5 Unsuccessful Assassinations That Would Have Changed History

Crazy assassination attempts only evil mind could plot.

From Lincoln to JFK, Julius Caesar to Martin Luther King, books have been composed about popular assassination attempts and how they transformed the course of history.

Only some people do more than catch a glimpse of a failed attempt that would have changed history as much, if not more.

“What if” games are always tricky, but it’s interesting to speculate how matters might have been different without the assassin’s ineffectiveness — positive and negative. Something could have been avoided.

The top 5 unsuccessful assassination attempts that, if successful, would have had an incredible impact until today are listed below.

5. Charles De Gaulle — Failed Murder Attempts

There were three unsuccessful attempts to kill General de Gaulle, all of which failed.

The first was by a German sniper in Paris in 1945. The second was on September 8, 1961, when a gang controlled by Raul Salan fired a plastic slug into his car.

His third attempt came on August 22, 1962, when his vehicle was hit by machine gun fire, shattering his rear window and bursting two of his tires.

The most notorious assassination attempt was in 1962 when a team of three fired 140 rounds into the president’s car on his way from the Élysée Palace to Orly Airport.

The group murdered two of his bodyguards and blew three tires, but it was the car that protected his life.

De Gaulle and his wife crouched, and the driver could accelerate from the front wheel skidding thanks to the car’s suspension system.

The group believed that de Gaulle had betrayed France after accepting Algeria’s independence and tried to kill him.

4. Abraham Lincoln — The President Who Escaped Assassination

Hundreds of years ago, one of America’s most popular presidents narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

Nine months later, he wasn’t so lucky: Abraham Lincoln was the target of five assassination attempts during his presidency (and before his presidency).

In 1864, nine months before he was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth, he rode alone into a former soldier’s home outside Washington, DC.

The moment a gunshot rang out, his horse jumped. President Lincoln arrived at a former soldier’s house without his hat.

The next day, two soldiers searched for the hat and, along the way, discovered a musket hole in the side. President Lincoln dismissed the incident as a possible hunting accident.

He told his soldiers that rumors of assassination were more dangerous to the Union cause than silence. He later shared the story among friends as a Sleepy Hollow-style anecdote.

3. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin — Who Narrowly Escaped Assassination

On August 30, 1918, the Chairman of the People’s Commissariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was assassinated.

The first attempt on Lenin’s life came shortly after the Bolsheviks came to power.

On January 1, 1918, at 6:30 in the evening, the car occupied by Lenin, Maria Ulyanova, and Fritz Platten of the Swiss Social Democratic Party was shot.

Platten, sitting next to Lenin, could bend his head with his hands, but he himself was injured. The terrorist escaped from the crime scene.

Finding the Chekists went nowhere. A few years later, the exiled Prince ID Shakhovskoy announced that he had organized the assassination and allocated half a million rubles.

2. Wilhelm II — A British Failed Attempt

In the final years of World War I, stunning unpublished evidence has come to light that the British failed in an attempt to assassinate German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II.

On June 2, 1918, a newly formed Royal Air Force squadron embarked on its previously secret mission.

In one of his first attempts, now called “precision bombing,” a unit of the 25th Squadron attempted to assassinate the Emperor while he was visiting a castle near the front line.

If the Emperor had died in the attack, his successor might have reacted differently to the assassination attempt on Franz Ferdinand 13 years later.

A sober leader could have prevented the situation from spiraling so quickly and entirely out of control. His young son was most likely responsible, but what path would he have taken in 1914?

1. Adolf Hitler — An Assassination Survivor

The most infamous assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler happened on July 20, 1944, at Wolfsschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg in East Prussia.

The conspiracy, codenamed Operation Valkyrie, was led by German nobleman and army officer Klaus Schenck, Graf von Stauffenberg, and Generals Friedrich Olbricht and Ludwig Beck of the German General Staff.

This conspiracy culminated in a broad anti-Nazi German resistance movement to take over Hitler and the Third Reich.

Colonel Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg kept a bomb in a bag near Hitler during a military meeting on the weakening military situation on the Eastern Front, but Hitler survived with injuries.

Later on, most of the members involved in the assassination plot were either killed or captured. Less than a year later, Hitler committed suicide, ending World War II in Europe.

The memory of Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators lives on to this day.

Therefore we all know that assassinations can take a big turn in political landscape, so people do remember such incidents and hence it becomes a pivotal part of history.

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