Propaganda after the Assassination Attempt
From the very night of the explosion, Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assumed the assassination attempt had been “doubtlessly thought up in London.” In the weeks that followed, Nazi propaganda presented the Munich attack as the result of a conspiracy between the British intelligence service and German emigrants. After Elser confessed, the Nazi leaders therefore referred to him as an “instrument” of the British secret service.
Nazi propaganda claimed the attack had been organized on British instructions by Otto Strasser, the leader of the “Black Front,” an opposition movement of former National Socialists. Many Germans continued to believe this version until well into the 1960s. To support the conspiracy theory, Nazi propaganda drew attention to two British secret service agents who had walked into a long-planned trap laid by the German SD foreign intelligence service in Venlo on November 9, 1939. Kidnapped and accused of being the men behind the Munich assassination attempt, in reality the agents had nothing to do with it.
