In November 1939, Adolf Hitler traveled to Munich to give his big annual speech at the Bürgerbräukeller — the site of his failed “Beer Hall Putsch” sixteen years earlier. Usually, these anniversary speeches ran to almost two hours. This time, though, the führer confined himself to ninety minutes of ranting so he could arrange an earlier train back to Berlin.

Twelve minutes after he and all the other big Nazi leaders left the beer hall, a bomb went off. It killed seven people and wounded several dozen others. When he was told about the bombing later that night by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Hitler responded, “A man has to be lucky.”

While it’s impossible to know for sure what would have happened if Hitler and his key lieutenants had died two years before Nazi Germany went to war with the United States and the Soviet Union and began to implement the Final Solution, it’s hard not to feel like the human race as a whole was extremely unlucky not to find out.