Bombing Hitler Read online

  The crowd has now become so sufficiently agitated and ready for war that Hitler can start to wrap things up. Even with all the rhetorical chaos, there is an inner logic to the speech: The objective is to get people fired up for war. When Hitler shouts into the hall that in this new world war “England will definitely not be the victor,” the roar from the audience is louder than at any point so far—the first vocal climax. Then follows another show of strength, at the same volume, when Hitler stumbles off into a collective death wish: “No matter how long the war lasts, Germany will never, never capitulate—not now, and not three years from now.” With the repetition of “never,” Hitler starts to rant; his voice rises rapidly, then falters and is lost in the sudden roaring of the throng. Total war is being foreshadowed here, a war until the Götterdämmerung. Berliners were not the first, in 1943, to shout to Goebbels that they wanted total war; in 1939 the people of Munich—those in the Bürgerbräukeller—demonstrated just how ready they were. There is one more bloodcurdling roar as Hitler makes a prophecy: “Here [in this war] only one can win—and we are the one!”

  The soldiers are ready for self-sacrifice, and Hitler digs deep into his bag of mystical ideology: “Whatever may be demanded of us individually in this period of sacrifice, we know that this shall pass ... it is of no import. The crucial aim is and will remain victory!”

  The church service is drawing to a close. Hitler expresses his gratitude to “Providence,” which he cloaks in a swastika. From the history of the Party he concludes that “What has happened was the will of Providence!” He expresses his gratitude to the fallen soldiers (everyone in the audience stands up; the sound of chairs scraping goes on and on). Their sacrifices helped make it possible to over-whelm Poland in thirty days. The mystique of death once more reduces Hitler’s language to a muddle: “What we National Socialists have taken with us as realization and as pledge from the bloodbath of November 9 into the history of our movement, that is, that what the first sixteen died for is worth, if necessary, sending many others to die for—this realization shall not forsake us, not now nor in the future.” One must read this sentence several times before the fog clears a bit.

  Hitler ends his speech at 9:07 p.m. In order to reach his private train on time he must hurry to the main station with his entourage. Besotted with thoughts of victory, Goebbels writes in his diary: “Mad enthusiasm rocks the hall. This speech will become a sensation all over the world.”

  But someone else, the Swabian woodworker Georg Elser, was to steal the show from Hitler. While the supreme commander of the German Wehrmacht was roaring praise to the next world war, the two clock mechanisms in Elser’s bomb were ticking. By this time the assassin had intended to be across the border in safety.

  II

  The Assassin Is Foiled at the Border

  GEORG ELSER COULD in fact have sneaked across the border on November 6, 1939, three days before Hitler’s speech, but after three months of nerve-wracking, exhausting labor in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, he had lost his sense of urgency. Leaving his home-land was harder than anticipated. After a long period of loneliness in Munich, he longed to see family and friends again. He had originally planned to take a quick trip to Königsbronn to say good-bye to his father, who was in poor health, as well as to the Schmauder family in Schnaitheim, with whom he had lived when he began working on his explosive device. He would pay dearly for this sentimentality.

  On November 6, he visited the family of his sister, Maria Hirth, who lived at Lerchenstrasse 52 in Stuttgart. He told them only that he had to go “over the fence” ( i.e., the border), but did not reveal the true reason, even after they asked. He felt no need to unburden himself, being at peace with himself and his self-assigned task. While his sister assumed that he intended to desert, Elser acted as if he simply wanted to take a trip and look for work in Switzerland. This was believable, since the time he had spent at Lake Constance had imbued him with enthusiasm for Switzerland. When asked about his reasons for leaving, he said only, “I must. It can’t be changed.” Given his well-known stubbornness, there was no point in quizzing him any further.

  On the evening of the 6th, Elser went to bed early. Feeling completely drained, he slept until quite late the next morning. The work was done, all the tension had left him, he had no further goals—the final one, the border, seemed a simple matter to him. He had entrusted the most important task, yet to be completed, to an ignition system which was secured against failure.

  The two clocks were ticking.

  From the outset, he had intended to recheck the explosive device before fleeing to Switzerland. He had a reputation among his superiors for going back to customers after a job had been completed to make sure that everything was in working order. Later they would joke about his “check-o-mania.” As a tinkerer with a tendency to perfectionism, Elser did not want to risk undermining a year’s effort because of carelessness or error. As a clock expert, he knew that a pendulum clock could stop if there were even a slight inclination in the floor. Under difficult circumstances and using primitive means, he had leveled the base of the bomb chamber in the pitch-black hall, using only a flash-light covered with a dark handkerchief. He had mixed the plaster using his own urine and was not able to use a level for the finishing work.

  On November 7, he took the 4:00 p.m. express train from Stuttgart to Munich, in order to arrive late. He would no longer have time for his customary supper in the Bürgerbräustübl next to the large hall, the Bürgerbräukeller. And perhaps on his last evening he didn’t want to be seen by the waitresses again, who had come to know him all too well. At the end of his three-month stint working as an “inventor” (which he claimed to be throughout his stay in Munich), he arrived in Stuttgart with only ten marks in his pocket. His sister gave him thirty marks, as thanks for the tools, clocks, and clothes that he had left with her. These few possessions would prove to be a fatal gift.

  * * *

  At the Swiss border Georg Elser had exactly five marks left.

  In order to avoid being seen, Elser entered the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich through the main entrance on Rosenheimer Strasse around 10:00 p.m., shortly before closing time. It was to his advantage that, in spite of its cult status as a Nazi hangout, the locals liked to use the gigantic hall as a shortcut between Rosenheimer Strasse and Kellerstrasse. It was an altogether unusual location, ideal for a silent assassin in the midst of a state presumed to maintain total surveillance of its citizens.

  Elser strolled through the hall to the end of the gallery, and then turned to see if anyone else was in the room. Once the coast was clear, he disappeared into a storage space behind a screen, as he had done so often during the previous months. After the doors to the hall were locked, he waited to see whether anyone else was around. He then moved toward his pillar in the middle of the hall above the podium, where Hitler would speak the next evening, and opened his “secret door” in the pillar. Both clocks were correct to the minute. Whatever he could accomplish as a craftsman and inventor had been finished. For the rest of the night he dozed as usual in the chair in his hiding place.

  At 6:30 a.m., he stepped out onto Kellerstrasse unobserved through the emergency exit next to the kitchen, and had breakfast at a kiosk near the Isartor. Elser had a reason to celebrate, and the thrifty Swabian treated himself to two cups of coffee rather than his usual single cup.

  Georg Elser loved regularity. In pubs, for example, he always liked to sit at the same table. But with no real reason for doing so, that morning he decided to stop by Türkenstrasse 59 to see master joiner Brög, with whom he had gotten along so well. Elser had been allowed to use Brög’s bench and even to spend the night at his home on occasion. Elser wanted to say good-bye to him one last time, but since Brög was not in his workshop, Elser went to see his landlady, Rosa Lehmann, who lived close by at Türkenstrasse 94. He had moved out the week before, explaining that he was going back home. Now he was standing outside her window wearing a black hat and looking somewhat threatening, a
s Rosa Lehmann would later recount after the war. But by then, she was caught up in the assassination drama, and her recollection may have been influenced by gossip or fear of harassment by the police, journalists, and her own neighbors. Elser called up to her to ask whether he had gotten any mail—a nonsensical question, since he hadn’t written anyone in a long time.

  No, she said, there was no mail for him. So at 10:00 a.m. he boarded a local train at the main station, traveling third class to Ulm, where he transferred to an express train headed for Lake Constance, arriving around 6:00 p.m. at the harbor train station in Friedrichshafen. He still had a half hour and went looking for a barber. He wanted to be clean shaven in order to make a good impression as a political refugee at the border crossing. The ship to Konstanz departed at 6:30 p.m. According to the schedule, it should have arrived at 8:05 p.m.; however, it might have been a few minutes late because of the fog.

  Once Elser was on shore at Konstanz, he started making mistakes—or so we might think today. In actuality, the errors were made a long time ago. They lay in his false perception of the border situation, in his stubborn rejection of all assistance, and in his profound state of exhaustion. His mood might have been compared to the feelings once expressed by the French prisoner Rovan, who, upon his release from Dachau, proclaimed: “Now that there was no longer a reason to be afraid I felt a great emptiness within me, an abyss of exhaustion, which, so it seemed to me, I would never be able to climb out of.” Elser had been seized by the “melancholy of fulfillment,” in the words of the philosopher Ernst Bloch. And he knew Switzerland only superficially from the six-month summer idyll he had spent in the village of Bottighofen near Kreuzlingen.

  In a similar vein, the playwright Rolf Hochhuth, attempting to put himself in Elser’s place, once remarked: “He had now used up all his energy; from this point on, he made only careless or foolish moves . . . positively dazed from emotional exhaustion, he simply stumbled into the clutches of the customs officials.” But the errors had already been made, largely as a result of his isolation. In the fall of 1938, Elser had indeed made a short trip to Konstanz in order to determine whether the border crossing he intended to use was still unmanned, as he had recalled it being in 1930. And it is possible that he in fact found this stretch of border unguarded; for in 1938, war had not yet broken out—the situation had even eased somewhat since Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by England. Now, however, Germany was in the third month of war, and war might break out any day on the Western Front. Elser did not consider soliciting Commu-nists with experience to help with the escape—he wanted absolutely no one else to be involved in the assassination. Besides, he didn’t belong to the Party nor was he some official in danger who needed to be taken along secret routes by couriers across the green border.

  From the harbor in Konstanz, Elser now took the most direct path to the border, almost like a sleepwalker: Konzil, straight ahead across the Marktstätte, left onto Rosgartenstrasse, past the Dreifaltigkeits-kirche, across Bodanplatz to Hüetlinstrasse, and across Kreuzlinger Strasse to the small border street, Schwedenschanze. His destination was the big park at the Wessenbergheim. There the border was marked by a fence approximately two meters high and topped by two rows of barbed wire. It didn’t occur to Elser to first determine the location of the border patrol and the route taken during patrols. To the left of the spot where the Elser memorial plaque stands today, he passed through an unlocked gate, walked down the left side of the house, and quickly approached the border fence.

  What happened next is not in doubt, as many have maintained. Most reliable are the reports of the border-patrol officers, who stopped Elser twenty-five meters from the border fence. Xaver Rieger and Waldemar Zipperer began their patrol at 8:00 p.m., walking from the Kreuzlinger customs office to the Wessenberggarten along the Schwedenschanze. Five weeks later, when it was clear what a catch they had made, Rieger wrote:

  We entered the property at 8:05 p.m. Our position was chosen so that we could keep the entire stretch of border in our section under surveillance. . . . Between 8:40 and 8:45, a figure stepped out from behind the building and, after quickly surveying the area, made for the border, moving stealthily, yet very rapidly. The distance between me and the figure was about fifteen to twenty meters. When I saw the figure, I immediately ran quickly and cautiously toward the man, while simultaneously readying my carbine. When I was confident that I would be heard, I shouted at him “Hello, where are you going?” . . . In accordance with the guidelines regarding such a scenario, I considered it best not to make the man suspicious by telling him that he was under arrest. Since in response to my shout the man claimed to be looking for an acquaintance by the name of Feuchtelhuber, with the Konstanz Traditional Dress Club, of which he had been a member some years ago, I let him think that I wanted to be of assistance to him. . . . I therefore told him that I wanted to take him to a man who was more familiar with Konstanz and would surely know the acquaintance in question. Should, however, this man not know the acquaintance, then he would have to work it out on his own. . . . I hereby managed to gain his trust, and he came along willingly. I instructed adjutant border guard Zipperer to remain at his post and to maintain a sharp lookout, since I suspected that there were other individuals behind Elser who would also attempt to cross the border illegally. I had this suspicion because earlier we had observed a man in a light-colored coat on the Swiss side of the border doing something at the fence and walking back and forth in a conspicuous manner. As I was escorting Elser, I watched carefully to be sure that he did not discard any objects. Before being taken into the border patrol office, Elser stopped again at the door and took another look in the direction of Switzerland. It gave one the impression that at the last minute he might flee to Switzerland. However, when Elser saw my carbine at the ready and I said to him firmly “Here’s the door,” he followed willingly into the inspection room. The thorough physical inspection undertaken here, with Elser stripped down to his shirt, yielded the following results: In his pockets Elser carried wire cutters and a sealed envelope, which contained numerous notes with sketches pertaining to the production of grenades and fuses, heat and hardness coefficients, and the labeling of ammunition crates, as well as their color, contents, and destination. In addition, Elser had parts of an ignition device with him (firing pins, spring, etc.) and a postcard with an interior view of the Bürgerbräukeller in color. The card bore the official seal of the Nazi Party and contained no writing. At the conclusion, Customs Secretary Traber, who participated in the inspection, found concealed under Elser’s coat lapel the former insignia of the Red Front. In answer to questions as to why he had the insignia and the postcard with him, he said, “Out of sympathy.” During the entire search and interrogation Elser appeared very cooperative and extremely calm. Elser was then turned over to the border police.

  This report serves as the basic text for Elser’s failed border cross-ing. Later on, the event was taken over by legends as wild and tangled as the rose bushes around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The exact location and activity of the patrol remain unclear. The guards positioned themselves behind the house on the south side, in such a way that they were able to see over the border fence. From the living room on the ground floor they heard through an open window the radio broadcast of Hitler’s speech from the Bürgerbräukeller. They were not able to see into the neighbors’ backyards on the left side—and here might have lain Elser’s chance. If he had arrived in Konstanz earlier and had observed the changing of the guard—for the previous watch in the Wessenberggarten had been relieved just a bit earlier—he might have actually made it. At 8:25, Elser could not have known of this trap behind the house. Unconcerned, he walked past the house without looking to the right. The border guards were standing in the shadow of an old pear tree off the right corner of the house—while twenty-five meters beyond the fence the Swiss border street was brightly lit.

  Elser was no fool. When the customs officers stopped him, he knew to quickly assume his trusting and h
armless manner. He mentioned the name of the former chairman of the Traditional Dress Club and said he was looking for him. Regarding the man in the light-colored coat on the Swiss side of the border, the clairvoyant Gestapo later claimed it was a British Secret Service man, Otto Strasser, or another contact. After that, the Gestapo interrogations focused for weeks solely on the question of whether this man had been wearing a hat or a cap. Rieger spoke of a hat, while others, including, interestingly, some who had not been there, said under intense pressure from the Gestapo, that it was a cap. The Gestapo was in a state of permanent paranoia. From this point on, anyone who had seen or might have seen anything suspicious was under the Gestapo’s constant watch and subject to interrogation, using methods garnered from the GPU (the Soviet secret police) and administered by the admitted GPU disciple Heinrich Müller, known as Gestapo Mül-ler. The paranoia was so widespread that long after the interrogations of Elser, even Xaver Rieger was kept under surveillance by a Gestapo informant to see whether he might meet with the British Secret Service or Otto Strasser.

  At the Kreuzlinger customs office, Elser looked toward Switzerland, perhaps with longing, perhaps with regret. In any case, he lacked the energy to run the last eight meters from the customs building to the border. There was at that time no barrier across the border, only a chain. Would the border patrol have fired? Most certainly—the Nazis had no qualms when it came to dealing with violations of the border with Switzerland. But Elser was drained. He had never been an athlete and didn’t have an athletic build. His strength lay in the years spent in his shop doing delicate work, hiding behind a calm and natural exterior. And with these skills, he had come far.