Killing Hitler (11 page)

On 13 November, five days after his arrest, Elser finally confessed. He had been caught out when his interrogator asked to see his knees. Though he had worn protective pads, weeks of working at ground level had left his knees badly bruised and suppurating. And when he failed to explain the injuries convincingly, he abandoned his resistance and conceded that he had indeed planted the bomb.

The following day, Himmler took Elser’s interrogation file, along with the signed confession, to show Hitler. The Führer was fascinated. He studied the file and asked to see photographs of his would-be killer. He commented favorably on his appearance: his intelligent eyes, high forehead, and determined expression. But when presented with a preliminary Gestapo report concluding
that Elser had worked alone, he was incredulous. “What idiot conducted this investigation?” he demanded.
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It was just not possible, he thought, to imagine that Elser was a lone wolf.

To many Nazis, Elser was simply an enigma. He was an ordinary German. He exhibited none of the typical signs of “degeneracy” that they claimed to be combating: apart from his brief flirtation with communism, he was a virtual teetotaler, was not promiscuous, did not consort with Jews, and was not close to the Church. In fact, he was exactly the sort of solid, upstanding, working-class German that they thought they had won over—and, indeed, that had become the backbone of the Nazi Party.

Perhaps for this reason, they simply could not believe that he had worked alone. They initially arrested over a hundred suspects in connection with the Munich bombing, but they realized fairly swiftly that Elser was their man. Yet as the investigators at the scene pieced together his plot, coming to see its thorough planning and high standards of workmanship, foreign complicity was assumed almost as a precondition. Elser, the ordinary German, they thought, must have been led astray; he must have been aided and abetted by the nefarious agents of Germany’s enemies.

That assumption fitted neatly with the requirements of the German propaganda machine. In the winter of 1939, the “perfidious English” were portrayed as being behind every kitten stuck up a tree. Thus, officially at least, a bizarre conglomerate of domestic communists, the exiled Black Front, and British intelligence was blamed for Elser’s attack. Elser, meanwhile, though most forthcoming and cooperative under interrogation, was little help in uncovering any wider conspiracy. Despite repeated beatings, torture, and hypnosis, he stuck doggedly to his implausible tale: he had had no accomplices and had received no foreign assistance. And when told to build a second example of his complex bomb, timing mechanism, and detonator, to prove that he had acted alone, he complied, skillfully re-creating his invention, to the astonishment of his interrogators.

Himmler even took it upon himself to torture Elser personally. A witness noted:

With wild curses [he] drove his boots hard into the body of the handcuffed Elser. He then had him removed by a Gestapo official…and taken to the lavatory…where he was beaten with a whip or some similar instrument until he howled with pain. He was then brought back at the double to Himmler, who once more kicked him and cursed him.
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Elser, by this point, was said to be “beside himself,” but he stuck to his story.

So if Elser would not name his accomplices, then the Nazi
Sicherheitsdienst
(SD) would name some for him. On the day after the Munich attack, at Venlo, on the Dutch border, SS-
Sturmbannführer
Alfred Naujocks was preparing an exercise in unorthodox warfare. Fresh from his adventure in Gleiwitz (see pages 115–117), he headed a kidnap squad aiming to snatch two British agents from neutral Holland. On the German side of the frontier, he had twelve burly SD men arranged on the running boards of two Mercedes cars. At the agreed signal, he was to lead them in a dash across the frontier to a café, where the British had been lured by a German officer posing as a member of the resistance.

The British agents had thought they were on the verge of masterminding a coup that would remove Hitler and restore peace in Europe. They were an odd pair. Major Richard Stevens had worked in intelligence for some years before being appointed head of the British intelligence office in The Hague. His brief there was to oversee espionage activities in Germany. His colleague, Captain Sigismund Payne Best, had worked in military intelligence during the First World War but had resigned his commission and settled into a comfortable life as a businessman in Holland. He had then been reassigned to the service on the outbreak of war in September 1939. The two had contacts with the deputy chief of MI6, Stewart Menzies, and their plan had been approved at the highest level.
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They were, however, being lured into a trap. Their German contact, a Wehrmacht officer going by the name of Captain
Schaemmel, was in fact Walter Schellenberg, a major in the SS and Reinhard Heydrich’s chief of counterintelligence. He had been wooing the British agents for some weeks, promising negotiations with high-ranking anti-Nazis seeking to overthrow Hitler.
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But, following Elser’s attack, Schellenberg was ordered to seize his contacts and bring them to Germany for questioning. He offered a meeting with a senior anti-Nazi as bait. Naujocks was to provide the muscle.

Soon after 3:00 that afternoon, the British arrived at the rendezvous. Almost immediately, they were accosted by Naujocks and his SD squad, who had crashed through the barrier at the border. After a brief tussle and exchange of fire, they were bundled into the cars and whisked to Berlin for interrogation.
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In time, they would furnish the SD with a great deal of information, including the names of numerous agents and details of all MI6 operations on the Continent. British intelligence would be fatally compromised and exposed as plodding and amateurish, but a bona fide link to Elser would not be established.

Despite this failure, Elser’s bombing would prove a boon for the Nazi regime. Goebbels’s propaganda machine swung into action, accusing the British of all manner of things, from the Munich bombing to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Goebbels forbade his newspaper editors from printing anything that might incriminate any other opposition groups within Germany, such as the Jews, the monarchists, or the clergy. The popular wrath had to be targeted specifically against the British. Accordingly, the news report about the Bürgerbräukeller bomb was given to the German press direct, with the instruction that it was to be quoted on the front page of every newspaper with every sentence in the same order.
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The banner headline left little room for doubt: “Miraculous Escape for the Führer—Chamberlain’s Fervent Hopes Are Not Fulfilled.”
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The propaganda campaign was necessary to inflame passions in a public that was in danger of growing tired of the Phony War. With the euphoria of victory over the Poles already fading, it sought to prepare the ground for new enemies and new offensives. It was also notable in signaling Hitler’s new obsession with
defeating the British. It had the desired effect: popular support for the war strengthened markedly.
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Aside from inciting hatred for the British, Elser’s attack was also exploited to boost Hitler’s popularity. The German press went into overdrive, lauding Hitler’s survival as a sign of divine intervention. Messages of congratulation poured in. The lead was taken by Pope Pius XII, who sent a telegram expressing his congratulations on the Führer’s survival. The German churches swiftly followed suit: a
Te Deum
was sung in Munich Cathedral, while the Protestants held a special thanksgiving service.
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Many foreign heads of state also expressed their best wishes. Mussolini sent his congratulations but was criticized by some for giving the impression of insincerity.
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Ordinary Germans, too, sent countless letters and telegrams. Some expressed their anger and dismay over the attack; others gave thanks to God for Hitler’s survival. Many sent donations as a reward for the capture of the culprits or to aid the families of the victims.
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A few ventured to express their feelings in verse. One poetess eloquently gave voice to the adoration that many Germans felt for “their” Führer:

He lives! The enemy’s plans were thwarted!
He lives! Our thanks to the Almighty
,
That the death of our Führer does not leave
A sorrowful Germany—a people to grieve.
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The aftermath of the attack also provoked much more sinister events. Tip-offs from the public about potential assassins multiplied, as did the list of suspects and conspiracies uncovered (or imagined) by Nazi agents and informants abroad. The German legation in Berne, for example, received a report of two suspicious individuals meeting conspiratorially in a café in the city shortly before the attack; tellingly, it was noted, one of them spoke with an English accent.
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The consulate in Zürich, meanwhile, was informed of an Austrian Jew who was considered to be a suspect because she had allegedly cursed her misfortune that Hitler had not been killed in the attempt.
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Another suspect had
apparently bet a colleague that Hitler would not survive until 1940. Other reports came from farther afield. One, from Venezuela, linked Elser to the dissident Nazi Otto Strasser,
⁵⁹
while another, this time from Connecticut, suggested that the authors of the Bürgerbräukeller attack were in fact “highly emotional fanatics,” who frequented a pool hall in the city of Hartford.
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Countless innocent Germans also fell victim to anonymous denunciations, many of them for merely expressing a lack of enthusiasm for Hitler, in some cases many years before.
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In such instances, arrest, interrogation, and a sentence of imprisonment almost inevitably followed. Barely six days after the attack, a lengthy new directive ordered that all such reports from the public were to be given the closest scrutiny.
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Hints were even included for those investigators unclear of their task: Did the suspect display a special interest in Hitler’s Munich speech? Did the suspect express surprise that the speech had concluded without incident? And had the suspect remarked recently that the Nazi government’s days were numbered?

The regime naturally also exploited the attack as an excuse to deal with dissidents and perceived opponents of all shades. In Düsseldorf alone, more than seventy arrests were made. Forty Bavarian monarchists were also taken into custody.
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And in Buchenwald, an unknown number of Jews were simply taken out and shot.

For Hitler, the attack seems to have been an almost mystical experience. While Goebbels cynically pushed the divine intervention angle for all he was worth, Hitler appears to have actually believed it. When he first heard of the attack, he took it as a sign. “Now I am completely content!” he exclaimed. “The fact that I left the Bürgerbräukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence’s intention to let me reach my goal.”
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Each time the story was told and retold, it was embellished and gilded a little more. Hitler would later recall that during the Bürgerbräukeller speech, a “little voice” had repeatedly told him, “Get out! Get out!”
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He gave a more dramatic version to his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann: “I had the most extraordinary feeling and I
don’t know myself how or why—but I felt compelled to leave the cellar just as quickly as I could.”
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A later concoction claimed that he had changed his plans that very morning after a seemingly insignificant conversation about his security arrangements.
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It is probable that Hitler really did believe these imagined and post hoc justifications for his fortuitous survival. But what is most telling is that he now felt that he had empirical proof of his status as Germany’s anointed savior. From this point on, he would only become more trenchant in his beliefs, more convinced of his own opinions, and more contemptuous of the advice of others. He was slipping into megalomania.

On one point at least, however, Hitler was perhaps right to ascribe his survival to the intercession of a higher power. It certainly had nothing to do with his security regime. One of the most astounding aspects of the attack is the incredible ease with which the assassin was able to work. Elser routinely stole explosives and detonators and purchased ammunition without hindrance. Once in Munich, he worked undetected in the Bürgerbräukeller for some thirty-five nights, allowing himself to be locked in, and escaping through a back door at daybreak. Until his arrest, he was never challenged by security guards, SS sentries, or policemen. He even returned one last time to check his bomb the day before it was scheduled to explode. Again he spent the night undetected. Hitler was due to appear the very next day and the country was at war—yet no security checks were carried out and no searches were undertaken.

For some, this apparent laxity was taken as proof of the complicity of the German authorities in the attack. The truth is probably more prosaic. The lack of any systematic security measures in the Bürgerbräukeller was the result of an administrative squabble and of Nazi nepotism. In 1936, a dispute had arisen between the chief of the Munich police and Christian Weber about who was to be responsible for security at the beer hall event. Hitler had decided in favor of his crony Weber, presumably on the logic that he had run the party meetings in the early years, and the Bürgerbräukeller speech was essentially a repeat performance with many of the same faces present. What he didn’t realize, however, was
that Weber had graduated from a pimp and bruiser to a notorious sybarite, grown fat on the corruption and hedonism available to him under the Nazi state. Weber had won the turf war over the beer hall meeting, but he had done nothing to discharge his new responsibility. The other security organs, the
Leibstandarte
and the RSD, had been passed over in favor of the party and one of Hitler’s clique—with fatal consequences. Elser’s ingenuity and Weber’s laxity made a general overhaul of security inevitable.