Killing Hitler (9 page)

The genius behind the Nazi propaganda machine was Joseph Goebbels. Born in Rheydt on the Lower Rhine in 1897, Goebbels was an archetypal misanthrope. Highly gifted intellectually, he was tormented by feelings of physical inadequacy as a result of his weak constitution and clubfoot. After gaining a doctorate in literature in 1921, he was frustrated as a writer and drifted toward the socialist wing of the Nazi Party. He was to become one of its most impassioned and eloquent spokesmen. Despite ideological disagreements with Hitler, he eventually came under the latter’s spell and was rewarded with the post of
Gauleiter
of Berlin in 1926. There, his energy, organizational talents, and demagoguery began the transformation of the capital from a bastion of the left into a stronghold of the right.

Goebbels’s methods were deceptively simple. Backed by the ever-present threat of violence, he used every means at his disposal to browbeat, taunt, and humiliate his opponents. He never allowed the truth to cloud his judgment. The essential aspect of propaganda, he asserted, was that it “achieved its purpose”; whether it was true or not was immaterial.
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Defamation, therefore, was a specialty, and at one point Goebbels was defending five separate libel actions.
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He would ridicule his enemies as simpletons, nincompoops, or philanderers, start scurrilous rumors, and make outrageous accusations. His words, honed with consummate skill, would almost drip with malice and cynicism. When the German chancellor Gustav Stresemann died after a long illness in 1929, for example, he was accorded little respect by Goebbels. Despite being a Nobel laureate and the architect of Weimar Germany’s brief flirtation with stability, Stresemann was described by Goebbels as having been “executed” by heart failure.
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Commensurate with his skills, Goebbels enjoyed a rapid political rise. Elected a Reichstag deputy in 1928, he was appointed national head of party propaganda two years later. In 1933, he was awarded the top prize—leadership of the newly created Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with the entire German media under his control. At his first press conference, he was remarkably candid about the new ministry’s purpose. It was, he said, to make people “think uniformly, react uniformly, and place themselves at the disposal of the government, body and soul.”
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Thereafter, his position was unassailable. Through the editorials of the Nazi press, especially the breathtakingly mendacious
Völkischer Beobachter
and the ever-burgeoning radio sector, he was free to propagate the Nazi worldview to an audience that was increasingly unable to discern the truth from lies.

But Goebbels’s talent was not confined to the printed and spoken word. He was also a gifted stage manager. His marches, rallies, and torchlight parades provided the model for Nazi ceremonials, utilizing every means available—flags, fanfares, banners
—to induce near-ecstasy in the watching public. His vision of National Socialism was as an “experience,” encompassing every aspect of the follower’s life: a fusion of politics with religion.
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It was not enough, he thought, for the German public to simply accept National Socialism; they had to participate in it, celebrate it, and believe in it.

Everyday life under the Third Reich required every individual to make his or her own compromise with the regime. The experience of the majority, admittedly, was not that of SS terror, concentration camps, and extrajudicial murder. Many would reminisce with some fondness about the peacetime years, stressing the economic boom, “the guaranteed pay packet…adequate nourishment…and the absence of disarray in political life.”
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It has been argued, for example, that unless one had the misfortune to belong to a specific risk group—Jews, communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and so on—and unless one actively conspired against or resisted the regime, one could live comparatively free from fear. This is probably accurate. After all, the Gestapo did not resort to the randomized terror then employed in the USSR. Their victims were usually identified via denunciations and were usually guilty of at least a minor transgression or misdemeanor.

Yet everyone, regardless of their enthusiasm for the regime, was expected to conform. They were expected to contribute to the People’s Welfare, to hang out the swastika when required, and to listen to Hitler’s speeches on the radio. At work, they were expected to be members of the required state and party bodies. When they married, they would receive a complimentary copy of
Mein Kampf.
Their children would be expected to join the Hitler Youth, attend schools purged of “unreliable” teachers, and learn from “revised” textbooks.

The Nazi state, therefore, was almost omnipresent and virtually omnipotent. Those who refused to conform and resisted its threats and blandishments did so at great personal risk. They were taking on a network of agencies that demanded unquestioning obedience and which could exercise the power of life and death over their opponents. In these circumstances, it took a great deal of integrity, courage, and downright bloody-mindedness to resist
the Nazi onslaught. Some chose what was called “internal emigration”—a form of moral and intellectual self-sufficiency that did not openly challenge the regime but rather sought to avoid its attentions by effecting a withdrawal from all public and political participation.

A few opted actively to resist the strictures and seductions of the Third Reich. Some did so by attending illegal dance clubs, tuning in to foreign radio broadcasts, or hosting political discussion groups. Fewer still set out to confront the regime by the use of violence. One of the latter was Georg Elser.

Georg Elser was born in the village of Hermaringen, in eastern Württemberg, in January 1903.
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The eldest of five children, with a pious mother and a violent father, he grew up in modest surroundings. His family worked on the land, trading in lumber, tending a mill, and managing their smallholding.

The young Georg was very much the product of his childhood environment. Small in stature, with unruly dark wavy hair, he often bore a pinched, slightly troubled expression. He was not unintelligent, but he was an average pupil, distracted from his studies by the burdens of being an oldest child, working for his father, and looking after his siblings. He was also somewhat of a loner. He made few friends and was content with his own company. But, perhaps most importantly, Georg developed one particular character trait in response to the nightly violence visited on the family by his father: a profound sense of justice.

After finishing secondary school in the summer of 1917, Georg briefly worked for his father before finding an apprenticeship in a local foundry. Health problems then forced a change of career, and he was apprenticed as a cabinetmaker. He was conscientious and hardworking, and he demonstrated a genuine talent for woodworking. He had found his métier. His patience and perfectionism meant that he left the technical school in Heidenheim at the top of his class. At age twenty-two, a qualified cabinetmaker, he left home, with all its unhappy memories, to make his living as a journeyman.

Elser found employment in a succession of jobs. He worked as a simple carpenter, building furniture, clock housings, and even wooden propellers. But when the economic crisis of 1929 broke, his modest existence became unsustainable. He regularly found himself unemployed, and was eventually forced to return to his family.

While little had changed at home, Georg had matured. He was still largely uninterested in politics per se, but he had developed a clear political standpoint: a visceral and uncompromising opposition to the Nazis. This was in part due to his background. Hitler’s slogans perhaps reminded him of the loudmouthed bombast of his drunken father. But he also believed that only the Communist Party could deliver improved wages and conditions for workers and craftsmen such as himself. Consequently, he voted for the German Communist Party and was briefly a member of its affiliated paramilitary “defense force,” the
Rote Frontkämpferbund.

Elser was no ideological communist, however. He was a practical man at heart and was not interested in political discussions. He had no desire to change other people’s minds, but he steadfastly refused to make any accommodation with the new regime. When Hitler’s speeches were broadcast, he would silently leave the room. One incident illustrates his attitude very clearly. In May 1938, a Nazi parade threaded its way through his hometown of Königsbronn. Elser, like many others, turned out to watch, but as those around him gave the Hitler salute, he refused to do likewise. When a colleague reminded him that it might be sensible to conform, he replied curtly: “You can kiss my ass.”
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He then ostentatiously turned about and started whistling to himself.

How Elser metamorphosed from a small-time nonconformist to an assassin is unclear. He certainly held a deep and personal hatred for Hitler, but that was not so unusual. He gave a clue to his motives when he later claimed that he had made his decision to assassinate Hitler in the autumn of 1938.
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At that time, war with Czechoslovakia appeared imminent, and indeed was averted only by the licensed treachery of the Munich Conference. But Elser, like many others, was convinced that Munich would not spell the
end of Germany’s aggressive designs. He believed war, with all its attendant miseries, to be inevitable.
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However, there were many in Germany who felt the same hatred and the same fear, yet did nothing. Other factors, therefore, must have contributed to Elser’s radicalization. For one thing, his home life was as unbearable in 1938 as it had been in 1922. His father’s business had finally failed and the family unit had begun to disintegrate in acrimony. His own circumstances were little better: he was chasing a married woman and paying support for a child he had never wanted.
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He was also struggling for work. After cutting ties with his parents, he once again scratched out a living as a jobbing carpenter but was shocked at how the hourly rate had sunk as a result of the Depression; it was barely possible to make even a modest living. By 1938, he simply had nothing left to lose.

So in the autumn of 1938, Georg Elser began to plot. By his own admission he had no idea of how he might carry out his attack. But the perfectionist went to work with a will. That November, he traveled to Munich to observe the commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. After Hitler’s evening speech in the Bürgerbräukeller—the traditional curtain-raiser of the celebrations—he entered the hall posing as a regular customer. Unnoticed by the lingering group of Nazi bigwigs and bodyguards, he noted the layout of the room, the position of the lectern, and the patent lack of effective security measures. The following morning, he returned to observe the start of the parade—the very same parade that Maurice Bavaud had hoped to disrupt so spectacularly. He then caught the train home.

As a result of his reconnaissance in Munich, Elser now had a clearer idea of a possible way to hit his target. The following year, he decided, he would plant a bomb in the Bürgerbräukeller to kill Hitler and as many of the leading cadre of Nazis as possible. He gave himself twelve months to collect the necessary hardware and to design and build his bomb.

First, he stole a fuse and a quantity of gunpowder from his employer, an armaments manufacturer in Königsbronn. He then found another job in a nearby quarry, where he was able to acquire
explosives and a detonator with comparative ease. Working evenings and weekends in his workshop, he drew up plans and experimented. Having no experience of explosives, he tested prototype bombs in the fields around his home before satisfying himself on the amount required for the task. In the spring, he returned to Munich to take measurements and make more detailed sketches of the hall of the Bürgerbräukeller.
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He also saw the ideal location for his bomb: behind the dais and lectern was a thick stone pillar supporting an upper gallery that ran the length of the hall. An explosion there, he reckoned, not only would kill those in its immediate vicinity but also could bring down the heavy balcony above.

Throughout more than eight months of plotting, Elser betrayed nothing of his activities to his family, his work colleagues, or his few friends. The only time he risked discovery was when, during his short stay in Munich in the spring of 1939, he tried in vain to get a job in the Bürgerbräukeller.
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Beyond that, he kept the entire operation secret. If asked what he was making, he would reply simply: “An invention.”
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When pressed by an intrigued colleague if his invention was an alarm clock that would ring and simultaneously activate a light, he answered evasively: “Yes, something like that.”
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In early August 1939, Elser finally left his home and traveled to Munich. With him, he took a wooden chest containing his tools: planes, hammers, saws, files, and, hidden in a special compartment, his bomb, with a further 50 kilograms of explosives, six clock movements, detonators, wire, and a battery.
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After registering under his own name with the authorities and finding accommodation, he set to work.

His modus operandi was shockingly simple. He would visit the Bürgerbräukeller every night at around 9:00 to take his evening meal. An hour or so later, he would sneak up to the gallery of the function room, where he would hide in a storeroom until the bar closed and the building was locked. Thereafter, he was free to work by flashlight until the bar staff returned at around 7:30 a.m., when he would sneak out of a back entrance.