two known plots were carried out by unidentified individuals, one by poisoning in 1932 and a second by a man dressed in a SS uniform in 1937.  The simplest plot was by a German general who simply individually planned on shooting him when he came to inspect his troops, although he ended up retiring prior to the opportunity presenting itself.  And these are all plots that are known about.  It's almost certainly the case that there were individual plotters whose intents were never revealed.

The fact that so many plots were attempted and failed actually ended up contributing to Hitler's aura with the convinced.  He seemed protected in their minds.

On this day the British evacuated Greek gold reserves from Crete, well aware that the Germans would be hitting the island soon.

After spotting German aircraft at a Syrian airfield during an overflight, the British government issued authority to the RAF to strike airfields in Syria, a French League of Nations mandate, which was done all on this day.  This was a strike against the territory of a neutral nation, France, but it wasn't the first time the British had hit the French following their 1940 surrender to the Germans.  The fact that France as allowing German use of Syrian airfields was itself a violation of French neutrality in any event.