The Lone Assassin

by Helmut Ortner

  From 1933 to 1945, at least 31,000 people had been killed in the Dachau concentration camp. Thousands had been fighting typhus and starvation since November 1944. On April 26 and 27, about 7,000 prisoners had been driven on a notorious death march toward the Ötztal Alps, where they were to build a mountain fortress. The SS had abandoned the plan of destroying the camp with all the inmates and had instead organized the evacuation in accordance with Himmler’s instructions. Himmler had ordered that no prisoner was permitted to fall into the hands of the Allies. Grouped into five “marching columns,” the 7,000 prisoners had set off, knowing that they could expect no mercy from the SS. Whoever fell and could not get up was shot. Numerous prisoners managed to escape. Most of the SS men had fled; some of them, wearing prisoners’ uniforms, were captured.

  For thousands, April 29 was the day of liberation and salvation. But for Georg Elser, the liberators arrived twenty days too late.

  EPILOGUE

  Georg Elser, a Man without Ideology

  When this book first came out in Germany in 1993, most Germans did not care to know much about their resistance fighters. Those who were committed to opposing Hitler reminded them of their own complicity—of cowardice, opportunism, and indifference. A man like Georg Elser confronted them with their guilty conscience—provided they had one.

  At the time of the writing of this book, about 6.4 million adult German citizens—nearly as many people as then lived in Baden-Württemberg, Elser’s native state—still had a favorable opinion of Adolf Hitler. Another 5.5 million thought “neither positively nor negatively” about the man who had survived Elser’s assassination attempt in the Munich Bürgerbräu Beer Hall on November 8, 1939. Within twelve years, he had first expanded the German Reich to the Meuse and beyond the Memel and then destroyed it. More than anyone before him, he had brought jubilation and then suffering to the Germans. And yet a survey by the magazine Der Spiegel from March 1989 showed clearly that, forty-four years after the end of the Third Reich, many Germans still refused to correct their image of Hitler and National Socialism.

  When Philipp Jenninger spoke ambiguously about the Nazi past in 1988 as president of Germany’s parliament, he had been forced to resign. But what was to be done with a hard kernel of unambiguous thinking in the people?

  “We are not a lost cause,” Franz Schönhuber, the leader of an extreme right-wing party, paradoxically called Die Republikaner, claimed in 1987, “but the enduring cause of the future.” This came from a man who was fond of publicly vaunting his membership in the Waffen-SS.

  In Germany, votes could be won with the rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS, but honoring resistance fighters didn’t get you any votes.

  In the political atmosphere of that time, the sad fate of Georg Elser was not only that of a failed assassin, but also that of a resister who was almost shockingly unknown—among the left as much as the right. Elser shared this fate with most who had opposed the Nazis, whose story had never particularly interested the postwar German people.

  Another reason for Elser’s obscurity might be that the historians’ guild had long evaluated him no differently than the Gestapo had, assuming that an individual assassin must have been either hired or mad.

  In actuality, Elser was anything but a fanatic or a lunatic. Rather, he was a reserved individualist who led an ordinary life. Politics, as soon as it left the everyday realm or took off on ideological flights, did not interest him. He never understood politics in the abstract sense. He believed, however, that conditions in Germany “could be changed only through an elimination of the current leadership,” by which he meant Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels. He hoped that after the elimination of those “at the very top,” more moderate men would step in—men who would not conquer other countries, but would improve the lot of the working class. That was the meaning of his deed.

  A fastidious craftsman who called himself an “artistic carpenter” and provided only high-quality workmanship, Elser had to watch from the middle of the 1930s onward as standards were lowered due to mass production. It was not only his political worldview, but also his concept of work that was shattered by National Socialism.

  Elser came from the eastern Swabian Alps, a region of Württemberg that is a bastion of Pietism. He was devout in that he had a strong sense of justice. When he attended church—whether Catholic or protestant—it was to gain peace and strength in prayer. For him, churches were places of meditation. In the days of his attack preparations, he often went to churches in Munich—alone, in communion with God.

  Elser was the type who preferred to be his own master. Conformity and enthusiasm for the national hysteria were not in his nature. All this—his political opposition, his sense of justice, his deep-seated Pietistic character—gave him the energy to plan the attack for over a year, starting in the autumn of 1938, with his characteristic care and meticulousness. This was the result of a particularly difficult decision. For the Pietist, violent resistance is profoundly suspect, and assassination is a method forbidden by his religiosity. Nonetheless, Elser decided in favor of the attack and against dogmatic obstacles of his faith. He was a man with his own mind, sense of justice, and courage, surrounded by an ocean of cowardice.

  * * *

  Georg Elser cannot be described as a hero. His biography is the story of a simple courageous man who opposed the Nazi terror system—a man who took action. A deed like that provokes legends. The Munich prosecutor’s office, however, which from 1946 to 1950 investigated the circumstances surrounding Elser’s murder in Dachau, came to the conclusion that he had not been following anyone else’s orders. That was based not only on intensive questioning of his family members, but also on the analysis of the transcripts of his interrogations in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, which were found in the ruins of the Reich Ministry of Justice. Today, those transcripts are held in the federal archives in Koblenz. In the late 1960s, the records were once again studied minutely and diligently by the two Munich historians Anton Hoch and Lothar Gruchmann, so that Elser now seemed vindicated at last against all attempts to turn him into a pathological glory seeker or an agent “hired” by the National Socialists. The two historians published the results of their research in 1970 under the title Autobiographie eines Attentäters (Autobiography of an Assassin). A year earlier, the television movie Der Attentäter (The Assassin) had been filmed, and it was broadcast several times in the period that followed. Thus anyone interested in the subject had access to the persuasive evidence that Elser acted of his own volition, at his own risk, and without any conspirators or helpers. What explained, then, the persistence of the suspicion that Elser had carried out the attack at the behest of the Gestapo?

  The National Socialists never put Elser on trial. Instead, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps as a “special prisoner.” Because the Nazi regime planned to use him in a show trial after the end of the war, Elser enjoyed special privileges for years during his internment in the camps. The Nazis envisioned a propagandistic tribunal in “liberated” London, where they would decry the participation of the British secret service. Not until April 9, 1945—when Germany’s imminent defeat made the prospect of a show trial illusory—was Elser murdered in Dachau in accordance with instructions from “the highest level.” What conclusion the interrogations in Munich and Berlin had ultimately reached thus remained unknown beyond the end of the war.

  Not even Elser’s fellow prisoners could make sense of the small, taciturn man from the eastern Swabian Alps. What those of them who survived the camp said about him after their liberation in 1945 was clearly a mixture of rumor and conjecture based on hints and evasive answers, as is common in every prison. Even Martin Niemöller later admitted that he had followed a rumor and speculation when he had publicly expressed the suspicion that Elser had been put up to the deed by the Gestapo. The investigations by the prosecutor’s office in 1950 and the extensive research of the two Munich historians Hoch and Gruchmann in 1970 should have put to rest theo
ries about the “hired” agent of the Gestapo. Nonetheless, speculations, doubts, and legends persisted.

  * * *

  Elser thus shared the same fate as other assassins from among the people. In the one-sided prominence given to the men of the July 20 plot in the history of opposition to Hitler, the resistance of the little people—the nameless—was largely forgotten. How could a man without an education, a simple journeyman carpenter, measure up to the great men of the July 20 conspiracy, such as Claus von Stauffenberg?

  Until recently, Elser was a mere shadow in the ranks of the German resistance. Unlike Stauffenberg, who was four years older than he was, Elser was ill-suited for the role of the glorified hero. Stauffenberg was an educated officer, who initially served the National Socialist regime and only later turned against it, but then took decisive action. Elser, on the other hand, was an aloof, reserved journeyman carpenter with only a primary school diploma. And yet in 1939, when Stauffenberg and millions of other Germans still supported the Führer, Elser had already recognized the murderous character of the regime and decided to undertake the assassination.

  Stauffenberg regarded himself first and foremost as a soldier, in keeping with centuries of family tradition. Though he would later lose all enthusiasm for National Socialism, he had nothing but contempt for parliamentary democracy throughout his lifetime. His sense of morality was a conglomeration of Catholic doctrine, an aristocratic code of honor, the ethos of ancient Greece, and German Romantic poetry. His bold decision to kill Hitler with a bomb was an expression of military considerations more than moral ones. The fact that Hitler by chance escaped with his life, the hopeless situation of the conspirators, the hasty execution of Stauffenberg—all this is a profound tragedy. Claus von Stauffenberg was a brave patriot—but also a strict anti-democrat.

  Of interest in this connection are the comments of Ian Kershaw, who is among the most respected historians of National Socialism in Germany, which has been the focus of his work for almost forty years. In an interview about his book The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45, he remarks that the unsuccessful attack on Hitler on July 20, 1944, led to a strengthening of the Nazi regime, at least temporarily: “There was a noticeable increase in Hitler’s popularity with the public. The shock effect of the attack was enormous, as we can see from many private records. But even more important is the fact that a purge of the officer corps in the Wehrmacht ensued. Arch-loyalists replaced people who were considered unreliable. All resistance was ruled out as a result” (Der Spiegel, No. 46, 2011).

  The fact that failed assassination attempts on Hitler were massively exploited by Nazi propagandists in order to invoke the invincibility of the Führer and nurture the myth of providence protecting him is historically documented. The efforts of the Gestapo and special courts to ensure that all participants and suspects were hunted down, arrested, and murdered were not directed at the officers of the July 20 plot alone.

  After Georg Elser’s failed attack, his hometown community in Königsbronn came under scrutiny by Nazi investigators searching for possible supporters and confidants. Until after the war—indeed, into the mid-1970s—Elser was for that reason not always an admired figure in his native region. There were many who had little sympathy for his act solely because, back then, “people got dragged into the affair who had nothing to do with it.” There were admirers and critics. And fifty years after the end of the Second World War, they remained irreconcilably opposed.

  There’s no question about it: Elser was a challenge not only for his native region, but also for the German public as a whole. He made clear that a simple man from among the people could muster the courage for a world-historical act. He gave the lie to all those who still tried to persuade themselves that there was nothing they could have done to oppose the Nazi state. His deed made many Germans feel ashamed.

  Elser had always been a loner. He sympathized with the labor movement and the Communist Party without being a member. He could not be made out to be a committed or exemplary comrade. He had little interest in ideological matters. How was such a man to be publicly recognized? How was he to be remembered? Remembrance often requires a group to sustain it; the memories of the aristocratic, military, social democratic, communist, and church resistance are preserved by the aristocracy, military, party, and church. But how could Elser be classified?

  In recent years, his name has finally been restored to its rightful place in the history of the German resistance, appearing in school textbooks from which it was notably absent when this book first appeared. More than forty streets and squares and three schools have been named after him, and in 2003, the German post office even issued a special Georg Elser stamp.

  In Munich there was controversy about how to memorialize Elser’s act for forty years before the city finally managed to honor him. Now each evening at 9:20 PM—the time of the explosion—a red neon sign lights up on a school. Since 2010, his hometown has commemorated him with a steel memorial. It is over six feet tall and stands at the train station of the Swabian town. In the Berlin government quarter, on the bank of the Spree River, there is a bust of Elser on the Strasse der Erinnerung (“Street of Memory”), alongside Thomas Mann, Edith Stein, and Walter Rathenau, the assassinated foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. And now, as of November 2011, there is a sculpture in the middle of the old government district on Wilhelmstrasse, a steel band over fifty feet high with a string of lights sketching Elser’s profile. The initiators around the writer Rolf Hochhuth intend the silhouette near Adolf Hitler’s former bunker to “rise above the site of the perpetrators.” The chance passerby who does not recognize Elser and might not even have heard of him learns from a small information board who is being honored here. The “symbol of reflection” (Denkzeichen, Hochhuth’s term for the memorial) with the curved neon lights has turned out somewhat advertisement-like; the individual becomes visible only at a second glance. Georg Elser, the reclusive man who decided to resist, has once again remained anonymous.

  Meanwhile, critics of the growing memorialization of Elser assert that he has become a figure of identification because he lends himself more to “self-reassurance” than, say, the aristocratic officer Stauffenberg, a highly conservative politician such as Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, or even members of communist resistance cells like the Rote Kapelle. Elser, such critics argue, now serves as an optimal projection screen for all retroactive opposition against National Socialism; he is ideally suited as a model for all the “contemporary do-gooders” who act as if one’s declaration of admiration for Elser and his deed were in itself a courageous attitude.

  That changes nothing about Elser’s honorable character. At the latest since the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl—a man who once participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at an SS military cemetery with his official guest Ronald Reagan—paid public tribute to Elser, the question “To whom does Elser belong?” has been obsolete.

  The historian Joseph Peter Stern once called Elser a “man without ideology.” To that, there is nothing to add.

  Chronology

  1903: Johann Georg Elser is born on January 4 in Hermatingen, in the Heidenheim district, the first of four children of the lumber merchants Ludwig and Maria Elser.

  1904: The family moves to Königsbronn.

  1910-1917: Elser attends primary school in Königsbronn.

  1917-1919: Begins an apprenticeship as a lathe operator in the Königsbronn ironworks; breaks off the apprenticeship for health reasons.

  1919-1922: Carpentry apprenticeship in Königsbronn.

  1922: Passes journeyman’s exam at the vocational school in Heidenheim at the top of his class. Works as a journeyman carpenter in the workshop of his master.

  1923: Journeyman carpenter at a furniture company in Aalen.

  Autumn 1923: Elser quits his job due to inflation and helps his parents with logging and farming work in exchange for free room and board.

  Summer 1924-Spring 1925: Job in a furniture w
orkshop in Heidenheim.

  February 1925: Elser leaves home and works as a cabinetmaker in Bernried.

  August 1925-Spring 1930: Carpenter at the Konstanz clock factory Upper Rhenish Clock Manufacturing.

  1928/1929: Joins the Red Front Fighters League.

  1930: Joins the Upper Rhenish Traditional Costume Society.

  1930-1932: Carpenter at a clock factory in Meersburg on Lake Constance. Laid off in the spring of 1932, due to bankruptcy of the company.

  Spring 1932: Returns to Königsbronn to help his mother on the farm.

  1933: Joins the Königsbronn music club.

  1936: Job in a Königsbronn carpenter’s workshop where, among other things, desks for the Wehrmacht are produced. Elser quits due to insufficient hourly wage.

  December 1936-March 1939: Works in a fittings factory in Heidenheim, first as an unskilled laborer in the fettling shop and then as an inspector of incoming material in the shipping department. He learns of the “special department” of the company, which produces armaments.

  Autumn 1938: During the Sudeten crisis, Elser decides to carry out an attack against the leadership of the Nazi Party.

  November 8, 1938: Travels to Munich and participates as an onlooker in the events in the city center and in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall, in order to research the local conditions for his plan.

  April 1939: Unskilled laborer in Königsbronn quarry; he obtains blasting caps.

  May 1939: Accident at work: fracture of the left foot. On sick leave, considers the technical problem of transferring a clock mechanism to a detonation device. Experiments with explosives in his parents’ orchard.

  July 1939: Finishes design of the explosive device.

  August 1939: Moves to Munich—first to Blumenstrasse 19, later to Türkenstrasse 94.