The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  The conspirators did not merely fail, they also made fools of themselves in front of their erstwhile collaborators from the army. Had not Schacht said to any general who was ready to listen that Britain would never abandon Czechoslovakia? After the war, he, too, was still furious and unforgiving:

  It is clear from the chain of events that this first attempt of Witzleben and myself to stage a coup d’état was the only one that could substantially change the fate of Germany . . . In autumn 1938 it was still possible to try Hitler before the Supreme Court, but all subsequent attempts presumed an assassination . . . I planned a revolt at an opportune moment and brought it to the verge of success, but history was against me. Intervention of foreign statesmen is something I could not have taken into account.63

  Gisevius and Oster had to quietly dissolve Commando Heinz’s shock troop unit. They would never be able to reassemble it. Its soldiers dispersed all over the country and later performed various military functions during the war. Lieutenant General Brockdorff, Witzleben’s partner in the conspiracy, withdrew from the resistance for good. The Nazi mood in the Wehrmacht, he conceded, left the movement no chance.64 Gisevius summarized the feelings of the conspirators then and later: “The impossible had happened. Chamberlain and Daladier were flying to Munich. Our revolt was done for. For a few hours I went on imagining that we could revolt anyway, but Witzleben soon demonstrated to me that the troops would never revolt against the victorious Führer . . . Peace in our time? Let us put it a bit more realistically. Chamberlain saved Hitler.”65

  Had Chamberlain saved Hitler? Perhaps. What is clear, and more interesting, is that the failure of the conspirators had nothing to do with any mistake they had made. In fact, they did not have the time to make any. Instead, their failure may have been directly related to the structure of their network, especially its character as a small, dense clique of friends. This was a source of strength in one sense, keeping the network relatively safe from the Gestapo and making it easy for the leaders, such as Oster, to control and orchestrate it. However, its size also meant that in order to function, it had to obtain the cooperation of outsiders such as General Halder and Prime Minister Chamberlain. Its leaders had to hope that decisions taken in London would turn out to be favorable. When they did not, the conspirators lost the best chance to stage a coup against Hitler and the Nazi regime. As we will see in the next chapter, a single man, without a network, would come closer to killing Hitler than the highest echelons of the German military ever would.

  6

  Without a Network:

  The Lone Assassin

  UNTIL THE END of 1944, an unusual German prisoner named Georg Elser lived within the notorious concentration camp Sachsenhausen, in a special facility separate from other inmates. He was polite but taciturn, and he kept himself busy mostly by carving wooden artifacts for the SS guards who watched him. He also built his own zither and played it well.1

  Unlike many other prisoners in Sachsenhausen, he was not a Jew, a homosexual, a criminal, nor a leftist political activist. Rather, he was a German carpenter and watchmaker, short in stature, with his black hair combed backward. His simple German, which he spoke in a thick Swabian accent, disclosed a limited education and south German roots. “He does not have a typically criminal face,” wrote the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter on November 22, 1939. “His eyes are wise . . . and he thinks long and carefully before he answers . . . When one looks at him, it may be forgotten for an instant what a satanic monster he is, what guilt, what terrible burden his conscience carries with such intolerable ease.”2

  In Nazi eyes, Elser’s guilt could hardly have been heavier. He had staged a highly sophisticated assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, all by himself. In the history of the Third Reich, no assassination attempt—not even Stauffenberg’s famous bomb plot on July 20, 1944—was so meticulously planned and so nearly successful. However, unlike Stauffenberg, Oster, and other would-be assassins from the resistance movement, Elser had no network to support him: no allies, no contacts in the military, no political friends. No one supplied him with cover, bombs, safe houses, or know-how. He never even eased his psychological burden by telling a friend about his terrible mission.

  Georg Elser was born in 1903, the oldest of five children; he had three sisters and one brother. He grew up in Königsbronn, a small rural community in the Swabian Alps. His parents made their living from carpentry and agriculture and, like many other rural Germans, could hardly make ends meet. At some point his father took to drinking, and would come home intoxicated every night and beat up his wife.3 Elser’s childhood was not a happy one. At school his achievements were mediocre, and he was relatively isolated from his classmates. Like many other rural boys, he spent the time after school doing house chores and agricultural work. Following the outbreak of the Great War, in 1914, the family’s finances deteriorated even further. Georg left school and set out to find a job, first in ironworks and then in carpentry. In 1917, at age fourteen, he left home.

  Georg was interested in little beyond his job and his close friends and relatives. He never read books or, until the late 1930s, even newspapers. During the Great War, he spent all his days in hard physical labor, his free time devoted to his only hobby: music. Elser was a talented player, especially of the harmonica and flute. Upon completing his apprenticeship in carpentry, he became greatly valued by successive employers, who understood that here was no normal worker. Elser was a technical genius, with an unusual understanding for complicated machines. Still, his wages were low, and, restless as he was, he could not find peace of mind in any single workplace. He moved between different workshops, walking from village to village, all the while earning and saving money. In 1922, his journeys finally brought him across the border to Switzerland. There, he worked in several carpentry workshops, played in dance clubs, and had some fleeting romances with German and Swiss women.4

  In 1929, Germany was hit by the Great Depression, and Elser’s family, destitute even at the best of times, came close to the brink. His alcoholic father was worse than useless. To afford his drinks and to cover his numerous debts, he started selling the family’s land. In 1932, in spite of the bad blood between him and his family, Elser responded to his mother’s urgent plea and came back to Königsbronn. He did his best to help, but in the Depression it was hard to find steady work. Two years before, following an affair with a local woman, his only son, Manfred, was born. His partner left immediately afterward and married another man. Elser never saw her, or his son, again.5

  The young carpenter was not interested in the stormy politics of the times. Still, for practical reasons he voted for the Communist Party. Like many other workers, he believed that the Communists would obtain better wages and more affordable housing for the working class. In January 1933, when Hitler took over the government, Elser was still largely indifferent to politics, though he never liked the Nazis. But time turned his initial indifference into hostility. Years later, Elser related to his Gestapo interrogators the hard feelings he had toward life in Nazi Germany: low wages, high taxes, and limited personal freedom. For born individualists like himself, it was hard to adjust to life in a totalitarian regime.6

  There was also the problem of religion. Elser, a devout Protestant, did not like the church policy of the Nazi regime. “I believe that God made the world and all men . . . and in Heaven and Hell, just as I was taught in Bible class,” he said.7 He was not interested in theological debates, but he didn’t like the attempts of the Nazi regime to change tradition by force. Nevertheless, his route to active resistance would be long and tortuous.

  His fateful decision to “do something” was, in the end, precipitated by the impending European war. Unlike General Beck, Elser understood immediately that Hitler himself was more responsible for the warmongering than the “radicals in the party.” He understood that Nazi policy would lead to a total destruction of the German fatherland. This was not only a theoretical, patriotic concern: Who, if not the workers, would be t
he first to suffer? Who would be the first to fight and die? “I am convinced that the Munich Agreement will not hold,” he said, “and Germany will continue to raise claims and annex other countries. Therefore, war is inevitable.”8 His conclusion was terrible, but clear as ice: “My hope was to prevent a bigger bloodshed . . . I understood that the state of affairs in Germany could be changed only by taking down the leadership. By ‘leadership’ I mean the bosses: Hitler, Göring and Goebbels . . . I hoped that after eliminating these three other people will come to power . . . without plans to annex other countries, [people] who will take care to improve the life of the workers.”9

  Elser’s mission seemed unrealistic in many respects. All by himself he had to obtain explosives, build a bomb, gain access to Hitler (not easy for a senior officer, let alone a simple worker), and get past the Führer’s bodyguards. He had to obtain precise intelligence, which was almost impossible to collect, without agents or confidants. Yet Elser was able to achieve all this because of his background, his unusual talents, and a fortuitous set of circumstances.

  Elser was never “normal,” by most definitions of that word. Coming of age in the 1920s, a time of both freedom of movement and economic trouble in Germany, the restless wanderer covered many miles on foot and acquired a diverse set of skills. He worked in carpentry and watchmaking, and became skilled in ways that would later benefit his bomb-building project. Moreover, around 1938, he worked in a munitions workshop and later in a quarry, and was therefore able to acquire explosives and practical experience with detonation.10

  All of that was not enough, though. Elser could have all the knowledge in the world about watchmaking and bomb manufacturing, but he still had to get close to Hitler despite his formidable personal security. Here, a set of events outside Elser’s control came to his aid: “So I decided to kill the leadership myself. I thought it would be possible only when all of them were in a ceremony of some sort. I read once in the newspaper that the next time all of them would come together would be 8–9 November 1938 at the beer hall Bürgerbräukeller in Munich.”11

  Unwittingly, the carpenter hit upon the best possible occasion to assassinate the Führer and his inner circle. The ceremony he mentioned was the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. This abortive uprising, long a seminal legend of the National Socialist Party, was celebrated by the “old fighters” every year in Hitler’s presence. Proud of their heritage and tradition, the veterans insisted on keeping the Munich police out of the building. If they could protect Hitler with their own bodies in 1923, couldn’t they still handle his security? Hitler, probably for sentimental reasons, sided with them. “Here in this gathering,” he instructed, “I am protected by the old fighters led by Christian Weber. Police responsibility ends at the entrances.”12 Consequently, there was a heavy SS and security presence in the streets leading to the building during the ceremony, but not months beforehand. And the two veterans responsible for the security inside, both SS officers, were unbelievably negligent.13 This resulted in a quadruple coincidence: Elser’s resourcefulness, his decision to choose this ceremony, Hitler’s sentimentality, and the veterans’ hubris.

  Elser was a meticulous planner. In 1938, he came to the ceremony to check the ground and decided to plan the operation for the following year. Thus, on November 8, 1938, at around 7:00 p.m., a short, simply clad man arrived at Munich’s main train station, holding a wooden suitcase he had made himself. The station was crowded with passengers, many of them wearing brown National Socialist uniforms. Veterans from all over Germany, accompanied by many curious citizens, came to take part in the ceremony and to see their dear leader again.

  At 8:00 p.m., Elser reached his rented room and asked the landlord for directions to the beer hall. He traveled there on foot, a considerable distance along the river, until he saw the dense crowd and, far away, the double doors of Bürgerbräukeller. He pushed his way through the crowd, entered the building, and crossed the drinking hall to the portal of the great hall: “I went from the entrance to the middle of the hall, looked around and noticed where the podium was . . . Still, I hadn’t yet decided how to best carry out the assassination in this hall . . . I went out of the great hall through the dressing room to the small drinking hall . . . There I sat at the first table and ordered dinner. The time was around 23:00.”14

  Then he came back to his room, deep in thought. The assassination plan was still forming in his mind. The next day, as Hitler was about to give his speech, he also spent in the beer hall. Now, the negligent work of the veterans was evident to him. His observations indicated that security measures in the building were almost nonexistent. He promptly made his decision: “This hall is the right place to assassinate the leadership.” The act itself, Elser concluded, could be done through one means alone: a bomb. He decided to install it in the pillar behind the podium, hoping the explosion would topple the roof and kill both Hitler and other Nazi leaders.

  Upon his return to Königsbronn, Elser began to plan the device. He had twelve months to prepare. During the nights, he sneaked unnoticed into the munitions workshop and stole explosives, a little every day. A short while afterward, he resigned and found work in a quarry, where dynamite was often used to break up the stone. At night, he would go to the warehouse, open the primitive lock with his self-made key, and steal what he needed. No one ever noticed his suspicious behavior.15

  During the summer, Elser took sick leave and traveled again to Munich to draw the hall and measure the pillar behind the podium. During his reconnaissance, he supported himself with his savings. In Munich he rented an apartment close by, and dined every day at the beer hall, his sharp eyes observing the structure, dimensions, and distances. Quickly, he found that the great hall could be reached through the dressing room, and that its double doors were open throughout the day until closing time. Moreover, he found a back door in the great hall providing access to the street through the garden.16

  Elser went up and down the deserted great hall, drew the pillar, and examined it closely. He took several photographs with a camera he had received as a birthday gift ten years earlier. His gentleness and his camera made him a favorite of the waitresses. Once, he even took a group picture of them. He drank beer with the caretaker and learned that the caretaker was soon to be recruited into the army. Quick to notice opportunities, Elser asked his new friend to cajole the owners on his behalf. Might it be possible for him to become the new caretaker? The caretaker promised to speak with the boss, but did nothing. In response, Elser started to buy him beer and bribe him with money. Finally, when he had to return to Königsbronn, he asked the caretaker to write and tell him when he was going to leave. The fellow broke his promise again, and Elser never got the job. He came back home, his purse much thinner.

  He went back to work at the quarry. In the evenings, he sat in his room and studied the drawings of the beer hall. Without any previous formal experience, he designed a highly sophisticated bomb, based on two watches, explosives, a battery, and a system of cogwheels. The hour hand of one watch was linked to a handle, which triggered a device hidden behind the clock face. When the hour hand made half a revolution, the handle turned an internal cogwheel thirty degrees. A second watch with a similar mechanism was installed to back up the main one. When the cogwheel turned to a certain point, a firing pin would strike the detonator, causing the device to explode. Because of the watches, the system didn’t need a fuse, and Elser could leave the beer hall before the blast. For two months, Elser experimented in his parents’ garden, finally drafting a detailed plan for his device. He never consulted experts or professional literature.17

  On May 19, 1939, a colleague accidentally dropped a heavy rock on Elser and smashed one of his feet. During weeks of convalescence, he lay in his room and elaborated the drafts of the bomb to completion. When he was fit again, around the end of June, he decided to leave work for good, and from then on he lived only on his savings. “From that mome
nt,” he later told his interrogators, “I lived only for one purpose—preparing for the assassination.”18

  On August 5, the curtain rose for the final act. Elser traveled to Munich. Again he rented an apartment close to the beer hall, dined there every evening, and sneaked into the great hall near closing time. There, he hid in a corner among a pile of cardboard boxes and waited for night to come. When the door was locked, he began to work. Using a scalpel, he painstakingly carved a cavity in the massive pillar, hiding it through a secret “door” that he could close and open when he needed to. He used metal, lest anyone knock on the pillar and become aware of its hollowness. Every night he worked until around 2:00 a.m. and then lay down, exhausted, on his pile of boxes. When the clock struck 6:30, he woke up and left the hall through the emergency door to the garden.19

  Elser spent the days in his apartment. Behind a locked door, he studied his drawings and assembled the device itself. He told the landlord that he was working on a secret invention, which would one day make him rich and famous. Between August and November, that invention took shape. Unexpected difficulties occasionally arose. In September, after the outbreak of the war, civil-defense observers were watching for enemy airplanes from the roof of the hall. Elser described what happened one night: “When the hall was opened . . . a man came into view just before I was about to leave my hideout. He wanted to take a box from the hideout, and therefore noticed me. He took the box and left the hall without a word. A short while later he returned with the owner—he came to the gallery from the left, and the owner from the right. Meanwhile I climbed to the eastern gallery, sat at a table and conducted myself as if I was writing a letter.” To avoid raising suspicions, Elser probably pretended to be drunk: “To the owner’s question I replied that I had a boil on my thigh and I wanted to squeeze it. To his question what I was doing in the backroom, I said that I wanted to squeeze my boil there. I also told him that I wanted to write a letter. He told me to write it in the garden . . . I sat in the garden of the beer hall and to avoid suspicion drank a coffee.”20