It’s one of our favorite fantasies: what if someone had killed Adolf Hitler? How different would the world be if somebody had just taken out the future Führer before he could plunge the world into war and horror?

But it’s not as if nobody ever tried. More than a few people did their best to take out the leader of the Third Reich—but Hitler, as it turns out, was surprisingly hard to kill. Dozens of people tried to take out Hitler—at least four before he became Chancellor and more than 40 afterward—but nobody ever pulled it off.

It’s one of the forgotten stories of history: the many, many plots to take out Hitler. Some are stories of heroism, some of madness, and some are just downright strange—but if any one of them had succeeded, the world would have completely changed.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]