Pish! These are all amateurs compared to King Zog of Albania with 55 confirmed assassination attempts. My favourite being an attempt on his life while visiting Vienna. Having escaped injury in the attack, King Zog pulled his personal sidearm and shot at the attackers as they retreated.
By all accounts he was a bit of a jerk, but he dressed well and wasn't afraid to fire back, so you have to give him some credit.
Our current world existing is sensitively dependent on Hitler not being assassinated. Universes where Hitler is killed early result in nuclear annihilation for some reason, and the only Everett branches that have humans in them have an improbable history of a single man dodging dozens of assassination attempts
what if time travel does exist, and allowing Hitler to live was the least bad option for the world? i.e. if Hitler was killed early in the war, he wouldn't have been able to override his generals with so many stupendously stupid ideas.
Or you can keep going back in time whenever a catastrophe happens, to prevent it. This probably creates multiple timelines and we just happen to be in the one where most large scale conflicts didn't get prevented (yet.)
Not to jinx it but the absence of large-scale nuclear conflict 1950-present seems pretty improbable and definitely very nice to have as far as counterfactual timelines go.
If there were (will be?) truly "good" time travelers, why not prevent the nuking of Japan? Or any of the other countless massacres and genocides throughout history and still going on to this very day? Or you know, help everyone to resolve all conflicts without violence? Prevent the mass production of weapons in the first place?
In the end this is just a variant of the "If there's a God why does it let bad shit happen" question.
It's more likely that there are eldritch Lovecraftian entities feeding upon sentient misery.
Remarkable number of close calls in here. A bomb that iced up, Hitler rushing faster than expected through a museum exhibit, a canceled uniform modelling appointment...
Reminds me of one bit of game mechanics in the Total War series that seems to be actually accurate in two infamous cases. The game series features assassination of prominent "people" in roles - generals, kings, and even clergy, merchants, spies, and other assassins.
There is a chance of success based upon relevant stats and traits and one of the outcomes is that failed assassination attempts often result in them becoming harder to assassinate as they take more precautions and occasionally show mental side effects.
Now look at Fidel Castro and the clownish job of the CIA's loony toons assassination attempts.
It sounds absurdly gamey at first but assassination resistance may be effectively trainable like immune systems or antibiotic resistance. There is nothing magical about it - the target simply builds up infastructure of countermeasures, deliberately not following schedules, and less physically accessible to anyone unvetted. If in the dirty business of sending assassins in the first place quantity does not have a quality in its own but makes defenses stronger - strategically what is needed is one to do it right.
"Stop sending people to kill me! We’ve already captured five of them, one with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send another"
It makes me think about how very close the assassination attempt on Archduke Ferdinand came to being botched. The initial attempt, tossing a bomb at the motorcade, failed, then as the Archduke was leaving, his driver took a wrong turn, coming to a stop right in front of the shop that Gavrilo Princep had gone into to get a sandwich after learning about the failure of the initial attempt.
I think WW1 would have still happened even without the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Either another attempt would have been successful or another casus belli would have happened.
Maybe the conclusion is that such plans were inherently unreliable, because people change speed by which they move through museums and cancel appointments.
22 recorded attempts in 12 years. But is that a lot or not? Do we have comparable lists for Stalin, Mao or FDR? Otherwise it's just a single data point.
Though I'll concede that having the list for him and not others does point to more attempts...
Fidel Castro is probably the man who survived / foiled the most assassination attempts (with a lot of help of the KGB).
/quote
estimated the number of assassination schemes or actual attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency to be 638
(according to the Church Committee)
/unquote
But most of these cases are still shrouded in the veil of secrecy by the intelligence agencies, so there is still a lot of guesswork and substantial amount of secret records involved.
And most importantly the regime ended without having had the chance to destroy much of its document stash. The Nazis were diligent record-keepers and an absolutely enormous trove of secret files turned up after the war.
The best trawl through this marterial is the gargantuan (but highly readable) "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer, an American journalist living in Europe during Hitler's rise to power and the second world war.
I'm confused by that - the book is absolutely crammed with footnotes, references to, and direct quotes from that archive of material. Undeniably, Shirer editorializes - he doesn't write like a historian - but his book is absolutely firmly based on that material. He even says as much in his introduction.
There was some web comic - my google-fu is failing me - that had a time traveler going back to kill Hitler. Hitler's guards intervene and stop the assassination.
The last couple of panels have them saying something like "
It's an OK job but what's the deal with all these time travelers coming to kill the guy we're guarding - this is the third one this week!"
