Yesterday you met my favorite arsonist and today you will meet my favorite assassin. (I´m escalating! 😂)
Movies have been made about him, documentaries also, books have been written, and, rather late, Germany also decided to treat him to some monuments, though admittedly they are not very monumental.
But at least you won´t find a single monument of the guy he set out to kill in Germany nowadays.
The name of the assassin is Johann Georg Elser. Ever heard of him?
I learned nothing about him in school of course, it took the German public till the nineties to recognize him for the hero he was.
The first time I came in contact with his name was some years ago while I was staying in Berlin for a few days.
As I was walking through the streets toward the apartment I had rented, I passed the windows of a parents initiative (as we call it in German) which is basically a kindergarden funded and organized by a group of parents. While it is very difficult to found your own private school in Germany, lots of red tape, when it comes to kindergardens the German state is more lenient and if you meet certain standards you might even get financial support, because though there is a law which guarantees every child a place in a kindergarden, the state sometimes has difficulties meeting this obligations with its own institutions, especially in big cities like Berlin, so private initiatives are welcomed.
And on the wall beside the windows there was a memorial tablet, bearing the inscription of Elser´s name, dates of birth and death and a description of his heroic act.
In a nutshell, in the evening of November 8, 1939, a bomb, which had been planted there by Elser before, went off at Bürgerbräukeller, the venue of a gathering of highranking Nazi officials in Munich, including Adolf Hitler, the main goal of the attack. Unfortunately Hitler had left a few minutes earlier than planned, so when the bomb went off, he was not in the hall.
So years before high ranking military officers like Stauffenberg, Canaris etc. made up their mind and came to the conclusion that it was time to end Hitler´s madness and save Germany from total annihilation (one of Hitler´s favorite terms), a simple carpenter singlehandedly had tried to take out the dictator.
Unfortunately Elser was arrested while trying to cross the border into Switzerland, interrogated by the Gestapo (Secret State Police) and imprisoned.
The Nazis, and later on also several historians, had a difficult time believing that a normal worker had singlehandedly plotted and executed this elaborate assassination attempt. In the beginning they suspected him of being a British agent, then a member of a Communist resistance group, but whatever they tried, torture, drugs, hypnosis, they never got anything else out of him than that he had acted alone. Later on they even made him reconstruct the bomb, to see if he was capable and he certainly was. The Gestapo was so impressed, they even included it into their field manuals for training purposes.
Nowadays there exists a whole field of historical research bearing his name (Elser-Forschung) which over the years dug up some pretty impressive stuff.
Elser´s CV (quite impressive if he ever wanted to interview for an opening as assassin in some other life 😎) can be found here, albeit in German.
He had been to the Nazi meeting at Bürgerbräukeller in Munich himself on November 8, 1938, one year before the attempted assassination. Every year, since they came to power in 1933, the Nazis would meet there to commemorate their failed coup attempt in November 8, 1923, which had started at the very same place.
The next day, on November 9, 1938, synagogues were burning in Germany, Jewish shops and institutions were smashed, (Night of Broken Glass), Jewish homes ransacked, Jews got arrested or murdered, though the world did not know it in that moment, it was the beginning of the Holocaust.
It was during that memorial meeting on Nomber 8, 1938, that Elser decided to blow Hitler up during next year´s meeting.
From then on his life is dedicated to that one single purpose.
He takes employment according to his explosive needs.
He steals powder and timers while working for one company, then moves to another company to work in a quarry in order to acquire knowledge in blasting engineering and steals blasting sticks and capsules there.
Nothing stops a determined mind!
He does explosive experiments in his parents garden,
designs and finally builds his bomb.
In over 30 nights he sneaks into the Bürgerbräukeller and caves a hole for the bomb into a column in front of which Hitler´s speaker´s desk will be placed.
On November 5 the bomb is hidden in the column, ready for action.
He returns one last time to check the mechanism on November 7.
Next day he takes the train to Konstanz where he is arrested by German customs at 8.45 p.m. while trying to cross the border to Switzerland.
9.20 p.m.: The bomb explodes, 9 dead, 63 injured, but Hitler had left the venue already at 9.07 p.m.
(That´s why the English version of a movie about Elser is called “Thirteen Minutes“)
11 p.m.: A telegraph from Munich orders the borders to be closed and guarded vigilantly, but at that time Elser is already in the hands of the Gestapo where he had been transfered to after border police found detonator parts, notes about bomb making and a postcard depicting the interior of Bürgerbräukeller on him.
How could a guy who had masterfully planned and executed the bomb attack on Hitler become so sloppy in the end? Maybe he did not care too much about his own life after the completion of his mission?
The Nazis held him prisoner in different places, planning to do a big show trial with him, but somehow that never happened.
On April 9, 1945 , shortly before American troops liberated Dachau concentration camp on April 29, Elsner, who had been transferred to Dachau in the beginning of 1945, was executed there by a shot in the neck and his dead body was immediately cremated.
I don´t know if the State of Israel has included Johann Georg Elser in its "Righteous Among the Nations", but I think, as a guy who already tried to do something against the Nazi insanity at a time, when Schindler was still just a businessman collecting intel for the Nazis in Poland prior to the invasion, he definitely deserves a place there.
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