Hitler’s Plan to Kill Churchill Using Exploding Chocolate
The Nazis are infamous for their murderous schemes and willingness to use any means necessary during World War II. In 1943, the war had turned sour for them. The massive gains they made in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were being chipped away, its navy decimated and the Battle of Britain had inflicted heavy losses on the air force.
With the prospects for a land invasion of the UK gone, the Germans tried a hilariously sneaky trick to sow chaos — killing Winston Churchill with deadly chocolate. Rather than using poisoned chocolate that would be harder to detect, the Nazis decided to use bombs with a thin layer of chocolate.
The bombs looked like a regular chocolate bar and would explode when one of the ends were snapped or pulled off — presumably by a hungry Prime Minister. The plan involved german spies placing the ‘chocolate’ in the dining room of the War Cabinet. The explosive treats were apparently designed to have a blast radius of a few metres, enough to kill everyone in a medium sized room.
You can guess how the plan unfolded. British agents in Germany heard of the scheme and alerted British intelligence. On the fourth of May 1943 Lord Victor Rothschild, an intelligence officer at Britain’s MI5, caught wind of it and wrote a letter to an illustrator called Laurence Fish. It read:
“We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate.”
“Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism…When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab.”
The letter remained hidden for 66 years, until it was uncovered by Fish’s wife after his death in 2009.
But the Nazis didn’t stop at exploding chocolate, they planned a whole platter of deadly treats. They managed to create explosive versions of:
- Tinned plums
- Incendiary eggs
- Soap
- Lunchboxes
- Wine bottles
- Chewing gum
- Vegetables
- Sardines…
The list probably goes on but we may never know the full menu.
Perhaps the UK was lucky in facing the Germans, one can only imagine what the French or Italians would have come up with!
