Bombing Hitler Page 22

  In 1951, August Ziegler gave a more precise description. Around Christmas 1944, the number of cremations started increasing—there were 200 to 250 bodies a day, and there were four ovens in operation. Later on the SS started using mass graves in order to save on coke. At the time of Elser’s execution, only those who had been hanged or shot were cremated. Shootings took place in the area in front of the new crematorium. The victims had to strip naked and were taken out into the yard to the backstop, where they had to kneel facing the backstop and were shot in the back of the head by Bongartz and occasionally by camp director Ruppert. Sometimes there was a doctor present. Eyewitnesses were strictly forbidden, but curiosity drove the prisoners to come out, as Ziegler admitted: “We were able to watch the shootings from a distance.” Then the prisoners had to rush out with the stretcher and carry the dead to the morgue. They had to inform Bongartz if a victim was still alive, and he would finish him off with another shot.

  On that evening Ziegler was already asleep. It might have been 10:00 p.m. when Mahl came running in and woke him up; he was in such a rush that he wouldn’t even let him put on his shoes and a coat. Outside it was so dark that Ziegler was able to follow Mahl only by shouting back and forth. Bongartz was standing near a flowerbed, with his hands in his pockets and a corpse next to him, lying on its back, as he recalled. Ziegler knew immediately that Bongartz was the only one who could have pulled the trigger. The corpse was still fresh; the blood had not yet started to coagulate. Ziegler’s hands and trousers became smeared while transporting it. The dead man was small and of slight build; he was wearing good clothing but no hat; his head was shaved. He was cremated the next day.

  After lengthy inquiries, the investigating judge of District Court Munich II, Dr. Nikolaus Naaf, concluded on November 8, 1954— the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination attempt—that Elser had been shot to death on April 8, 1945, by Theodor Heinrich Bongartz. His only error was in the date: Bongartz actually fired the fatal shot one day later.

  Judging by the general practices at Dachau, it is to be assumed that witnesses at Elser’s execution would have included the following high-level SS officers: camp director Friedrich Ruppert, camp doctor Dr. Hans Eisele, and liaison officer Franz Böttger. All three were hanged by the Americans in 1945. At that point the execution of Georg Elser was not taken into consideration because it had not yet been discovered.

  Around 10:00 p.m. on April 9, the special prisoners, who had been waiting in trucks, were given an exceptionally cordial reception by the commandant. As Best was being delivered to the cell block that evening, he was greeted by an old acquaintance from Sachsenhausen, Jehovah’s Witness Paul Wauer, who told him that “Little Schorsch” had been there. “They just took him out and shot him.” Wilhelm Visintainer was a trusty who had earned the nickname “Coal Thief,” in reference to a Nazi propaganda character who hurt the war effort by wasting power. From him Best learned that Elser had been executed with a shot to the back of the head. The opinion was widespread that this shot could have been fired only by Bongartz—he was the only one who carried a pistol out in that area.

  The manner in which Bongartz killed individual prisoners becomes clearer with the case of French general Delestraint. On this occasion, unlike others, Mahl, Ziegler, and Geiger were standing just a few feet away. And it was daytime—April 19, 11:00 a.m. By this time shootings were no longer customary; evacuation of the camp was expected at any time. The American army was positioned fifty miles from Dachau.

  Delestraint was led to believe that he was being released, then was taken to the crematorium. From the gate he walked on alone. Eyewitness Geiger was not far away. The usual higher-level SS officers were waiting close by. Ruppert cordially greeted the general and shook his hand. He then instructed him to proceed on to the new crematorium to pick up his papers. Delestraint had gone no more than fifty feet when Bongartz slipped out of the old crematorium wearing gym shoes and started following him, unnoticed. Ziegler saw Bongartz fire, and the prisoner fell forward face down. Since the victim was still alive at the crematorium oven, Bongartz shot him in the mouth from the side, knocking out a gold tooth. This provided Bongartz with yet another exploit to talk about. He liked to boast that he was the best shot with a pistol in the camp. It was well known that he always kept his weapon at the ready.

  Theodor Bongartz, who shot Georg Elser.

  Theodor Heinrich Bongartz, who was born in Krefeld in 1902, was a terror at the crematorium. Having been trained as a plasterer, he worked in his hometown from 1922 until 1930 as a plasterer, and in 1928 he was made a master plasterer. The same year, he joined the SA and four years later, the SS. He then became a stoker and machinist with the army post administration in Krefeld. In 1939, he was transferred to a Totenkopf (Death’s Head) regiment in Brünn and in 1940 to the commandant’s staff of the concentration camp in the town of Dachau, where he lived at Schleissheimer Strasse 121. His first wife committed suicide in 1941—as her reason he cited “melancholy.”

  According to witnesses, Bongartz was “an exceptionally brutal-looking man.” Lechner said that he “had a very sallow complexion and looked dreadful.” Periodically, he would also drink heavily and would fire his weapon when drunk. In 1951, a policeman from Dachau submitted a personal description to the court: “About 5’ 8”, somewhat frail, strikingly erect posture, black hair parted on the left, pale complexion, oval face, heavy black eyebrows, slightly prominent cheekbones, no mustache, no eyeglasses; particular traits: strikingly erect posture, determined stride.”

  On Saturday April 28, 1945, the SS cleared out—one day after the last of five death marches had left Dachau. Before they did, they dynamited the crematorium, destroyed the standing cells in the cell block, and burned all the files that the prisoners had not managed to spirit away. It was an effort to undo the existence of Hell. A week before, the commandant’s office had issued the guards forged military IDs, German army uniforms, and backpacks.

  When they began their retreat on April 28, the members of the prisoner work detail were in a horse-drawn wagon with Bongartz; then one by one they started fleeing. Ziegler made it to Munich-Pasing. Bongartz also took off—presumably headed for home in the Lower Rhine area. Along the way, an American patrol stopped him and took him to the P.O.W. camp at Heilbronn-Böckingen. There he died so suddenly—on May 15, 1945—that at first suicide was suspected. But the entry on the list of the dead read “Master sergeant, born 1901”—the tattoo showing his blood type, which was typical for the SS, appears not to have been discovered, and the cause of death is listed as tuberculosis. His strikingly sallow complexion might indicate a different cause of death—hepatitis or cirrhosis of the liver. Bongartz was buried in a grave in the military section of the cemetery at Böckingen: row 17, number 6. To this day it is cared for as a military grave.

  SS man Lechner was placed in an internment camp for a year. He had thought ahead about exonerating himself and had Georg Elser write a “Persilschein” for him. There was an SS man from Heidenheim, now in prison for his role at Dachau, whose wife established contact with the Elser family in Königsbronn. Her hope was that Elser was still alive and that she could get a letter of commendation. In a flurry of tastelessness and falsification of history, Elser achieved a brief bit of attention. The Englishman Sigismund Payne Best, who had propagated so much nonsense about Elser, suddenly referred to him as “my poor little friend” in a letter written in 1952. It would seem that a dead Elser was the “best” Elser.

  XX

  The Long Road to Recognition

  ELSEB’S ATTEMPT ON Hitler’s life left two piles of rubble in its wake: the first was in the Bürgerbräukeller, the second was in the minds of the German people. This second pile of mental debris has taken more than thirty years to clear away. The Nazis’ idée fixe that Elser’s attack was a plot between the British Secret Service and Otto Strasser did not survive very long, but it helped fuel the notion that the Nazis could be suspected of virtually anything. In addition to technical c
onsiderations, the fact that the assassin had been kept alive so long appeared to speak in favor of this theory. People had become accustomed to the Nazis’ practice of executing such an enemy immediately. The logic was simple: Anyone still alive must be an accomplice. In that case, people should have condemned the many co-conspirators who survived the attack of July 20—but that was another story, a much more serious one.

  Around the beginning of 1946, Martin Niemöller started the vicious circle of claiming that Elser had been an SS man and the attack an undertaking of the SS leadership itself. He claimed that he alone among the prisoners at Sachsenhausen and Dachau had been a direct witness, stating that he had spoken with Elser. In a series of presentations, Niemöller contended that the attack had been “carried out on Hitler’s orders, in order to strengthen the belief among the masses so often stressed in Nazi propaganda that Hitler was protected by Providence.” Elser had been an “SS staff sergeant,” he claimed, had been treated gently while being arrested at the border two days after the attack, and had enjoyed “advantages” at the concentration camp: “He had a large living area, a radio, a library, and a private workshop at his disposal.”

  This depiction appeared repeatedly in newspapers and on radio broadcasts, and also reached the Elser family, who had no idea what had happened to Georg. On behalf of her mother, daughter Anna Lober wrote to Niemöller. First she vehemently disputed the claim that Georg had been in the SS. She also wanted to know whether Georg was still alive.

  Anna Lober expressed the widespread sense of helplessness that her family as a whole must have felt: “In the Third Reich we were persecuted and imprisoned, the whole family, and now everything is being turned upside down. Who can make out who is telling the truth and who is lying and who has lied? Why did they drag all of us as prisoners all the way to Berlin back then? We innocent people who had no idea about the whole affair?”

  Why indeed were the Elsers interrogated and persecuted at the time? Why all the criminal investigation? These are questions that journalists and historians over the next several years did not ask. Writing even more frankly to another contemporary, Niemöller revealed the speculative nature of his claim: “I am convinced that it was Himmler who instigated this.”

  In his response to Elser’s mother, Niemöller trotted out as arguments the camp rumors about Georg Elser. And he admitted that he in fact had spoken to him only one time, briefly. They had not spoken about the attack, he said. Elser just mentioned that his wife—meaning Elsa Härlen—had read Niemöller’s book From U-Boat to Pulpit.

  Anna Lober responded for her mother:

  You know, Herr Pastor Niemöller, it creates a great strain on us when all the newspapers and radio stations send out the message to the whole world that my son [was] in the SS until 1939. One newspaper said he was an SS staff sergeant; the others said he was in the SA. None of this is true. Up until the time of his capture in 1939, he had never been associated with any part of the Hitler regime. The entire village can confirm this.

  And Anna went on to say that Dr. Lothar Rohde, Elser’s cellmate at Dachau, was also now claiming that Elser himself had admitted to him that he was a member of the SS.

  In her mistrust of such witnesses, Anna Lober proved herself quite worthy of her brother: “A man who is no longer alive cannot defend himself. So people can just dump even more suspicions on him.” She made short shrift of all the rumormongers: “There are people who make themselves out to be important, yet know nothing at all about this matter.”

  The Elsers of course received no response from Niemöller. However, when the Munich investigating judge Dr. Naaf questioned him in 1951, Niemöller quickly shifted into reverse and started downplaying the once so popular theory about Elser the SS man and the appearance of Nazi involvement in the attack. In an NDR television broadcast in 1965, all he had to say was that Elser was “a good, honest craftsman.” The world of the camp rumors had vanished into thin air.

  In 1949, the hearsay from the camp underground found its way into a book by Hans Rothfels, which was considered to be the definitive account of the German opposition to Hitler. The author expressed doubts that Elser could “be counted among the lone fanatics.” Interesting that Rothfels did not consider any of the conspirators of the July 20 attack to be a “fanatic.” Perhaps his implication was that Elser was lacking the proper breeding and education to carry out such a plan. In short, he was a man without social and political legitimacy.

  Hans Rothfels’s reasoning was particularly odd: “In the public opinion it had been proved that this was another case of a paid agent provocateur, like the one involving van der Lubbe—in all probability they were close to the truth.” Rothfels appeared to have already forgotten that four years before then, the National Socialists were the ones who determined public opinion. For dissenting views there was no public forum.

  The assessment of the Hitler era by Rothfels was accepted throughout the 1950s and 1960s by other historians such as Allan Bullock, Gerhard Ritter, and Eberhard Zeller. It was not until the appearance of the seminal essay by Anton Hoch and the transcript of the Berlin interrogations, edited by Lothar Gruchmann and released in 1969-70, that this assessment was proved to be false.

  More “mental rubble” was created by the journalists who incessantly interviewed the craftsmen in Munich who had unknowingly helped Elser. They were hoping to reveal that at least a few of these craftsmen knew about the bomb. It was not until the 1950s that any serious interviews of contemporary witnesses, including Elser’s girl-friends, were undertaken, and they were still tainted by the lingering Nazi conspiracy theory and driven by the popular press and its desire for exposés. Scholars of the period were insufficiently rigorous in confirming their sources.

  After the end of the war, as long as interest in the idea of a militant opposition to Hitler persisted, the isolated attack by Elser attracted charlatans. Hans Loritz, commandant of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen from 1940 to 1942, suddenly claimed that he had carried out the attack on Hitler himself. Naujoks, who was camp leader among the prisoners at Sachsenhausen, described Loritz as “primitive, ruthless, corrupt.” The Jehovah’s Witness Wauer saw Loritz as a sadist of the first order. So Elser’s act of liberation had fallen into the worst possible hands. But Loritz took himself out of the debate by committing suicide on January 31, 1946.

  In 1941, while the Königsbronn quarry owner Georg Vollmer was in the concentration camp at Welzheim, his wife tried in desperation to place the blame for the attack on a trio of Communists in league with the music-store owner Kuch. The Stuttgart Gestapo didn’t take this subterfuge seriously. Vollmer himself continued embroidering this story when he filed an objection during a denazification hearing. In a letter to Bavarian radio dated March 17, 1946, he audaciously conjured another version of the tale out of his bag of tricks. Suddenly Vollmer revealed himself as a staunch antifascist, who had seen it all coming after the Reichstag fire of 1933. Since he was such an opponent of the Nazis at that time, it was “not so surprising that Georg Elser . . . would apply for a position at my quarry,” he claimed. Vollmer resorts to village gossip: “And he [Elser] was foolish in his relations with women. He surely lived beyond his means and usually associated with people who, like himself, had just a little education. The people in his circle were not part of the middle class; they were what we call in dialect ‘half gentlemen.’” Vollmer then brought up Kuch, the ominous man from Zurich; next he tried to portray Faistelhuber, the man Elser said he was looking for when he was arrested, as the middleman who arranged access to the Bürgerbräukeller for Elser. According to Vollmer, Elser expressed great interest in demolition techniques and said he wanted to find work in this field in Munich, claiming that he would produce something “that the whole world would talk about.” Elser was, he stated, “simply a paid tool.”

  In August 1947 this tale entered a third phase. Now Vollmer tried to show that he had been placed in the concentration camp because of his activities in the resistance, but he had
nothing to do with the explosives, he said; that was all the doing of Kolb, the explosives expert. At the hearing before the denazification tribunal in September 1949, Vollmer finally went all out, claiming that Elser had requested explosives from him because “he had a project he wanted to carry out that fall that the entire world would be talking about,” but that Elser did not receive the explosives. Elser would then go on to steal the explosives in order to bring Vollmer down politically, he claimed.

  A few months later, Vollmer wrote to the court of appeals in Stuttgart saying that Elser “asked me for them [the explosives]—and came into possession of some.” So Vollmer came a bit closer to identifying the supplier.

  In 1950, Vollmer was interrogated by the Kripo on behalf of the investigating judge in Munich. Kuch, according to Vollmer’s latest claims, was involved “only in espionage” and was mixed up with an English resistance group, which in turn had contacts to a German group. The German secret service had gotten onto Kuch’s trail. The Propaganda Ministry was in on the assassination attempt, but Hitler knew nothing about it. Faistelhuber had been ordered to keep Elser under surveillance. After crossing the border, Elser was to receive a reward of two million marks. At the end, Vollmer called everything he had patched together a “combination.” Or perhaps the work of an amateur detective with a lot of imagination.