Bombing Hitler Read online

  After three or four hours of this night work, Elser is exhausted and spends the rest of the night dozing on his chair. In the course of three months he spends thirty to thirty-five nights working in this way, generally coming in at three-day intervals.

  During the day, after Elser has gotten some sleep, he gets down to developing his explosive device. One of the first things he does is modify the clocks. The bomb case will have to wait until he finishes boring out the chamber. At first he considers connecting the clock to the detonator using an automobile turn indicator and a battery. Then he installs a wooden cog in the clock. The hour hand strikes a tooth on the cog every twelve hours and moves the cog one-twelfth of a rotation further. With this arrangement, Elser can set his ignition mechanism no more than 144 hours in advance—six full days. The Gestapo was surprised by this system.

  When the cog is struck, a lever in the clock is moved. This lever was intended in the clock mechanism to activate the striking of the clock; after Elser’s conversion, it sets a gear in motion that winds a wire soldered onto a small drum. This wire releases a ratchet lever, pulls away a spring under tension, and frees a sleigh, which is a molded block of iron with three nails implanted into it. These strike the igniters of live gun shells from which the shot has been removed, setting off firing caps that cause the blasting caps to penetrate into the explosive containers, finally triggering the detonation.

  But Elser still has technical concerns—his “checkomania” reasserts itself. Lacking sufficient confidence in one clock, he installs a second one. He also thinks of the possibility that someone sitting near the column during the day might hear the clocks ticking inside it. He therefore insulates the interior of the wooden bomb case with a layer of cork. Elser cannot carry out such detailed construction without workshops and the help of experienced craftsmen. His land-lady, Rosa Lehmann, observed how he won over the craftsmen: “He drove all the craftsmen in the neighborhood crazy. He needed to do something in every shop—at the locksmith or the carpenter or the mechanic. He could beg like a little child.”

  If it suits his purpose, Elser can overcome his penchant for privacy and become chatty. If need be he can be downright gregarious. The strongest ties develop between him and master woodworker Brög. He has been in his good graces since helping him with the con-struction of a large heavy wardrobe for no pay. Brög couldn’t afford an assistant, so in exchange Elser was allowed to work in the shop and even use the adjoining supply room to sleep in. At Brög’s own suggestion, he provided Elser with a key; Elser was able to spend the night there after he vacated his room at the Lehmanns at the beginning of November.

  On November 1 and November 2, Elser is at last able to fill the chamber with explosive. Conscientious as he is, he makes sure to pack every corner with dynamite. At home during the day he tests the accuracy of his clocks several times. On November 3, he arrives at the hall carrying his clocks wrapped in newspaper under his arm—and finds the hall locked for the first time. He can’t go to the supply room at Brög’s place because the street access is bolted. So Elser has to spend this night in the courtyard of the brewery among beer kegs, a scene that foreshadows his role as an outcast. The cold gnaws at his dwindling strength.

  He makes his next attempt on November 4—the hall is open and there is a dance, as Elser already knows. He buys a ticket and has no problem making his way up to the gallery with his clocks. He sits down at a table and watches the people dancing. At closing time, he disappears into the storage room—then he gets his second shock: His ignition apparatus is too big to fit into the bomb chamber. Elser has only three nights left and he becomes even more nervous. For-tunately, the difference is not great; he saws off the corners of the wooden case and files them down.

  On November 5 there is another dance. Elser again waits up on the gallery. This time the case fits. Elser inserts the wire, tightens it, and starts the clocks. This is the longest night for him so far—he does not finish until 6:00 a.m. Since November 1, he has been slowly folding his tents. Having already given notice, he vacates his room; he sleeps during the day in Brög’s supply room, and sends a box containing clothes and tools to his sister Maria in Stuttgart.

  His final meeting with master Brög, who without his knowledge has been Elser’s best helper, is the crowning event in this theater of the absurd. Two affable craftsmen who have unselfishly assisted each other say good-bye. Each nods to the other and expresses his warmest thanks for his cooperation and support.

  Elser neglected his connections to Königsbronn during the three months in Munich. He insisted on receiving Elsa’s letters from Esslingen at general delivery so that she would not find out his address. He no longer wrote to his family. On his last trip to Munich on November 7, he wanted to stop by Königsbronn only to say goodbye to his father, who had become very frail. There was no time for anything else.

  The constant tension in Munich, having to keep everything—all his thoughts and worries—bottled up, made Elser even more nervous. This tendency had already begun in Schnaitheim when he was living at the Schmauders’ place. He recalled his childhood, when his mother had prayed with him. Since the beginning of 1939, as he told the Gestapo during the interrogation, he would frequently seek out a church—silent prayer did him some good, he said. “It wasn’t until this year that I once again started going to church a lot—maybe thirty times since the beginning of the year. Lately on weekdays, I have been going to a Catholic church to say the Lord’s Prayer if there wasn’t a Protestant church close by. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter whether you do it in a Protestant church or a Catholic church. I’ll admit that there was some connection between my plan, which was always on my mind, and going to church frequently and praying frequently—I definitely wouldn’t have prayed so much if it hadn’t been for the action I had been planning and preparing for. And it’s true that I always felt a little calmer after praying.”

  While Elser’s clocks were ticking on the gallery of the Bürger-brãukeller, the military opposition was tearing its hair out trying to figure out how Hitler’s next war could be stopped. But the opposition couldn’t act—more and more new considerations kept it paralyzed. Hitler assumed there would be a rebellion or an assassination attempt. Yet he did not have much respect for his top military leaders; he had often witnessed how quickly they knuckled under when he yelled at them. Since the Polish campaign, the general staff was aware of the brutality with which Hitler conducted war, and they suspected his motives: the extermination of the Polish Jews, clerics, and intellectuals. And so it would continue. The high-ranking German military officers who didn’t dare to eliminate Hitler then sacrificed entire divisions without compunction. Elser, by contrast, had made his decision: one instead of many millions.

  XVIII

  In the Concentration Camp at Sachsenhausen

  BEFORE THE INTERROGATION in Berlin, which took place November 19-23, 1939, Elser was repeatedly tortured. As a prisoner at the Wittelsbacher Palais in Munich, he had been brutally beaten on Himmler’s orders. After November 23, the punishment became truly systematic. In Berlin, as one of the Gestapo’s most important detainees, Elser was certainly kept in the cellar at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. Sooner or later almost everyone who had made a name and reputation for himself in the resistance movement was imprisoned there, from Canaris to Bonhoeffer. The only one generally overlooked by posterity was the little woodworker from the Ostalb.

  On direct orders from Hitler and Himmler, all the torture sessions centered on the question of instigators. It is entirely possible, and could hardly be held against him, that under great duress Elser occasionally fabricated the existence of instigators. When Elsa Härlenwas brought face-to-face with him in Berlin, she watched as Georg was forced to state that he was following the orders of foreign agents when he was working at Waldenmaier in Heidenheim.

  Claims of another scenario dreamed up by Elser can be traced to Walter Schellenberg, former head of the domestic intelligence division at the SD, “Elser explained that two
unknown persons had assisted him in the preparation of the attack and promised that they would arrange to get him safely out of the country.” What came next might clearly have been made up by SS secret service man Schel-lenberg. According to him, the day after the SD commando group responsible for the Venlo abduction received a commendation, he was summoned to Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Beforehand, he asked Gestapo Müller about the status of the investigation. Müller’s response:

  I just can’t get anywhere with this guy; he’s completely bullheaded and always sticks to his original story—that he hates Hitler, who put his brother in a concentration camp because he was a Communist. Then he claims that tinkering around with this infernal bomb was fun for him and that he always kept an image of Hitler’s maimed body in his mind. . . . He says these two unknown men delivered the explosives and the detonators to him at a Munich café. It may well be that Strasser and his Black Front have a hand in this.

  The Gestapo figured out all on its own that these two stories were not compatible. Müller went on: “So far I’ve always been able to break every one of these types that I’ve taken on. If this guy had been treated to my beatings earlier on, he never would have thought up this nonsense.” In a subsequent discussion, Hitler issued an order to Heydrich: “I would like to know what kind of man this Elser is. We must be able to classify him somehow. Report back to me on this. And furthermore, use all means to get this criminal to talk. Have him hypnotized, give him drugs; make use of everything of this nature our scientists have tried. I want to know who the instigators are. I want to know who is behind this.”

  A few days later, Schellenberg heard from Gestapo Müller that three doctors had worked on Elser for twenty-four hours and injected him with “sizable quantities of Pervertin,” but that he continued to say the same thing. Müller had a workshop set up for Elser at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and ordered him to reconstruct the explosive device. Elser accomplished this task in a short time, then installed the device into a wooden pillar. The Gestapo and the SS could not conceal their enthusiasm: “A masterpiece!” Heydrich and Schellenberg visited Elser in his workshop. When Schellenberg saw Elser for the first time, he said:

  He was a small, slight man, somewhat pale, with bright eyes and a high forehead—a type that one finds occasionally among skilled craftsmen. He spoke pure Swabian dialect, and he seemed shy and reserved—a bit frightened. He responded to questioning only with reluctance, but he opened up when he was praised for his craftsmanship. Then he would comment on his reconstructed model in detail and with great enthusiasm.

  Police Photo of Elser with a shaved head.

  But Elser still stuck to his story about the two unknown men at the Munich café.

  The same day, Gestapo Müller summoned four noted hypnotists. Only one was able to put Elser into a trance, but the hardheaded prisoner stuck to what he had already said. A hypnotist rendered a report reflecting the role of psychology in the service of the regime, stating that Elser was a “fanatic,” a “sectarian loner with the obsessive notion that he had to avenge his brother,” and that he also had a pathological desire for recognition—a need for some extraordinary technical achievement.” The conclusion of the report might be accurate; Elser had made similar statements before the attack. According to the psychologist, Elser had the “drive to achieve fame by eliminating Hitler and simultaneously liberating Germany from ‘the evil of Hitler.’”

  At first Elser remained at the headquarters of Reich Security. Hitler issued the order to hold Elser, along with the two British Secret Service men, for a show trial after the war. This unlocks the secret of why Elser was given preferential treatment as a special prisoner at the concentration camp. Elser’s reproduction of the explosive device was held in high regard by the Gestapo, who adopted it into their field manuals for training purposes. Elser indeed achieved recognition as an inventor, albeit among his archenemies.

  According to a secret message passed by an inmate of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen to Secret Service man Best, it was rumored that Elser was kept imprisoned on the top floor of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin until January or February of 1941.

  Nebe was one of the last to see the prisoner in 1941, as reported by Gisevius:

  In the courtyard of the Gestapo building, a prisoner suddenly came running at him so fast that the guards couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t believe his eyes: It was the Munich assassin. He had heard nothing more about him and assumed that he was no longer alive. With tears in his eyes, Nebe told me at the time of the haunting encounter with a tormented creature. Elser was just a shell of his former self because they had tried to squeeze information out of him by feeding him very salty herring and exposing him to heat, and then depriving him of liquids. They wouldn’t let up—they wanted him to confess to some kind of connection, however vague, to Otto Strasser. The artisan remained steadfast. Almost like an innocent child or the kind of person one sometimes finds among sect members, he told Nebe of his torment, not begging for mercy, not even complaining—it was more like an outburst of joy at seeing once again the only person who had treated him humanely since his arrest.

  The standard program of Gestapo torture included turning up the heat full blast, giving subjects only salted herring to eat, and depriving them of liquids. The procedures surely also included such routine measures as waking a prisoner and interrogating him, never turning off the light and shining it directly in his face, threatening him with additional torture, destroying the last vestiges of hope by describing various kinds of execution, and so on.

  Even before Elser was placed in a cell block in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, rumors about him circulated among a public burdened with disinformation. German society in its confusion tried to find someone to blame for anything out of the norm. Their speculation could never be proved, but neither could it be refuted. Anyone reporting a rumor was therefore at first assumed to be right. Of course, rumors were prohibited, but they continued to flourish— there was simply too much need for clarification and hope. In the concentration camp at Dachau, the confusion was so rampant that many inmates thought even the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, had been staged by the SS.

  The origin, development, and spread of rumors about Elser are as tangled and impenetrable as a dense jungle. An early published attempt appeared in the St. Galler Tagblatt of November 24, 1939, according to which Elser was a Communist, was sent to a concentration camp in 1936, and was part of Strasser’s Black Front. Judging by the remaining content, which contained details of the assassination attempt, one is led to conjecture that the source of the information was within the headquarters of the Gestapo. From here there were direct connections to the “Political Department” of a concentration camp, the Gestapo office responsible for maintaining the political files of all prisoners. Prisoners who worked in this “Political Department” were held in the highest regard in the information marketplace at the camp. Those in control here were frequently Communist prisoners, who were also responsible for passing on rumors about the Gestapo.

  Probably the oldest version of all the rumors about Elser circulating in the concentration camps goes back to Ernst Eggert, a trusty in the prison cells of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Eggert heralded his remarks as a “great scoop” with the heading: “The assassin at the Munich Hofbrãuhaus” (citing the wrong beer hall as the location of the attack). At first Eggert was struck by the suspiciously civil reception Elser received at the concentration camp:

  I am completely convinced that the attack on Hitler in Munich was staged, purely for propaganda purposes. One day we have big excitement at the prison cells—the senior officer as well as Commandant Lorenz [actually Loritz] appeared and issued orders to prepare a large room—and make it the best one we had. They put cloths on the tables, and vases with flowers. They provided a radio.

  This is followed by a description of the prison conditions prescribed for Elser, the main parts of which are probably accurate:

  The doo
r was never locked, and there was an SS man stationed in his room—the guard was changed every two hours. Three times a day he [Elser] was allowed to move around outdoors, and he had all kinds of other privileges—he could smoke without restriction and he was provided with excellent food, the same as the food served to the commandant. Every day there were potatoes, meat, sauces, vegetables, stewed fruit. The assassin was given classy treatment—he was handled with kid gloves.

  Every line exudes envy—an understandable reaction, given the hellish conditions in the prison cells. As if there had been objections to his remarks, Eggert adds: “I firmly believe, after what I have seen and heard, that I am justified in saying that the attack was staged— because nobody would treat a real assassin in this manner. If this t[hing] hadn’t been staged, they would have put him in chains and made short work of him.”

  It is not until this point that Eggert describes the conspiratorial path that led him to his discoveries:

  When he [Elser] was let out of his cell, I [had to] leave the corridor and go to my cell, but I wasn’t locked in. I suspected something and said to myself something’s not right here—so I waited until I caught sight of him. But I still didn’t quite have a handle on what was going on. But then one day I got hold of a magazine, and guess what I saw in it—a picture of the Munich assassin with his name under it, Georg Elser. At the prison they called him Schorsch. Then it dawned on me. So I started feeling out the SS in the cell block and got confirmation that he was the assassin. The SS was outraged that the assassin would receive such treatment. If the camp directors had known my secret, they would have shot me on the spot.