We all wish we had a guardian angel. Some of us are even nice enough to wish everyone else had one, too. But maybe we should be careful what we wish for, because if guardian angels were real, it would mean that awful people would end up with heavenly protection. People like Adolf Hitler, for example.
One of the most evil people in history, Hitler himself believed he enjoyed supernatural protection from God; or sometimes, from "the gods," if he was in a particularly neo-pagan mood. And as you will see from the list below, it seems the Fuhrer of Nazi Germany had good reason to think there were occult forces working to keep him alive.
The following crazy coincidences from Hitler's life and rise to power do suggest that the future German dictator and mass murderer did indeed have a destiny. Any one of these incidents alone could be easily written off as luck, but when put together, they seem to form a frightening pattern: some otherworldly force or entity might have been looking out for Adolf Hitler.
Are guardian demons a thing?
Photo: Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons • Hitler Was Rescued from Drowning by a Future Priest
Believe it or not, Hitler was a kid once, too. And it was a childhood accident in winter of 1894 that may have been the first example of an evil supernatural guardian influencing others to protect young Adolf.
In January of that year, then-5-year old Adolf Hitler was playing tag with some other kids near the shores of the Inn River in Passau, Germany. Running out onto the thin ice of the river, Hitler fell through into the freezing water flowing down from the mountains, and struggled to stay afloat in the fast and frigid current.
He likely would have drowned or frozen to death then and there, were it not for the bravery of his parents' landlord's son, Johann Kuehberger. Young Johann spotted little Adolf struggling, and dove into the river to help him. Johann successfully pulled Adolf to shore, thus saving his life.
It was during his military service for Germany in the First World War that Adolf Hitler became convinced he had been touched by destiny. And he wasn't alone in thinking this about himself; the young soldier racked up a string of surprising survivals in the face of certain death that gained him a reputation as an amazing, if prudish and somewhat preachy, soldier. As a dispatch runner for the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Hitler was often required to expose himself to enemy fire, including from shells and grenades as well as guns, and was almost never wounded while doing so.
Many years later, Hitler recalled an incident (whose time and place are not known to us) in which a mysterious voice warned him to leave a crowded dugout during an Allied barrage. Moments after he left the dugout and went out into the trenches, the dugout was hit by an incoming shell, and everyone inside was killed.
Of course, there is only Hitler's word to go on with this, but it isn't the only time he claimed to have been spoken to by supernatural forces. And he did survive a shell blast that killed several other nearby German soldiers, on 7 October 1916. The injury sent Hitler to Munich to recover, and it was during his time there, seeing German morale collapse all around him, that Hitler became convinced his country was being sabotaged by Jews and Marxists.
Had he died in this shell blast, Hitler wouldn't have witnessed the war's effects on German society, let alone have had his manic vision turned towards redeeming Germany for the Aryans.
A British Sniper Was Inspired to Spare Hitler's Life
Photo: Duke of Wellington's Regimental Headquarters, Halifax, England / via Wikipedia.org
Adolf Hitler enjoyed several lucky survivals during his Great War service on the Western Front. One of the most well-known incidents - and one which Hitler himself would later commemorate - was his chance run-in with a British solider on 28 September 1918.
Private Henry Tandey had been serving gallantly with British forces for the entirety of the war, having returned to the frontlines twice after having been wounded. On the day in question, Tandey had been shooting at German soldiers outside the French village of Marcoing all day. Late in the day, Tandey caught sight of a wounded German soldier running out from cover and trying to flee the assault.
Tandey put the German soldier in his sights - they were close enough to each other to make eye contact - but spared the man's life when he saw that the German was wounded. The German nodded his thanks and crawled away to safety.
Many years later, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Tandey learned the awful truth: the German he spared was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had known about Tandey's reputation much longer than Tandey had known about his, however. Hitler saw Tandey's photo in the newspaper when Tandey received the Victoria Cross (Britain's highest military honor), and recognized him immediately as the man who'd spared his life in France. He cut Tandey's photo out of the paper and kept it for 20 years.
He also went out of his way, as chancellor of Germany, to obtain a copy of Italian artist Fortunino Matania's painting of Tandey carrying a wounded friend to safety, and displayed it prominently in his offices.
When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler in 1938, hoping to avert a war between Britain and Nazi Germany, he noticed the painting of Tandey, and asked Hitler about it. It was then that Hitler yet again declared his belief the heavens were protecting him.
"That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again," Hitler said. "Providence saved me."
Another of Hitler's famous World War I run-ins with death occurred shortly after his encounter with Pvt. Tandey. Serving with the German army in the Ypres Salient in Belgium, Hitler was exposed to mustard gas launched in a shell from the British lines. Though mustard gas is usually deadly, Hitler walked away only with a case of temporary blindness.
As a result of his injury from this attack, Hitler rode out the rest of the war at a military hospital in Pomerania, and ultimately learned of the war's end while convalescing there. The news shocked him so deeply it solidified his belief that Germany was being betrayed by all manner of secret conspiracies, and sent him on the path of political radicalism.
Hitler used this attack heavily in propaganda about his war hero image, but years after his death, it was revealed that his blindness was likely the result of mental illness rather than a side effect of mustard gas. Hitler purged all the medical records he could find about the incident, to bolster his war hero image. But ultimately, the truth came out, though sadly not soon enough to damage the Fuhrer while he lived.
Radicalized and embittered by Germany's defeat in the Great War, Hitler quickly became a loud-mouthed political agitator, spewing fiery right-wing and fascist invective seemingly at every opportunity.
In 1919, at a barracks gymnasium in Munich, Hitler's political ramblings nearly got him killed. He and a companion had riled up a room full of 200 German soldiers so badly that the soldiers turned into an angry mob and attacked them.
The riot was so bad that a duty officer was called in to quell it with a squad of armed men. That officer was an Irishman named Michael Keogh, who had switched sides and joined the German army as a gesture of fighting for Irish independence.
When Keogh and his men arrived on the scene, they found Hitler and his friend being viciously punched and kicked by the mob. Bayonets were pulled by the mob, too, and thinking that they were about to murder the two men, Keogh ordered his own men to fire a volley above the mob's heads.
The action worked, and the mob dispersed, leaving the young Corporal Adolf Hitler beaten and bruised, but still very much alive to continue his path of destiny.
Hitler's First Suicide Attempt Was Thwarted by an American
In the years following the First World War, Hitler maneuvered his way into the leadership position of the fledgling National Socialist Party, and on November 8-9 1923, staged the Nazis' first attempt at a coup d'etat of the Weimer Republic government. The infamous Beer Hall Putsch failed completely, making fugitives of Hitler and his followers, who were now wanted for treason.
While many Nazis fled to Austria for refuge, Hitler experienced car trouble on the way and instead sought a hiding place at the home of his friends Helen and Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, in Uffing, just outside of Munich. "Putzi," the husband, had been involved in the Putsch and had fled to Austria with the other Nazis, but the wife, Helen, had remained home.
A young American who had met and married Ernst in New York, Helen took her friend Adolf in and agreed to shelter him while he tried to find passage to Austria. But it wasn't long before Bavarian police caught up to Hitler and he found himself trapped in the Hanfstaengl house instead.
When Helen informed him that the police were on the way to arrest him, Hitler proclaimed, “Now all is lost - no use going on!”... and snatched up his revolver from the nearby cabinet.
Helen grabbed Hitler's arm and took the pistol away from him. She then gave him a pep talk and convinced him to carry on for the sake of his men and other followers.
By the time police arrived, Hitler had regained enough of his self-confidence to berate them as he was being arrested. It didn't work, and he was taken away anyway, but Helen's quick thinking and inspiration had averted a possible Hitler suicide that could have spared the world years of horror and pain.
A Judge Spared Hitler a Death Sentence in the Nick of Time
The event that should have ended Hitler's career - and life - once and for all instead became his catapult to national fame. Arrested and charged with treason against Germany after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler would have to stand trial for his life, since the charge carried a death penalty.
But another string of lucky coincidences came to Hitler's aid once again. Between the attempted coup in November 1923 and his trial in February-April 1924, Hitler benefited from a radical change in Weimar judicial policy. As part of a wider state of emergency, the country switched from a trial-by-jury system to a trial-by-judge system. Hitler, who chose to defend himself, would now argue his case before a panel of judges.
The presiding judge at Hitler's trial, Georg Neithardt, couldn't have been more sympathetic to Hitler's cause unless he'd been a Nazi himself. The pro-fascist judge allowed Hitler to turn the trial into an opportunity to give grand speeches about his plans for Germany's future.
As a result of the press coverage of his trial, Hitler became a national sensation, and the panel of judges, led by Neithardt, commuted Hitler's sentence from death to five years in prison. He only served nine months.
During this brief prison stint, Hitler wrote his famous treatise Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which further solidified his place in history and politics as the definitive voice of the Nazi party and the father of Germany's future.
By the start of the 1930s, Hitler was a popular right-wing leader heavily involved in political campaigning, already with his eyes on the prize of becoming Germany's ruler. But a car accident on March 13 of that year nearly ended it all.
According to Major General Otto Wagener, who was at the time Hitler's economic advisor, a heavy tractor truck collided with Hitler's Mercedes and almost crushed the future Fuhrer in the resulting crash. Wagener was a passenger in the car at the time, and said that the truck's driver managed to brake just short of crushing the car. Just a split second later, and Hitler would have been killed, or severely crippled.
On November 8, 1939, Nazi Party faithful followers and VIPs were gathering for an annual meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall from which Hitler had launched his first attempt to seize power in Germany. Security was assumed to be tight, but unknown to everyone, a bomb had been planted in a hollowed-out pillar behind the speaker's rostrum, where the Fuhrer was soon scheduled to make an address to the Nazi party's founders.
Both the bomb and the hollowed-out column were the work of a lone would-be assassin named Johann Georg Elser, a leftist who'd spent months secretly staying in the beer hall after hours so he could hollow out the column. He'd set the bomb's timer to go off at 9:20 p.m., when Hitler was supposed to have been well into his remarks (the Fuhrer had been scheduled to speak for about an hour at 8:30 p.m.).
But the weather interfered with Elser's plan. Heavy fog had forced Hitler to cancel his flight to Berlin and make use of a train instead. As a result of this last minute change of plans, he began his beer hall speech 30 minutes early, at 8 p.m., and had left the premises entirely by 9:07... 13 minutes before the bomb went off.
Of course, the bomb still exploded, killing eight people and wounding 60. But Adolf Hitler was not among them. He was already on his way to the train station.
Elser was captured at the Swiss border, and later confessed to his assassination attempt. He died in the Dachau concentration camp on 9 April 1945.
On 20 July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in Hitler's secret "Wolf's Lair" hideout in what should have been a flawless plan. After all, Hitler was going to be standing right next to the brief case containing the bomb when it went off. But at the last minute, one of the Nazi generals in the room, who wasn't involved in the plot, moved the brief case behind one of the table's thick wooden supports. As a result, when the bomb went off, Hitler escaped the blast with only an injured arm. Four other high-ranking Nazis were killed, of course, but not the main target of the attack.
This lucky break by Hitler came at the end of a long string of logistical obstacles that plagued Col. von Stauffenberg over the course of the previous weeks. The colonel had attempted to kill Hitler several other times, but had always been thwarted by circumstances beyond his control.
He'd also spear-headed a coup d'etat that was meant to follow the bombing, and might still have succeeded despite Hitler's survival had it not fallen apart due to a combination of bad timing, ineptitude by his co-conspirators, and simple cowardice.
The plot's failure led to the executions of more than 5000 people and effectively ended the internal German resistance movement. Col. von Stauffenberg was executed the very next day, but his memory lived on, and his heroism became the subject of the famous Tom Cruise film Valkyrie.
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