The Lone Assassin

by Helmut Ortner

  Elser shook his head. Only after Graeter offered him a cup of tea from his thermos did he accept with thanks. He didn’t become any more talkative afterward, though, and time crawled.

  Graeter felt the pressure on him. His boss and the Gestapo wanted results; they wanted to know what was with this Georg Elser. What had he been doing in Munich? Why did he want to go to Switzerland? What was the significance of the things found in his pockets? Did he belong to a group of communist conspirators who had carried out the attack on the Führer and then dispersed and gone into hiding? Graeter had his suspicions, but he lacked evidence and had so far failed to extract a confession.

  Meanwhile, the clock showed that it was three o’clock in the morning. Graeter was tired and running out of patience with Elser. He had finally sharpened his tone, shouted and threatened, but all to no avail. Now it seemed sensible to him to lock the man in a cell for the time being. Maybe that would make him more talkative. He brought Elser into one of the three detention cells on the ground floor. Just as he was about the close the iron door, Elser stepped up to him. “Officer, may I tell you something?”

  Graeter pushed him angrily back into the cell. “No, you may not tell me anything at all. I don’t want to hear anything more from you. I’ve had enough!” He slammed the door and went up to his office. His anger was written on his face.

  That stubborn fellow is not going to walk all over me; tomorrow is another day—then we’ll see, thought Graeter. His pent-up anger dictated the content of his report, which he now, as the clock approached 3:30 AM, typed on his typewriter. Half an hour later, he was done with it. His last sentence read: “It cannot be ruled out that Elser could come into consideration as the perpetrator.”

  * * *

  At seven o’clock in the morning, Inspector Hinze appeared in Graeter’s office. He carefully read the report, which took up less than one typewriter page. “A tough fellow, eh?” he remarked, shaking his head. He then instructed him to send the report by teletypewriter to the Gestapo in Karlsruhe.

  The morning in the Villa Rocca would turn out to be hectic. When the report reached the Gestapo in Karlsruhe, it was immediately forwarded from there to Berlin. Due to the communication from Konstanz, the Gestapo launched a blitz operation that same night. Registers of residents were investigated, Elser’s background was determined, and, to the extent possible, his life up to that point was reconstructed. There was nothing suspicious to be found, but the Gestapo did not give up. Even as Graeter was talking to his boss in Konstanz about what to do next, the Gestapo had criminal police in Königsbronn, a small village in the eastern Swabian Alps, arrest Georg Elser’s parents and siblings and bring them to Heidenheim for questioning—once again, to no avail. “Georg is supposed to have been involved in the attack? No, he was never particularly interested in politics … he’s a hardworking, quiet person. Most recently he worked in Munich …” There was nothing more to be learned from the interrogations.

  The scarce information gathered by the Gestapo officers was immediately forwarded to Berlin, where the secret state police had already received more than 120 leads on suspicious people after the first night. They sorted through them and sent them on to Munich for further investigation. There, in the “capital of the movement,” an army of criminal investigators under the leadership of Kriminalrat and SS-Oberführer Nebe had begun their work, overseen by Himmler himself.

  The officers pursued hundreds of clues. They sifted through the ruins of the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall, searching relentlessly for parts of the explosive device that might produce a lead on its origins. The staff of the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall was questioned as well. Maria Strebel, who had worked as a waitress on the evening of November 8 and had suffered hearing damage from the detonation of the bomb, later described the circumstances of the interrogation.

  The next day—I was lying at home on my sofa at 23 Pariser Strasse on the second floor—a police detective came. He asked me to come with him, but I refused, because my daughter was still very little. She was nine years old at the time. In the next room, my mother lay dying. A few days after this event, on November 19, she died. The detective told me that a colleague of his would come soon and ask me to come with him. On November 10, I had to go to the state police headquarters on Brienner Strasse for questioning with my beer maid, a nineteen-year-old Viennese girl. We entered the room.

  I saw about eight to ten police detectives sitting at desks, interrogating civilians who had been summoned. As I approached one of the desks, the interrogating officer asked me for my husband’s telephone number. He wanted to call him and inform him that I would not be coming home. I told him that that was unacceptable, because I had to return home to my seriously ill mother and my child. Then I went to a certain man on the third floor. This man gave me an official document so that I could pass through the entrance again in order to go home and speak to third parties. In the days that followed, police detectives came with typewriters. They were at my home about five or six times. Again and again they asked me whether anything struck me as unusual. Then, a day or so later, I had to go into the city again to the police station. There I was again questioned. Suddenly the interrogating officer opened his drawer, pulled out a picture, and put it on the table. He asked me, “Have you seen this man before?” I said, “No.” But here I have to add that I had seen this man before. He was a guest. He sat in the Bräustüberl [a smaller restaurant attached to the beer hall] every day. The identity of this man came back to me only later, after I had spoken to my other colleagues. I remember that he was very poorly dressed and ordered the normal worker’s meal, which had cost sixty reichspfennigs at the time. He caught my attention—and this is the reason I remember him well—because he never ordered anything to drink.

  Maria Strebel was not the only one who was visited by the Gestapo the day after the assassination attempt. Waiters and waitresses, barmen, cigarette women, workmen, janitors, cleaning women, and toilet attendants were all interrogated, though without success. Himmler was gradually losing patience; it was high time a perpetrator was found.

  * * *

  In the early afternoon of November 9, Inspector Hinze’s telephone rang in Konstanz. “Bring this Elser to Munich,” was the terse order. Hinze called Graeter to his office and asked him to take Elser to Munich. He declined: “I’m simply too tired after the long hours last night. Someone else should take this on.”

  An hour later, criminal police secretary Wilhelm Moller was driving a gray Volkswagen toward Munich, with Georg Elser sitting in the backseat.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One People, One Reich, One Führer

  It is so hard to describe all this, sighs the newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten on November 9, 1939. The heart is not resilient enough to grasp the most horrible crime of all time. Nonetheless, an eyewitness was found who had not lost his pithiness.

  There is a dull, heavy blast … an aircraft bomb? Someone screams the words that are as unforgettable as those moments: “There was an infernal machine in the hall!” That is like a crushing blow and an immediate jolt. The Führer was speaking in there just a short while ago. He spoke much more briefly than usual…. An attempt was made on the Führer’s life—my God, what bestial brain spawned and committed this dreadful act?

  The witness described to the readers of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten his profound distress.

  A comrade emerges from the ruins. His face is streaming with blood, encrusted with dirt, and his brown shirt is streaked darkly with blood. He grabs us by the shoulders and cries, “They wanted to take our Führer from us!” He screams this incessantly in anguish.

  The report concludes: More firmly, more resolutely, and more faithfully than ever before, the whole Volk has now rallied around the Führer.

  One people, one Reich, one Führer—united in the search for the “nefarious assassins.” A report from the German News Agency two days after the attack described the status of the investigations into the assassination attempt in the Bürg
erbräu Beer Hall.

  The responsible authorities have taken all measures to step up the investigation and illumination of the nefarious attack in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall. In the interest of a central management of this operation, SS-Reichsführer Himmler has assigned the whole task of solving the crime to a special commission of experts. This special commission is evaluating all clues with even the slightest possible connection to their investigations and has already made important findings.

  The rescue work for the severely and mildly injured in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall was carried out as quickly as possible thanks to the exemplary cooperation of all the local forces and the assistance of still-present “old fighters.” This deserves even greater emphasis in light of the fact that this rescue work had to be undertaken in the midst of a wild chaos of rubble, ruins, and debris. Among the police, firefighters, Wehrmacht pioneers, members of party organizations, ambulances, etc., there was outstanding cooperation from the first minute of the operation on, so that the great difficulties of the rescue and recovery effort could be managed smoothly.

  According to the findings so far, the act was by no means a spontaneously perpetrated attack, but rather a very carefully prepared crime committed with a mechanical timed detonator.

  What happened here was not something primitive and born of the moment, which was hatched only a brief time before the rally. Rather, both the choice of the place and the “expert work” suggest that the perpetrators made very careful preparations.

  Even if specific perpetrators or groups of perpetrators cannot yet be identified, evidence and leads nonetheless indicate the direction in which further investigative activity should move. Within the scope of this systematic, painstaking work, the collapsed masonry is also being meticulously examined. Only by piecing together the countless individual results of the investigative work can the police reconstruct the bigger picture.

  Fortunately, the public in the capital of the movement is taking an immense interest in the illumination of the attack. From all social strata, people are continuously coming forward to provide information and contribute to the solution of the crime by reporting clues.

  Under the headline “Valuable Leads from the Public,” the German News Agency disseminated another article on November 10.

  As the German News Agency has learned, the special commission for the investigation of the crime of November 8 has been receiving more and more clues and statements from comrades belonging to all social groups. For that reason, the special commission has been tripled in size this Friday so that it can process exhaustively the influx of information. Though this contains at present mostly clues of a general nature, it can certainly yield important results. Currently, probably over a thousand such leads have been reported by the public. Just as praiseworthy as the cooperation of all German comrades in the solving of the disgraceful crime is the joint effort of all the members of the special commission from the first to the last man—for they not only feel a strong sense of duty, but are also putting their hearts and souls into it. Currently, experts are in the midst of meticulously investigating the found parts of the mechanical apparatus used for the detonation of the explosive charge. It is essential to this task to determine the exact composition of the metal parts. At this point, it can already safely be said that, with respect to the alloy of individual metal parts, a foreign origin will indeed be demonstrable. There are presently investigations in progress from various sides working completely independently of one another to reach an absolutely sound result. This particular type of investigation is of decisive significance, all the more so as the special commission is already pursuing clues in a quite specific direction, and it can be expected that further details might be made available to the public in the immediate future so that the special commission, which investigates all leads, will receive more information pointing in this direction.

  Meanwhile, Georg Elser had already been questioned by the SS officer Nebe in the Wittelsbach Palace. Despite threats and intimidation, Nebe did not obtain a confession.

  Gestapo officers of the special commission had their doubts anyhow. For them, a lone assassin was out of the question; behind the deed, they assumed, was a plot—a conspiracy. They were convinced that they had to search for foreign instigators, and they were not alone in this view. The official coverage of the Munich attack aimed from the beginning in the same direction.

  On November 9—when the official investigative commission had just taken up its work—foreign instigators were already suspected. The Völkischer Beobachter of November 9 stated: Today we do not yet know in detail how this criminal act was prepared or how it was possible. But we know one thing: the instigators, the financial backers, those who are capable of such a vile, abhorrent idea—they are the same people who have always used murder for political purposes: the agents of the secret service! But England shall get to know us!

  The Bürgerbräu attack, which in contrast to all previous twenty-nine assassination attempts on Hitler had almost succeeded, provoked wild speculations. Was it Jewish circles, communist resistance fighters, or did the evidence point outside the country, as the Propaganda Ministry would have people believe? Was it a joint operation among agents of the British secret service and Otto Strasser—who, as an opponent of Hitler, had founded in 1930 the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten, an organization of “revolutionary National Socialists,” also known as the “Black Front,” and had been living since 1933 in Swiss exile? The Propaganda Ministry strove zealously to spread this version.

  The idea that it could have been the act of a single individual was beyond imagination. Neither the Gestapo nor oppositional circles believed that. The former would have had no political interest in it; a lone perpetrator, and a German to boot, was of little use for the propagandistic purposes of the National Socialists. And the latter accused the Gestapo of staging the attack itself in order to spread as propaganda the myth that providence had saved the Führer. Both theories of behind-the-scenes manipulators would be long-lasting …

  * * *

  In the secret briefings of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or security service), the “string pullers” behind the attack were also suspected of being in England. There was method in this. A confidential memo from Berlin urged the Nazi-coordinated press not to direct speculations on who was to blame for the assassination attempt in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall at domestic German groups. At that time, anything could be of use, with the exception of German resistance groups or an assassin from among the people.

  In foreign policy that year, Hitler pursued his goal of the “conquest of German lebensraum,” which he had already begun to realize. Austria had been “annexed” to the German Reich since the Anschluss in March 1938. Czechoslovakia had to “relinquish” the Sudetenland to the German Reich; Great Britain, France, and Italy had given Hitler their political blessing for the appropriation of this territory in the Munich Agreement of September 1938. In violation of this agreement, but without protest from the three powers, Hitler had then given the order in October 1938 to seize what remained of Czechoslovakia (the so-called Erledigung der Rest-Tschechei). As of March 1939, there was only a “Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”

  Hitler strove for total domination of Europe. He sought and found the opportunity for this in Poland, where his stated aim was “the expansion of lebensraum in the east and the securing of sustenance.” Thus, he asserted, there was “no longer any question of sparing Poland, and we are left with the decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity…. Right or wrong or treaties play no role in the matter.”

  The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 with the secret protocol for the division of Poland cleared the way for Hitler’s invasion, which began on September 1, 1939, after a staged attack by the SS on the Gleiwitz radio station. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Second World War had begun.

  From that point on, Hitler’s focus was on the western offens
ive. The date of the attack, originally planned for November 9, had still not been decided, because the generals of the Wehrmacht regarded an offensive as premature in terms of military preparedness.

  For the Nazi regime, a favorable opportunity thus presented itself in the wake of the assassination attempt to foment the necessary bellicose mood in the German public with the help of propaganda. As propagandistic raw material, the German News Agency assembled a collection of purported quotes from foreign media that were sent to editorial departments as proof of foreign “warmongering.”

  To the editors: The following material, which proves the guilt of the warmongers in London and Paris in the Munich attack, is being made available to the newspapers not for use in the form provided by us but as a basis for commentary.

  CHAMBERLAIN declared in his first speech before the House of Commons soon after the British declaration of war: “I have only one wish, and that is to see Adolf Hitler destroyed.”

  TIMES: “Now it is a matter not of Hitler’s conditions, but of Hitler himself.”

  EXCELSIOR wrote: “England and France have reached the mutual decision to put an end to the bloodthirsty despot Adolf Hitler.”

  TIMES: “As long as Hitler and Hitlerism have not been wiped out, England will make no peace.”

  The Member of Parliament SINCLAIRE in the House of Commons: “As long as Germany is ruled by Adolf Hitler, our only choice is either to submit to his will or to eliminate him.”

  The correspondent of the NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN reported from London: “England has only one war objective: to do away with National Socialism, from Hitler down to the last party member.”