Elser’s assassination attempt

On the evening of Wednesday 8 November 1939, two months after the German invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler addressed party veterans in the Bürgerbräukeller, a Munich beer hall, as he did every year on the anniversary of the Munich Putsch. He spoke for less time than usual and left the hall at 9.07 p.m. to catch a train to Berlin. Thirteen minutes later, at 9.20 p.m., a time bomb exploded in the pillar directly behind the rostrum. The blast brought down the ceiling and the gallery above the spot where, a quarter of an hour earlier, Hitler had been standing with the party leadership seated beside him. Eight people were killed and several dozen injured. The bomb had been built and hidden in the pillar by a 36-year-old carpenter from Swabia, Georg Elser, working alone over more than thirty nights. At the moment of the explosion he was already in the custody of the border guard in Konstanz, having been detained half an hour earlier while trying to cross into Switzerland.

Some chronologies state that on the same evening “British bombers accidentally bombed Munich”. The sources do not confirm this. In the autumn of 1939 RAF Bomber Command was forbidden to attack targets on land where civilians might be harmed: over the Reich it dropped only leaflets, and it aimed its bombs solely at warships, as in the first days of the war. No account of 8 November 1939 mentions a raid on Munich, and the Germans treated the explosion in the Bürgerbräukeller as an assassination attempt from the very first moment. The claim most likely arose from a confusion of anniversaries: an RAF raid on Munich during the Putsch anniversary celebrations did take place, but a year later, on the night of 8–9 November 1940, when Hitler was addressing the “old fighters” in another beer hall, the Löwenbräukeller, because the wrecked hall of the Bürgerbräukeller could no longer be used.

An anniversary in wartime

From the seizure of power in 1933 the anniversary of the failed putsch of 8–9 November 1923 was the most important party festival of the Third Reich. On the evening of 8 November Hitler spoke in the Bürgerbräukeller, in the same hall where years before he had proclaimed the “national revolution”, and the next day the participants in the putsch marched in solemn procession along the route of the original march to the Feldherrnhalle. The annual speech was always held in the same place and followed the same script. It was precisely this predictability that gave Elser his chance.

In 1939 the commemorations took place in wartime and in a reduced form. On 7 November the Gau leadership in Munich announced in the Völkischer Beobachter that the procession of 9 November would not take place but that the evening gathering in the beer hall would go ahead. Hitler at first did not intend to come. He was absorbed in preparations for the offensive in the west: Directive No. 6 of 9 October ordered an attack through Belgium and the Netherlands as soon as possible, and he had set the date of the attack for 12 November. On 7 November, because of bad weather, he postponed it by a few days and said that the final decision would be taken on 9 November. His deputy in the party, Rudolf Hess, was to speak in the beer hall in his place. At the last minute Hitler changed his mind and travelled to Munich by special train during the night of 7–8 November.

The weather changed the plan for the day. Forecasters predicted fog, which would have made a flight back to Berlin the next morning uncertain, and Hitler wanted to be in the capital when the decision on the attack in the west was taken. He therefore decided to return that same evening by a train due to leave the main station at 9.31 p.m. The gathering began earlier than usual: Hitler took the rostrum at 8 p.m., half an hour before the customary time, and instead of the planned two hours he spoke for about an hour.

The carpenter from Königsbronn

Georg Elser was born in 1903 in Hermaringen in Württemberg and grew up in nearby Königsbronn. He was a skilled carpenter and for several years worked on Lake Constance, including in a clock factory, where he learned about clockwork mechanisms. He voted for the Communist Party of Germany and for a time paid dues to its affiliate, the Roter Frontkämpferbund, but he was never an activist. From 1933 he refused to raise his arm in the Hitler salute and left the room when Hitler’s speeches were broadcast on the radio.

According to his later testimony, he made his decision in the autumn of 1938, during the Sudeten crisis (PL). Elser believed that the position of the workers had worsened since the Nazis came to power and that Hitler’s policy was leading inexorably to war. The Munich Agreement did not reassure him; on the contrary, it confirmed his conviction that Hitler would demand more and more. He concluded that only the removal of the leaders could change the situation: Hitler, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. He had no accomplices and told no one of his intention.

On 8 November 1938 he went to Munich and late in the evening, when the ceremony was over, he entered the Bürgerbräukeller. He saw that the rostrum stood in front of a brick pillar supporting the gallery and the ceiling, and judged that a charge hidden in that pillar would kill whoever was speaking. Two days later Munich was one of the scenes of the Kristallnacht pogroms. Over the following months Elser prepared with great patience. At the Waldenmaier fittings factory in Heidenheim, where he worked in the dispatch department, he smuggled out pressed blocks of powder. In April 1939 he went to Munich to measure and photograph the pillar. In the spring he took a job at a quarry in Königsbronn, where he stole more than a hundred explosive charges and more than a hundred detonators. In the summer he tested prototype detonators in his parents’ orchard.

Thirty nights in the beer hall

On 5 August 1939 Elser moved to Munich. He rented a room under his own name and told his neighbours that he was working on an invention. Every evening he ate a cheap supper in the Bürgerbräukeller restaurant, and before closing time he hid in a storeroom on the hall’s gallery. Once the building was empty, by the light of a torch shaded with a blue handkerchief, he worked on the pillar: he cut a concealed door in the wooden panelling and behind it, by hand, with chisel and drill, hollowed out a chamber in the masonry for the charge. He did the noisier work when the automatic flush in the lavatories started up. In the morning he carried the rubble out in a suitcase and tipped it into the Isar. According to his testimony, he spent between thirty and thirty-five nights in the beer hall in this way. After the outbreak of war air-raid wardens appeared in the building, but no one noticed him. Security in the hall, for which the Munich party veteran Christian Weber was responsible, was lax, and the police and the SS checked the building only just before the ceremony.

By day, in his rented room and in the workshop of a carpenter friend, Elser built the detonating mechanism: two clocks, each of which could set off the detonation on its own, allowed the explosion to be set several days in advance. He lined the box holding the mechanism with cork to muffle the ticking. During the night of 1–2 November he placed the explosive in the pillar, and on the first weekend of November, 4 and 5 November, when dances were being held in the hall, he installed and started the clocks, set for 9.20 p.m. on 8 November. He chose that time because he knew from the newspapers and from previous years that Hitler spoke from about 8.30 p.m. for an hour and a half or more. On 6 November he went to his sister in Stuttgart, but returned the next day so that during the night of 7–8 November he could once more put his ear to the pillar and make sure the mechanism was working. On the morning of 8 November he left Munich and travelled via Ulm to Friedrichshafen, from where he took the evening boat to Konstanz.

Thirteen minutes

According to various sources, between one and a half and three thousand people gathered in the hall: participants in the 1923 putsch, the families of its dead, Gauleiters, SA and SS commanders. In the front rows, a few metres from the pillar, sat among others Goebbels, Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg and Robert Ley. Hitler delivered a speech devoted entirely to attacks on Britain: he accused it of envy, hypocrisy and starting the war, and assured his audience that this time Germany would not capitulate and was ready to wage a long war. He did not let slip a single word about the army standing ready to strike in the west.

Hitler finished a few minutes after nine and at 9.07 p.m. left the hall with his closest associates, heading for the station. Some 120–150 people remained in the hall, mostly members of the guard of honour, musicians and staff. At 9.20 p.m. the bomb exploded at exactly the time Elser had set. The pillar disintegrated, and the ceiling above the rostrum, the gallery and part of the outer wall collapsed. The sound of the explosion was heard by radio listeners following the broadcast of the ceremony. Eight people were killed: a waitress, Maria Henle, and seven men, members of the NSDAP, most of them party “old fighters”. Some died on the spot, the others in hospital, the last of them, 73-year-old Michael Schmeidl, a few days later. The number of injured given in the sources ranges from 57 to 63, more than a dozen of them seriously.

Hitler learned of the attempt only during the night, when the train stopped at Nuremberg. According to witnesses, when Goebbels gave him the news he replied that “a man must have luck”, and then added that his early departure from the hall was proof to him that Providence wished him to achieve his goal. By the next morning the official communiqué was speaking of the Führer’s miraculous escape, and from the first day the press pointed to the British secret service as the instigators.

Arrest in Konstanz

Elser came ashore in the harbour at Konstanz at 8.40 p.m. and set off towards the Swiss border, in the direction of Kreuzlingen. At about 8.45 p.m., a few dozen metres from the border fence, two officers of the German customs guard detained him as a suspect. He had no valid papers for crossing the border, and in his pockets were found wire cutters, parts of a detonator, notes and sketches about explosive charges, a picture postcard of the interior of the Bürgerbräukeller and a Roter Frontkämpferbund badge. The arrest had as yet nothing to do with the bombing, which was not due for another half an hour. News of the explosion in Munich reached Konstanz by teleprinter at around 11 p.m., by which time Elser was already being questioned by the local Gestapo. The next day he was taken to Munich.

The investigation

While still on the train Hitler ordered Himmler to open an investigation. At the scene of the explosion a criminal police commission worked under the supervision of the head of the Kripo, Arthur Nebe, while overall direction was taken over by the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. In the rubble the remains of clockwork mechanisms were found bearing the marks of a manufacturer from Schwenningen, and thus of German origin, but Himmler had it announced that the parts pointed to foreign origin. A reward of half a million marks was offered for information leading to the perpetrators. The beer-hall staff and hundreds of suspects were arrested.

In Munich Elser was one of many detainees and at first attracted no particular attention. Small details gave him away: a waitress recognised him as the odd customer who always ordered only one drink, a Munich shopkeeper recognised the customer to whom he had sold an insulating board, and the Gestapo men noticed that his knees were sore from many nights of work at the pillar. He was beaten, according to the head of the Munich Kripo also in Himmler’s presence. In mid-November, on the night of 13–14 November according to most accounts, he confessed to the attack and described how he had prepared it. He was then taken to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, where from 19 to 23 November he was questioned by several criminal commissars. Their record, found in the archives only in 1964, makes it clear that he acted alone, without instigators or helpers. Elser had in fact intended to announce this himself: he planned to write to the German police from Switzerland saying that he was the sole perpetrator, so that no innocent person would suffer.

Propaganda: “the British did it”

The investigators’ findings did not fit what the regime wanted to announce. Hitler was convinced from the start that the attack had been carried out by British intelligence in league with Otto Strasser, a former NSDAP activist who had broken with Hitler in 1930 and led the opposition Black Front from exile, and whose brother Gregor had been murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. An opportunity arose to “prove” it. The day after the attack, 9 November, a detachment of the SS Security Service under Walter Schellenberg abducted from Venlo, on the Dutch side of the border, two officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service with whom the Germans had for weeks been holding talks while posing as conspirators from military circles. The operation had been prepared earlier and had nothing to do with the bombing, but propaganda linked the two affairs.

On 21 November Himmler announced that the perpetrator of the attack was Georg Elser and that its instigators were British intelligence and Strasser. The next day newspapers all over Germany carried on their front pages a photograph of Elser alongside photographs of the two British officers. A great show trial was announced, at which Elser and the British were to sit together in the dock. Strasser denied having anything to do with the attack, and Schellenberg later wrote in his memoirs that he regarded linking the British officers with the Bürgerbräukeller bombing as absurd. The trial never took place.

The attack had immediate victims outside the beer hall. On 9 November at Buchenwald concentration camp SS men, on the orders of the commandant Karl Otto Koch, shot twenty-one Jewish prisoners in “retaliation”, and the remaining Jews in the camp were deprived of food for three days. For many months the Gestapo interrogated the inhabitants of Königsbronn and everyone with whom Elser had had dealings. The owner of the quarry from which the explosives had come was sent to a camp for more than a year, and Elser’s sister and her husband spent more than a year in prison. On 11 November the Soviet government conveyed to the German ambassador in Moscow its “indignation at the vile attempt” and its joy at Hitler’s escape. Abroad, on the other hand, many opponents of Nazism were convinced that the explosion, like the Reichstag fire, had been staged by the Nazis themselves to strengthen faith in a Führer protected by Providence. This belief, kept alive after the war by some of Elser’s fellow prisoners, weighed on his memory for decades.

Place in the history of the war

Elser’s attempt came closer to success than any other attempt to kill Hitler before 1944. Had Hitler spoken for as long as in previous years, the bomb would have killed him together with most of the party leadership, at a moment when, after Poland’s defeat, the Wehrmacht was preparing to strike at France and the war in the west was only just beginning. The attack was prepared not by generals, diplomats or a foreign intelligence service, but by a single worker acting on his own initiative, one of the few Germans who already in 1938 had drawn the conclusion that Hitler’s policy was leading to war.

Hitler emerged from the attempt strengthened. His miraculous escape became the subject of sermons, poems and articles, and confirmed him in his belief that he was the chosen one of Providence. The Führer’s protection was tightened, and the annual meetings with veterans of the putsch were moved to other halls. The attack also hampered the conspirators in military circles: Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr and the diplomat Erich Kordt were planning a bomb attack in the Reich Chancellery in those same days, but after 8 November it was no longer possible to obtain explosives unnoticed, and the plan was dropped. The offensive in the west, which Hitler was so eager to launch in November, was postponed many more times and began only on 10 May 1940. The alleged links between British intelligence and the Dutch, “revealed” in connection with Venlo, were then given by the Germans as one of the pretexts for invading the neutral Netherlands.

Elser never stood trial. He was held as the “Führer’s special prisoner” at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and at the beginning of 1945 he was moved to Dachau. He was kept alive in case of a show trial after a victorious war. When the Reich’s defeat was certain, on orders from the highest level, he was murdered with a shot to the back of the head on 9 April 1945, the same day on which Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed at Flossenbürg. His death was to be blamed on an Allied air raid. Only the publication of the records of the Berlin interrogations in the 1960s and the work of historians convinced the Germans that the Bürgerbräukeller bomber had been the tool neither of the SS nor of a foreign intelligence service, but one of Hitler’s most consistent opponents. Today he is remembered alongside the participants in the 20 July plot of 1944.