Abandonment of the Plan to Assassinate Hitler

The Abandonment of the Plan to Assassinate Hitler is a 1938 episode in which the narrator’s mother turns her patriotic hopes for her son into an extraordinary assignment: he is to kill Adolf Hitler and thereby save France and civilization. The comedy lies in the plan’s grand certainty and its practical, intimate undoing. The narrator makes real preparations, yet the decisive obstacle is not a security force or a change of political circumstance. It is his mother’s sudden reversal, expressed through the cost of a train ticket and her confidence that the money can be recovered.

Background and the proposal

The episode takes place after the narrator returns from Sweden, a few weeks before he is due to enter the Air Force Academy. He comes back to Nice disappointed by the loss of a beloved woman and angered by her husband’s behavior. His mother greets him not with the embrace he expects from a homecoming, but with repeated sobs and a distress that seems, at first, to signal a parting. Although she tells him that her health is controlled and the family business is flourishing, she continues to weep. She then leads him into the empty restaurant and explains her plan.

He is to travel to Berlin and assassinate Adolf Hitler. In his mother’s forecast, the consequences are as certain as the assignment itself: if her son were caught, France, England, and America would demand his release under threat of war; Germany would be thrown into confusion; and the young man would return to Paris as a celebrated national hero. She has imagined not merely a killing but a complete public destiny for him, one that would transform her anticipation of his military distinction into world-historical achievement.

The narrator says that he hesitates, but not because he challenges the plan’s political reasoning. He has recently completed a succession of tiring and unpleasant jobs and wants to rest beside the Mediterranean. A summer journey in a crowded third-class train, followed by hours waiting in Berlin for Hitler to appear, holds little appeal. He would prefer to undertake the mission in October, when the academic year begins. Yet his reluctance does not become refusal: disappointing his mother is, in his account, not a real option. Her confidence in his heroic future outweighs his own wish to delay.

Preparations in Nice

Once he accepts the assignment, he begins to prepare for it as an actual journey. He considers himself a good pistol shot, still able to impress friends at fairgrounds despite being out of practice, and recalls the training he received in Lieutenant Sverdlovski’s gymnasium. He retrieves his revolver from the family box in the cellar and sets about obtaining a ticket. When he learns from the newspapers that Adolf Hitler is at Berchtesgaden, the prospect becomes somewhat less disagreeable to him: the Bavarian Alps seem preferable to a city in the heat of mid-July.

The preparations also acknowledge that he may not return. He puts his manuscripts in order and writes farewell letters to women he loves. He oils the pistol and borrows a jacket from a heavier friend so that the weapon can be concealed more comfortably. These practical steps sit beside his continuing irritability and his longing for the sea. After months apart from the Mediterranean, the beach at Grande Bleue seems especially attractive, while the Swedish girls there become, in his distracted assessment, more appealing than ever. The contrast makes the preparations at once serious and faintly absurd: danger is being considered alongside the familiar pleasures he is reluctant to leave.

His mother stays beside him throughout these preparations, watching with pride and admiration. Even the purchase of the ticket produces an incongruous detail: the German railways grant him a thirty-percent discount for holiday travelers. During the last forty-eight hours before departure, he also limits his consumption of dill pickles, wary of a possible intestinal disturbance that his mother might regard as unheroic. The detail makes clear how completely her imagined standard of heroism has entered his thinking, even as it punctures the solemnity of the mission.

The reversal on the eve of departure

After taking what he understands to be his last swim at Grande Bleue, the narrator returns from the beach to find his mother collapsed in an armchair. She joins her hands and kneels, pleading with him to abandon the project. Her reasoning now reverses the role she had assigned him: she reminds him of the sacrifices involved in raising an only son and insists that a mother should not be asked to surrender him to a heroic cause. The woman who had designed the assassination and predicted its triumphant aftermath now presents the departure as an intolerable personal loss.

The narrator is not surprised by this change. He describes himself as having been conditioned for a long time and says he understands his mother completely. Instead of answering her plea with an argument about Hitler, France, or the likelihood of success, he points out that the ticket has already been paid for. His mother’s fear gives way to resolve. Grasping her stick, she declares that the railway will have to refund the fare. That practical answer settles what the grand political forecast had not: he will not go.

Outcome and narrative significance

The narrator concludes that this is why he did not kill Adolf Hitler, while acknowledging how close the plan came to being carried out. The qualification is comic, but the preparations give it substance. He had chosen a destination, secured a weapon, arranged his papers, written farewell letters, and bought a ticket; departure had become a concrete possibility. The cancellation therefore depends on a brief, sharply staged change in his mother, not on the plan having remained only an idle fantasy.

The episode also sets two forms of her patriotism beside each other. At first she imagines her son’s sacrifice as the means by which France and civilization might be saved, and sees him returning as a hero. On the eve of the journey, the prospect of losing him becomes more compelling than that public future. The final exchange reduces the scale of the proposed deed without erasing its emotional stakes: a projected rescue of the world is halted by a mother’s plea and her insistence that a ticket can be refunded. In the memoir’s telling, the difference between a completed assassination and an abandoned one rests on the same maternal force that first sent the young man toward the mission.