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On the evening of November 11 or early in the morning of November 12, the attention of the Special Commission lit upon a clue—the Swabian dialect. Finally they looked around in their own cellar and discovered the prisoner from Konstanz who had been forgotten until now. Bringing the innkeeper of the Bürgerbräu and the night watchman to Elser provided a further connection: It turned out they had once stopped Elser on the gallery, but he had had the presence of mind to talk his way out of it.
On Monday, November 13, the Gestapo announced: “The evidence is steadily mounting.” The previous day the Stuttgart Gestapo had found important clues of Elser’s preparations in Heidenheim-Schnaitheim at the Schmauders’ residence. Bits of information like this were driving Elser more and more into a corner. In the end this was why he made a “voluntary” confession. But to describe the confession as “voluntary” is a painful lie.
Germany would not have been a Gestapo state if the investigation had relied solely on circumstantial evidence. It was after all Himmler who was heading up the proceedings. On his own initiative and without the consent of Kripo boss Nebe, he ordered up a full-fledged Gestapo interrogation and involved himself in it right away. What Elser was subjected to next is to this day still cloaked in the euphemistic language of suppression known as “intensified inter-rogations.” These consisted of bouts of questioning accompanied by the most brutal abuse, including torture sessions in which he was beaten to a bloody pulp. Even so, to this day no police officer associated with the Elser case has ever been brought before a court and sentenced.
Only one person lifted the veil of silence—the head of the Munich Kripo, Dr. Albrecht Böhme, who was a jurist, not a police officer. He was responsible for securing the evidence and did not feel himself bound by the code of the Gestapo. During the course of events, he wound up joining the resistance struggle in Bavaria. Dr. Böhme attested to the atmosphere prevailing during Elser’s torment:
I saw him [Elser] only once; I never spoke with him. When I saw the prisoner, I by coincidence became witness to a brutal scene that was playing out—in the presence of Nebe and me—between SS Reichsführer and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and the prisoner Georg Elser. Elser was bound up, and Himmler was kicking him hard with his boots and cursing wildly. Then he had a Gestapo man unknown to me drag him into the washroom of the Munich Gestapo chief and beat him there with a whip or (I couldn’t see it) some similar instrument, so that he cried out in pain. Then he was hustled, quick time, before Himmler, who kicked him again and cursed at him. Then he was dragged back to the washroom, where he was beaten again horribly, then brought back to Himmler and kicked again. But Elser, who was groaning and bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose, made no confession; he would probably not have been physically able to, even if he had wanted to.
The next day, police president von Eberstein informed Dr. Böhme that the Gestapo had “yet again demonstrated their clumsiness by apparently beating Elser horribly,” so now Elser would probably not confess anything. Dr. Böhme remarked that Himmler himself had been present at the beating. For Eberstein, this rash criticism might have been very dangerous. According to Böhme, “Von Eberstein grew pale and said in a fearful tone to me: ‘Oh, Herr Böhme, please completely disregard my remark about the beating.’ I was then treated with courtesy—with unaccustomed courtesy—as I was shown out.”
On the night of November 13, Elser was so battered that he saw no further point in continuing his denial. Only out of ignorance could one make the claim, as Rothfels, Hassel, and others have done, that Elser unnecessarily made a complete confession. Even hardened resistance fighters such as Communists or military opposition leaders had a rule of thumb: Nobody could withstand the savage torture of the Gestapo for more than twenty-four hours—and live.
In the meantime, the Gestapo had made progress along another path. On the morning of November 12, an order arrived via teletype at the office of the Stuttgart Gestapo to proceed immediately to Königsbronn and inquire into Elser’s personal and political back-ground. His family members were to be taken into custody as a precaution. If former Gestapo man Wilhelm Rauschenberger recalled correctly in 1950, the teletype mentioned only that when Elser was detained at the border crossing he had in his possession grenade detonator parts, which he had taken from the Waldenmaier company.
Georg Elser during the Berlin interrogation, November 19-23, 1939. The man interrogating him is probably Arthur Nebe.
The counterespionage arm of the Gestapo in the person of Otto Rappold took charge of the matter. He and Rauschenberger went immediately by car to Königsbronn, where at the town hall they acquired personal information on the family members, with the intention to start making arrests on November 13. Rauschenberger struck pay dirt right away at the Schmauder residence in Schnaitheim at Benzstrasse 18, where Elser had spent the final months before his departure for Munich. The daughter, Maria, only sixteen, turned out to be very chatty. Elser had certainly not told her anything about his assassination plans, but he had teased her a bit with all his secret doings. Once, when she discovered him opening the secret compartment of his wooden suitcase with the false bottom where he kept his sketches, he became a funny, mischievous storyteller. The sketches, he had told her, were for his invention, “a new kind of device for display windows, which had to be able to automatically lift a weight of about 1 1/2 pounds.” He said he had been working on the invention for months and wanted to apply for a patent on it in Munich. She said he had told her that “if this thing works and it gets patented in Munich, he would become a rich man with 2 1/2 million marks. He said he would go straight from Munich to Switzerland, and then he would bring her to Switzerland and marry her.” In actuality the two were still quite formal with each other, using the German Sie; Elser was still attached to Elsa Härlen, whose photograph remained on his table in his cell block at the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.
Things got worse when Maria started talking about Elser working at the quarry and having something to do with gunpowder. She said that he had been in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller in 1938 and that he “had finished drinking a glass of water that Hitler had not finished,” that he knew the hall well and had shown her photographs of the Bürgerbräukeller taken November 8 and 9, 1938. So when she heard the radio report that morning, she became suspicious.
The Stuttgart Gestapo officials changed their schedule and spent the rest of that Sunday interrogating Maria Schmauder at the Kripo office in Heidenheim. The suspicion of Elser’s guilt continued to grow; the news went immediately to Stuttgart and from there to Munich, so that by the evening of November 12 Elser’s probable involvement was known in Munich. By this time at the latest, Elser was repeatedly being tortured.
Georg Elser’s fingerprints, taken November 15, 1939, in Munich and containing Elser’s signature.
For her willingness to cooperate, Maria Schmauder received special treatment: On the orders of Gestapo Müller, she was taken into “informal custody.” In Stuttgart, unlike the Elsers, she did not have to go to the Gestapo prison on Büchsenstrasse, but was sent instead to the family of a prison warden as a maid—nonetheless under house arrest. The Schmauders were otherwise treated more gently, even though Elser had worked out the construction of his bomb right in their house and had conducted explosives tests from there. The Elsers, on the other hand, who had nothing to do with the attack, were imprisoned, threatened at times with death, and tyrannized for months, with lingering effects that continued well into the postwar period.
Town hall in Königsbronn, where the Stuttgart Gestapo began its investigation on November 13.
The next morning, Monday, November 13, the Gestapo stormed into Königsbronn. Five or six Gestapo people moved into the König Karl in Heidenheim, and two to four of them were housed at the Hirsch in Oberkochen. Above and beyond family members, everyone was questioned who had known Elser: people involved with the zither club, the glee club, or the dancing lessons; workers from the quarry; all relatives. There might have bee
n well over a hundred individuals—almost every family was affected. Under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo, the town felt compelled to collectively renounce this dangerous man.
After the Gestapo had shown themselves to be negligent in guarding the Bürgerbräukeller, they now wanted to cast the unassuming Georg Elser in the fiendish image of a born assassin. The Gestapo wanted to leave no instant of Elser’s life uninvestigated. Incapable of establishing priorities, they went after every minuscule detail. Thus one of the Gestapo people had as his duty to trace Elser’s childhood and youth, from childhood diseases to toys. Georg Holl, who did social work with the parish, was perhaps one of the few who, after the war, was able to view this pressure on the residents of Königsbronn with some humor: “A wonder that they didn’t interrogate the midwife who was there at his birth!” The Gestapo fell victim to its guilty conscience, its “biologistic” view of life, and its global conspiracy theory. It was impossible for the people of Königsbronn to comprehend this world of madness. Anywhere—even on the playground or in the laundry room—an agent for the English might have been hiding, or perhaps a tendency toward criminal behavior or some perverse interest had become apparent. The story of the Elsers became the subject of “research into criminal biology” (criminal tendencies were considered hereditary). And in fact everyone in Königsbronn appeared as a borderline accomplice in the crime—this kind of thing was catching.
After months of investigation, Stuttgart Gestapo official Rappold arrived at a view that reflected the efforts of the threatened community around Elser to distance itself: “Georg Elser was a very talented craftsman, but in his private life he was an eccentric.” The birth of the legend of Elser the eccentric, which still lives on, can be traced to the sense of helplessness felt by those being interrogated as they sat in the presence of the omniscient and unscrupulous Gestapo and saw themselves being treated as accomplices.
VII
From Königsbronn to Berlin
ON THE MORNING of November 13, 1939, the Gestapo invaded Königsbronn, making arrests: Georg Elser’s parents, his siblings, his relatives, and their spouses were all brought in. Everything had to be done in a great rush—simply in order to increase the atmosphere of intimidation. So Georg’s brother, who worked at the Königsbronn ironworks, was not allowed to remove his work apron or change clothes; he was taken as he was to Stuttgart. It was not until November 28 that those arrested were to return to Königsbronn from Berlin.
A reason for the arrests was never given. Although they remained top secret, word about them got around. On the first day, people in Königsbronn were rounded up and placed in custody in Heidenheim; in the evening they were transported in cars by the Gestapo to Stuttgart, where they were imprisoned at Gestapo headquarters on Büchsenstrasse. While Georg’s mother, Maria Elser, was placed in a common cell with five other women, most of the others were placed in single cells. All were kept isolated from each other. Maria was interrogated once or twice daily, always by a different person. She didn’t believe that her Georg was the assassin. (And as late as 1950 she still had doubts—perhaps he had just been used by someone else. She would later report that her husband, who died in 1942, had been assaulted during the interrogations, and that he had talked “a little too much, which he shouldn’t have done.”)
Maria Elser was sent alone on the night train to Berlin before the others, where she was taken to the prison at Moabit, brought face to face with Georg, and then, like the other family members who followed, locked up in the Hotel Kaiserhof—in a kind of “informal custody.”
Georg’s sister Maria Hirth was subjected to the worst treatment. The reason for this was the baggage that Georg had left with her as well as his last visit to her on November 6. Maria Hirth was considered a co-conspirator because the large suitcase with the false bottom contained sketches, clock parts, detonators, and the like, and in the tool chest there was almost everything that the assassin had used. Thus Georg’s sister fell victim to an old saying about the people of Württemberg: They can’t throw anything away, especially not when someone has given his all to acquire it and use it regularly. If Elser had taken the tools, sketches, and bomb-making materials and thrown them into the deepest part of the Isar River in Munich, he would have spared his sister much terror and trauma. Georg was a superb craftsman and well experienced at keeping quiet, but he had no concept of the internal workings of the terror apparatus—he lacked the political experience.
In her witness testimony after the war, Maria Hirth said only that she had been “treated very severely” during the interrogations in Stuttgart—a gross understatement by a woman who had clearly been intimidated. Only her sister Anna Lober dared to tell the truth: “During the interrogations, my sister Maria Hirth, who lives in Stuttgart, was the only one they threatened to kill if she didn’t tell the truth.” Her tormentor was the notorious Gestapo official Paul Bâssler, who subsequently was kept longer than anyone else in Allied internment camps because of his mistreatment of people in the cellars of the Stuttgart Gestapo. Maria Hirth, the one most seriously affected, was, like all the others from Königsbronn, taken at first to the detention prison in Moabit, then a few days later to the Kaiserhof.
Her sister Anna Lober and her husband were arrested in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen on November 13, taken to Gestapo headquarters on Büchsenstrasse, and booked in like all the others, with fingerprints and photographs. The Elsers, one and all, were considered to be criminals. Despite her inquiries, Anna Lober was given no reason for the arrest, “which really made me angry,” as she stated to the Kripo for the record after the war in a remark truly worthy of her dead brother. But she too did not originally want to believe that Georg Elser had blown up the Bürgerbräukeller; she too was interrogated “in a very harsh manner.” After the war, now without the Gestapo on her back, she managed to reach a conclusion: “It is believable that my brother came up with the idea of executing this attack; he was unquestionably in a position to undertake the technical preparations for the attack on his own.” She nevertheless still had some suspicions that others might have been involved in the instigation and financing of the attack. None of the siblings could see inside Georg—there was a wall of silence between them. It was a family that, according to Georg Elser’s statements, was apolitical. From an early age, he had preferred not to speak of politics at home, where there was always strife anyway because of his father’s drinking and violent tendencies.
Like his siblings, Leonhard Elser, the youngest, was arrested on November 13, and his wife a few days later. When the Gestapo tried to take her out of the laundry in her work clothes, she insisted adamantly that she had to change, and went up into her apartment. The two secret service men, not wanting to let her out of their sight, tried to follow her into her bedroom. She explained that she wanted to be alone, and quickly shut the door and locked it—a gesture that, with a bit of courage, was possible even in a Gestapo state.
On November 15, Elser’s girlfriend Elsa Härlen was also arrested, at her mother’s place in Göppingen-Jebenhausen. On the same day, the quarry owner Georg Vollmer was picked up in Königsbronn along with his son Ernst, as well as the explosives expert Kolb and the bookkeeper.
Around November 23, the Gestapo moved all of the relatives being held in the Stuttgart police jail along with Elsa Härlen to Berlin, transporting them on the night train in a special car. Each person was in a separate compartment—only the married couples stayed together. Guards were stationed left and right; not a word could be spoken; even a trip to the toilet could not be made unaccompanied. It gradually became clear to the Elsers that they were on a family trip—to Berlin, for interrogations. In the morning they were first taken from the Anhalter train station to the Moabit prison, then a few days later to the Hotel Kaiserhof, the finest hotel in the government district, located at Ziethenplatz 4 between Wilhelmstrasse and Mauerstrasse. Before the First World War, the massive complex had been the preferred hotel for diplomats and the aristocracy. Before 1933, Hitler had his headqua
rters at the hotel, and he still liked to stay there—he was fond of the Hungarian orchestra that often performed there.
Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin around 1930, where Elser’s relatives were kept under arrest for a week in November 1939.
So the Elsers were in first-class accommodations but under house arrest, with a Gestapo guard outside every door. Anyone who wanted to go to the toilet had to knock and wait to be accompanied; meals were taken in a room together, but no speaking was permitted. Only Elsa Härlen, the outsider in the group, got her meals brought to her room. In the finest hotel, in the center of the capital, directly across from Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, the Gestapo had transformed an entire floor into a temporary luxury prison. The inmates were taken by police van to the interrogation sessions, which were conducted, generally at night, in the nearby Reich Security Headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. Everyone noticed that the tone here was markedly more polite than it had been in Stuttgart.
Gestapo headquarters could assume different guises; this time, orders had come from above to put on a friendly face with the prisoners. At the same time, however, down in the cellar a hellish atmosphere prevailed. The cells were filled to overflowing: The prisoners were crawling over each other in a dreadful stench; they weren’t able to wash and were covered with bugs and filth. The preferential treatment of the Elser family reflects the direct involvement of Hitler, for whom this assassin constituted a psychological enigma. Hitler wanted to keep the whole family in custody, but he wanted to do it with style. It is possible that the transfer to the luxury hotel was connected with the conclusion of Elser’s interrogation on November 23.