British soldier allegedly spares the life of an injured Adolf Hitler
On 28 September 1918, in an incident that would go down in the lore of World War I history—although the details of the event are still unclear—Private Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving near the French village of Marcoing, reportedly encounters a wounded German soldier and declines to shoot him, sparing the life of 29-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler. Though sources do not exist to prove the exact whereabouts of Adolf Hitler on that day in 1918, an intriguing link emerged to suggest that he was in fact the soldier Tandey spared. A photograph that appeared in London newspapers of Tandey carrying a wounded soldier at Ypres in 1914 was later portrayed on canvas in a painting by the Italian artist Fortunino Matania glorifying the Allied war effort. As the story goes, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Germany in 1938 to engage Hitler in a last-ditch effort to avoid another war in Europe, he was taken by the Führer to his new country retreat in Bavaria. There, Hitler showed Chamberlain his copy of the Matania painting, commenting, "That’s the man who nearly shot me." A WW1 legend that Adolf Hitler's life was spared by a soldier who had him in his sights has been questioned by new research. Pte Henry Tandey, who was serving with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, reputedly had a chance to kill the future Führer during fighting at Marcoing, near Cambrai, France, on the day he won a Victoria Cross, 28 September 1918. But he could not bring himself to kill a wounded man and instead let Hitler go. Hitler was indeed wounded in northern France, but work by historians has cast new doubt on the story. Documents in the Bavarian State Archive show that Corporal Hitler was on leave on the day in question and nowhere near the battle. |