by Dennis Bock
A sombre voice interrupted the music on the radio and announced the death in Munich of the heart and soul of the nation. Treachery had cast its dark shadow over the land, the voice said. A villainous Bolshevik conspiracy had shaken the nation and would be crushed. Border crossings were being closed, all suspicious travellers detained.
The guards unholstered their sidearms and questioned this man, so oddly wandering the countryside at this late hour. They examined his papers again, more closely, and searched him, and asked the nature of his business at this time of night. He told them his lies, so calmly rehearsed as he’d walked this road, but now they came jumbled and confused, and the fear that rose in him brought more questions and caused the guards to believe that this was a man with secrets.
THE FOLLOWING DAY THEY returned him to Munich where he was held in Stadelheim Prison at the edge of consciousness for two months while they taught him that everything he knew about pain and longing and willpower had been until that time nothing but the imaginings of a coddled child. The relief in knowing that he’d released Germany from its doomed history lasted only days. He’d created a moment that would be seized upon, he thought. A coup would follow. The fanaticism that had gripped the country would be crushed. It was still reasonable to believe this twelve hours into his detention, despite the beating he received when he arrived at the prison—even thirty-six hours later he was able to believe it. It was an expectation that buoyed him as he waited those first nights for the men to come and pull him from his cell to resume the interrogation. He imagined, instead of beatings, the triumphant news that the coup had begun—people were rising in the streets, they’d say, soldiers deserting their posts. Surely it had begun. His act of defiance would create opportunity to be seized upon. Moderates would be emboldened; the people would move against what was left of the regime. The men who came to his cell door would raise him on their shoulders and present him as a hero of the nation. But they did not come.
He was raised on no one’s shoulders.
Instead, he was taken from his cell and strung naked by his ankles from a beam in a cold room in which paced the head of the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt. This man’s name was Arthur Nebe. He was a compact, smiling man who nodded his head with pleasure when his assistant enacted the various tortures Nebe was fond of dreaming up.
Over the first nine days and nights of the interrogations Elser learned nothing of the chain of events he’d set in motion. On the eleventh day Nebe told him the American Republican presidential nominee, Joseph Kennedy, had attended Hitler’s funeral in Berlin, just three days earlier. It had been a solemn and beautiful occasion, he said, during which Kennedy had spoken of his great respect for the fallen leader. The next day the American politician attended the ceremony that saw Göring elevated to the Chancellery. He joined him later that afternoon on the Reichstag balcony and spoke to the assembled masses of the sitting President Roosevelt’s foolish lust for war in Europe, which the Republican nominee would avoid at all costs should he win the presidential election twelve months from now.
Elser watched the man’s face in disorienting glimpses as he spun in slow circles.
“We do not speak of this openly, of course,” Nebe said, “but the nation will thank you one day. The Austrian Gypsy understood only zealotry and fear. And we all know zealots do not win wars. Göring, though. Yes. A man who understands military strategy and tactics. You have cleared the way. We should come to you bearing flowers for the service you’ve done your country. Instead of this.” He raised his hand and gestured to the pathetic sight before him. “Such a pity we cannot pay the hero-assassin his proper due.”
THERE WAS LITTLE IN his background to suggest Elser possessed the talents required to execute this plot unaided. A trade unionist and small-time communist, a little man, he was too ordinary for anyone to believe that he’d carried out so complex an operation on his own. This Mr. Feuchtelhuber, Nebe said—the name he’d offered the guards at the Swiss border—had been waiting to guide him through to a safe house where he would continue this conspiracy with the men who controlled him, wasn’t that right? A second explosion had gone off in the city the very day of the assassination. The work of British agents, Nebe said, who now enjoyed the same treatment as Elser in this very prison. The wider web of lies was waiting to be discovered, he assured him. They would need names before they finally hanged him, and until then he would be kept alive. He told Nebe and the others who interrogated him that the name he’d offered the guards at the border had been an invention. They had him repeat every step of his plan over and over. Days in a row they asked the same questions. When he wasn’t suspended by a rope or tied to a chair they had him sketch the floor plan of the banquet hall and the schematics of the bomb he’d perfected. He told them about his regular meals at the Bürgerbräukeller and timing his work to coincide with the sound of the automatic flushing of toilets. He told them about his love for his country and his desire to save Germany from the disaster that was coming.
ON THE TWELFTH DAY of his detention they cleaned him up, fed him, and brought him to an office with a window overlooking a prison courtyard. Nebe stood with him at the window and watched a man wearing a cotton-sack prisoner’s uniform push a wooden handcart across the gravel yard. Overhead the sky was grey. Three guards trailed behind the man, one smoking a cigarette. The prisoner set down the handles of the cart at the foot of the scaffolding that dominated the square and waited for the guards. The one who’d been smoking tossed his cigarette and produced a length of rope from his coat and bound the hands of the condemned man. The two others walked the prisoner up the steps and positioned him on the trap door. They placed a cloth sack over his head and fastened the noose around his neck and stepped away. The prisoner rolled his head and raised his chin, as a man does after securing a fresh Windsor knot, attempting to find the right fit. The trap door opened. The prisoner dropped and bounced at the end of the rope.
“Some of them, it takes more than once,” Nebe said.
He handed Elser a pencil and a pad of paper and had him draw yet another diagram of his bomb. With the three fingers that remained unbroken on his right hand he produced the drawing, and one of the timing device; he wrote the name of the factory in Königsbronn where he’d worked and the addresses of the locations where he’d purchased the materials he’d used and the name of the old couple he’d rented his room from. Later that day he was provided a workshop where he was to construct a facsimile of the bomb using items similar to the ones he’d taken from the armaments factory and the materials he’d purchased in Munich. They wanted to see if he was capable of doing the things he claimed he’d done.
His torturers admired the intricacy of the plan. Privately, they began to believe he’d worked alone. His ingenuity impressed Nebe. In a flash of delirium Elser almost believed they’d let him go for the respect he’d earned. Every day he asked them to kill him, but they would not grant this simple favour. Nebe was expert at bringing a man’s soul to the surface and keeping it there, beating and alive for hours, before letting it slip back into darkness.
ON THE FIFTEENTH DAY of his torture he was led into a room in which he heard the sounds of a woman sobbing. He listened through the cloth sack covering his head, his heart already ripped with fear. It was not the usual screams and cries of pain that haunted the prison at all hours. These sounds were soft and familiar, almost comforting to hear. He stood on uncertain legs, his body and spirit weakened by beatings and exhaustion and thirst, hands cuffed behind his back. And then he understood what this was. He knew before the hood was removed.
He turned his face away so his mother would not see what they’d done to him, but a hand took a fistful of hair at the back of his head and pulled him straight to give his mother a good look at her half-dead son. She was seated at a small table beside his sister, Maria, delivered here to witness this torture. He attempted to nod his head to tell them he could feel nothing now. They should not fear for him. It would be a final comforting lie. He wanted to tell
them that what he’d done he’d done for them and every other German. They could be proud of him and know that he’d accept his death a thousand times over for the bloodshed he’d helped prevent. He wanted to say all this with a look or a nod of his head, but they saw nothing of the sort, only the terrified eyes of a son and a brother.
His torturers had not brought Elser’s family there that day to watch his interrogations, though. What Nebe needed now was for Elser to watch the torture of those he loved. When he understood this, he pleaded and told him he would say anything. He would confess to any sort of foreign conspiracy they wished, a Jewish one, or communist, whatever they needed from him. And when it began and did not stop, he begged for their forgiveness, and that was the last time he saw his people.
IN JANUARY, TWO MONTHS after his capture, he was delivered to Wiesbaden and put on a barge that would carry him and sixty other men to one of the Rhine Meadow labour camps, where they’d be worked until they died. He watched the hill towns and vineyards on the riverbank as the barge moved north and wondered in his delirium if he wasn’t already dead. He knew little about the specifics of the place he was going to, or the leadership of the country as it had reshaped itself after the death of Hitler. His imprisonment had kept him in a state of unknowing, but for scraps of news Arthur Nebe had thrown him. The landscape slipped under a blanket of cloud, and rain began to fall as the barge cut north, down-river, with its cargo of men and fear and drowned hope.
THE CAMP WAS A city of earthworks and wooden shacks built at the bottom of the deep valley they called the Devil’s Cup. It was encircled by tiers of barbed wire and eighteen guard towers positioned at quarter-mile intervals along the ridge of the valley. Within an hour of his arrival Elser witnessed a guard beating a man to death for the crime of shivering in his presence. The man, shrunken by starvation, received these blows with hands braced about the back of his head. Within days the beatings he witnessed no longer moved him. He learned the necessity of minding one’s own business. Yet sometimes he could not help but watch what played out before him. He saw one man kill another in a dispute over a heel of bread. He saw men die of starvation, of typhus and cholera and gangrene and the tireless parasites that haunted the lung or bowel or liver. They died of smallpox and diphtheria. Many were shot or beaten or froze to death that winter and were replaced, and the new prisoners were put to work in the nearby factories, mines, and fields until they themselves died. The Devil’s Cup was mud most of the year until the winter turned the mud into a rock-solid surface that split your head when a guard slammed you to the ground. The groups of men within each barrack kept mostly to themselves, groups of twenty, but these groups were constantly changing as men perished, some in their sleep—a whisper of mercy, perhaps, in repayment for some long-forgotten virtue. Twice in the span of seven days he awoke beside a man who’d been so blessed, and by nightfall there was another man in that bunk to take his place.
In those first months, in the early winter of 1940, he looked for signs that the war of aggression had slowed, and that Germany would soon sue for a negotiated peace. But instead came talk of an escalation in the war and the string of successes enjoyed by the new Chancellor. The German divisions that rolled through Western Europe to the edge of the English Channel were well supplied and buoyed by victory, the rumours said. The massacre at Bydgoszcz avenged now, Poland had been crushed and divided, all territories west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line falling under German control. The Soviets, by agreement, held the east. Speculation abounded that Göring himself would stroll the beach at Calais before summer came, and from there he’d witness smoke rising over the Channel as London burned. Poor weather had stalled the German advance through the Scandinavian countries. But soon the spring thaw would come to permit land access all the way to the Barents Sea.
When word arrived in late November of the upset victory in the American elections, Elser took the news as a man does his own imminent death. President Roosevelt, weakened by polio, had fallen ill in the last months of the campaign. Joseph Kennedy, former ambassador to the United Kingdom turned Republican challenger, had promised peace for America and peace it would have. The catastrophe that would be American involvement in the war in Europe was all but certain if Roosevelt managed to clinch a third term, he argued. His promise had been rewarded with a landslide. Kennedy’s running mate, Strom Thurmond, set out on a victory tour of America with the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, leader of the America First Committee, while the president-elect crossed the Atlantic to personally assure Berlin that he was a man of his word.
In April of 1941 the Bavarian typesetter who replaced the second man to die in the cot next to Elser’s told of the non-aggression pact that had been signed with America. He also spoke of the Japanese sneak-attack on the Soviet Pacific fleet anchored at Vladivostok, in the Far East. The raid had sent three-quarters of the fleet to the bottom of the harbour. The Red Army was moving east to come to the aid of the besieged city and to meet the expected land invasion there and in the border regions of Mongolia, where Japanese Imperial forces had been building their presence since 1933. The typesetter had worked at the Völkischer Beobachter in Munich, the paper Elser had bought on the morning he read about the Bloody Sunday massacre in Bydgoszcz. His hands were still ink-stained, so swiftly carried out was the sentence that had condemned him. He’d manipulated a story concerning the neutrality of Holland, second only to Portugal as the busiest transit point for refugees waiting to leave Europe. It was a simple enough piece, a story intended to be about the largesse of the German state—there were no barriers for those whose papers were in order. The typesetter could not resist. For months he’d been altering the officially sanctioned copy that was provided for him, leaving off an adjective here, a qualifying phrase there. This time he’d been too ambitious, perhaps, he told Elser, typesetting the words freies Land to replace neutrales Land, and so declaring to the German readership, if but for one evening edition, that Holland would decide its own politics.
Here was a like-minded soul, Elser thought, a selfless man willing to risk his life for the cause. The following day he decided to tell the typesetter that he was not alone here, he was in the company of the “bierkeller bomber.” They would find strength in each other’s example. The sense of hope that had abandoned him rose again. At roll call he looked for the man among those from their barracks on the mud flats between their flimsy shacks and stood at attention as the evening’s speeches and the “Deutschlandlied” were piped through the loudspeaker. He did not see him. Afterwards, he found a new man had taken the typesetter’s place in the cot next to his.
He had been shot to death when he failed to heed a warning to step away from the barbed-wire fence, another inmate told him that night. The man who said this was wearing the typesetter’s boots. He’d helped lift him into the wagon that made its rounds through the Devil’s Cup all day, pulled by two old mares and driven by a Hungarian violinist who played for the camp’s officers by night.
IN THE SPRING OF his third year there a new round of typhus ripped through the camp. He was placed in the work gang that managed the cremations in open country west of the valley. They wore rags over their faces, but the rags were threadbare and did not mask the smell of death. They soaked them in the gasoline they were supplied for their labours, but the fumes threatened to overtake them, and so they soaked the rags in their urine. Always there were more bodies waiting. The wagon masters drove their horses until the animals collapsed on their way up the valley roads, and fresh animals were harnessed to the wagons, and again the wagons moved in an endless carrying away of the dead. But always more men arrived by rail and road and river barge, from Poland and Czechoslovakia and the German cities, too—all being emptied now of Bolsheviks and degenerates and Jews; the Romany and the Reds; the disobedient, the headstrong, the suicidal, the crippled, and the mad.
In the half-light of a cool spring morning the first blades of grass emerging from the cracked earth near the ash pits caused him to fall to hi
s knees and weep, until a boot laid him out and stepped on his neck and the guard asked if he wanted to work or to burn. He rose to his feet, and the line of horse-drawn wagons appeared again, and he set to unloading and placing bodies on the pyre. He did this until daylight began to fail and finally a guard called out that their work was done, and they began the long walk back in the direction of the camp.
At a turn in the road Elser motioned that he needed to relieve himself, and the guard waved him off. He stepped down into a shallow gully and dropped his pants. He squatted there as the column of men and guards walked on in the direction of the camp and the machine gun towers looking over the valley below.
With no guard in sight now, he inched his way farther down the incline and waited, as good as dead, and stared at the faltering sky and shivered and clutched himself, and slowly the dark gathered and the quarter moon moved in and out of drifting cloud that drew shadow-shapes over his haunted eyes.
When he got to his feet hours later he saw the guard towers on the valley ridge shining their searchlights in slow, roving arcs down into the valley and turning outwards to the fields beyond the wire in the direction of the cremation pits. There would be patrols and dogs, but there was no sign of these now. By next roll call, they would surely know he was gone.
He walked in a painful crouch in the direction of the dying blooms of light that hovered over the open pits, the smell of burnt flesh and bone and spilled petrol filling the night. He felt the heat from the cremations radiating up from the earth and slowed his pace to warm himself, like a man savouring the last comfort he’d ever know, and when he found the edge of the forest soon after, still leafless in the early spring and dangerously open to a revealing moon, he was absorbed into its cold wooded maze.
HE FOUND WHAT HE was looking for after an hour’s walk. The building was dark and silent and set against a cluster of birch trees. He stood at the edge of the forest and waited, breathing heavily now for the pain in his limbs and bloody feet. He listened and watched for a light to turn on or a twig to snap in the woods behind him. There was nothing. No movement, no sound. He moved forward down the lane until three men, sitting in the middle of the compound between the farmhouse and the barn, came into view.
