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Thursday, July 23, 1998 Published at 11:39 GMT 12:39 UK

Hitler: more help alive than dead?

Almost 50 years after the event, historians and military experts are still divided over whether Adolf Hitler was more help to the Allies alive than he would have been if he had died before the end of the war.

Hitler: More use dead or alive? Historians Professor Donald Cameron-Watt and Andrew Roberts debate on BBC Radio 4's Today
Operation Foxley - the wartime UK government's plot to kill Hitler - was put together only shortly before the war ended and the defeated German leader committed suicide. If the plan to eliminated him had been successfully put into action, it was so close to the end of the war that it is doubtful events would have been significantly affected.

The Allies had been coming up with various schemes to kill Hitler from the early stages of the war. But the strategists who calculated that bumping off the German leader would have been counter-productive won the day.

They believed that Hitler could be a positive asset to the Allies, because he could be counted on to make serious military blunders and tactical mistakes in the course of the war.

They said all the people around Hitler were too scared to ever question any decision he made, no matter how disastrous they thought it was. According to this theory, he was more use to the Allies alive than dead.

Other strategists who disagreed with this view believed that Hitler's concept of the Fatherland and the racial purity of the German race had become vital to the country's identity, and that Germany's people worshipped their Fuehrer as much as the British acclaimed Winston Churchill. Hitler's death, they argued, would rob Germany of the will to fight the war.