Can Assassins Be Heroes?
How 13 minutes meant the difference between life and death for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
John Wilkes Booth. Lee Harvey Oswald. James Earl Ray.
These names are forever etched in history and in our collective mind, representing not only cold-blooded murderers but more so the haunting question of what might have happened had they not done what they did.
Then there is Georg Elser.
Elser took it upon himself to try and alter the course of history with one violent action. However, he didn’t succeed, and for that reason, the world has all but forgotten his name. Yet, his attempt makes us question even more what could have happened if he had succeeded in his attempt.
What was this attempt? In 1939, Georg Elser decided that he was going to kill Adolf Hitler.
Beginnings
Elser was born in Germany on January 4, 1903, to lower-middle-class parents. Although his education was limited, he was always mechanically inclined and good at working with his hands.
Growing up, he tried to stay away from politics, a proposition easier said than done once Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Democracy was torn down and terror claimed the streets as Hitler stripped away individual liberties one by one and Germany and Europe moved closer to war.
Elser became especially alarmed when the Nazis implemented the War Economy Decree of 1938. The new law banned all trade unions and basically cut off most of the remaining freedoms he still enjoyed as a working man.
After that Elser knew he had to do something, if not for himself then for the sake of his country.
An opportunity presented itself in early 1939, when he read in a newspaper that Hitler was going to be giving a speech at a Nazi rally in the Bürgerbräukeller, a popular beer hall in Munich, later that year, on November 8. This would mark the sixteenth anniversary of the infamous Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in which a young Hitler first tried to seize power and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. The importance of that date in the Nazi story all but guaranteed that Hitler would not cancel his appearance.
This, Elser decided, was when and where he would save Germany.
The Beer Hall
In August of 1939, Georg Elser moved to Munich and started to frequent the Bürgerbräukeller almost every night. Studying every square foot of the hall, which was actually an underground cellar, he soon hatched an audacious plan. Elser would hollow out a portion of a large pillar and place a bomb inside, one set to go off at the exact time Hitler would be standing at the nearby rostrum giving his speech.
Night after night, inside the Hall, Elser would slip away from the crowd and hide in a small storage room until the place closed and everyone had gone home. Then he would come out and, working by flashlight, painstakingly carve out a piece of the stone pillar.
When that was finished, he started working on a sophisticated time-delay bomb, using skills he had previously learned while working in a clock factory. When all was finally ready, he placed the bomb inside the pillar and sealed it up.
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, officially triggering World War II. Now more convinced than ever that he was saving Germany from total destruction, Elser was relieved to see that — true to his thinking — the rally in the Munich Beer Hall was not postponed or altered. On the 8th of November Hitler was still scheduled to speak from 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM. Relying on that schedule, Elser had calibrated his bomb to go off at 9:20 PM.
Hitler and his entourage, including his top henchmen Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Rudolf Hess, arrived in Munich that day by train. But now that the war had begun, Hitler was reluctant to spend much time outside of Berlin. At the last minute he decided to begin — and end — his speech a half hour earlier so he could get back to the capital as soon as possible.
That night, the room was packed with nearly 3,000 Brown Shirts and other fanatical Nazi followers. As it was wherever he went in those days, the excitement preceding an appearance by Der Führer was palpable. At a few minutes past 8:00 PM Hitler took to the stage and launched into another furious speech, finishing around 9:07 PM. Shortly thereafter, he was in an armored car heading to the train station.
At precisely 9:20, just as Elser had planned it, the bomb went off and sent huge beams crashing down on the empty rostrum where Hitler had been standing just thirteen minutes earlier. Seven people were killed and many others injured. However, the Nazi elite he had targeted was by then long gone.
Upon hearing news of the explosion and of how close he had been of dying in it, Hitler automatically chalked it up to divine Providence that he had survived.
Elser was arrested the next day trying to cross the border into Switzerland. Under brutal interrogation by the Gestapo, he confessed to planting the bomb and was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He languished there for the rest of the war before being transferred to Dachau in the waning days of the Third Reich.
On April 9, 1945, he was executed by the Schutzstaffel (SS). News of his death was reported in the German press, but it was falsely attributed to wounds suffered during an Allied air attack.
Less than a month later any thought of victory was over and Hitler put a gun to his head. Within days, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally.
Now, it might be a stretch to say that if Hitler and his elite adjutants had been in that Hall thirteen minutes later — when the bomb went off — the entire European war would have ended right away. Fighting was already underway, as was the deadly persecution of the Holocaust.
However, this does not diminish the heroic, albeit deadly, actions of this particular man, one man who sought to change history significantly. For that, he should be remembered.
Note: History records that during the twelve-year run of the Third Reich no less than 42 attempts were made on the life of Adolf Hitler by citizens of Germany.
