After 1942 the prospect of the promised easy military victory receded. Despite government efforts to control the information flow, rumours of industrial scale killings of Jews and government opponents in death camps began to emerge among those able and willing to ask the right questions in the right places and listen to the answers. By 1944, with military defeat looming on the horizon, the mood was increasingly one of despair: the government was becoming unpopular. A high-profile assassination attempt in July 1944 left the leader seriously injured and sent the government into a protracted spasm of enhanced paranoia. Thousands &lt;a href="Aktion%20Gitter"&gt;were arrested overnight on 22/23 August&lt;/a&gt;. It is clear from the list of addresses visited at that time by police, Nazi paramilitaries and Gestapo officers that the government's list of people to be rounded up was heavily dependent on (by now increasingly outdated) lists of politicians who had served the country before 1933.