Bombing Hitler (31 page)

After the end of the war, as long as interest in the idea of a militant opposition to Hitler persisted, the isolated attack by Elser attracted charlatans. Hans Loritz, commandant of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen from 1940 to 1942, suddenly claimed that he had carried out the attack on Hitler himself. Naujoks, who was camp leader among the prisoners at Sachsenhausen, described Loritz as “primitive, ruthless, corrupt.” The Jehovah's Witness Wauer saw Loritz as a sadist of the first order. So Elser's act of liberation had fallen into the worst possible hands. But Loritz took himself out of the debate by committing suicide on January 31, 1946.

In 1941, while the Königsbronn quarry owner Georg Vollmer was in the concentration camp at Welzheim, his wife tried in desperation to place the blame for the attack on a trio of Communists in league with the music-store owner Kuch. The Stuttgart Gestapo didn't take this subterfuge seriously. Vollmer himself continued embroidering this story when he filed an objection during a denazification hearing. In a letter to Bavarian radio dated March 17, 1946, he audaciously conjured another version of the tale out of his bag of tricks. Suddenly Vollmer revealed himself as a staunch antifascist, who had seen it all coming after the Reichstag fire of 1933. Since he was such an opponent of the Nazis at that time, it was “not so surprising that Georg Elser . . . would apply for a position at my quarry,” he claimed. Vollmer resorts to village gossip: “And he [Elser] was foolish in his relations with women. He surely lived beyond his means and usually associated with people who, like himself, had just a little education. The people in his circle were not part of the middle class; they were what we call in dialect ‘half gentlemen.'” Vollmer then brought up Kuch, the ominous man from Zurich; next he tried to portray Faistelhuber, the man Elser said he was looking for when he was arrested, as the middleman who arranged access to the Bürgerbräukeller for Elser. According to Vollmer, Elser expressed great interest in demolition techniques and said he wanted to find work in this field in Munich, claiming that he would produce something “that the whole world would talk about.” Elser was, he stated, “simply a paid tool.”

In August 1947 this tale entered a third phase. Now Vollmer tried to show that he had been placed in the concentration camp because of his activities in the resistance, but he had nothing to do with the explosives, he said; that was all the doing of Kolb, the explosives expert. At the hearing before the denazification tribunal in September 1949, Vollmer finally went all out, claiming that Elser had requested explosives from him because “he had a project he wanted to carry out that fall that the entire world would be talking about,” but that Elser did not receive the explosives. Elser would then go on to steal the explosives in order to bring Vollmer down politically, he claimed.

A few months later, Vollmer wrote to the court of appeals in Stuttgart saying that Elser “asked me for them [the explosives]—and came into possession of some.” So Vollmer came a bit closer to identifying the supplier.

In 1950, Vollmer was interrogated by the Kripo on behalf of the investigating judge in Munich. Kuch, according to Vollmer's latest claims, was involved “only in espionage” and was mixed up with an English resistance group, which in turn had contacts to a German group. The German secret service had gotten onto Kuch's trail. The Propaganda Ministry was in on the assassination attempt, but Hitler knew nothing about it. Faistelhuber had been ordered to keep Elser under surveillance. After crossing the border, Elser was to receive a reward of two million marks. At the end, Vollmer called everything he had patched together a “combination.” Or perhaps the work of an amateur detective with a lot of imagination.

This absurd fable reached its conclusion in 1956 when Vollmer requested restitution for his imprisonment in order to gain a tax advantage. Now he risked everything, saying that he had known of Elser's assassination plan and had given him the explosives himself. The state office for reparations expressed its irritation: “So now the plaintiff is making the claim that he aided and abetted in the attack.”

On February 23, 1950, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice initiated an investigation of an “unknown party for bomb attack.” This soon became an investigation of Edgar Stiller, the former director of the prison at Dachau—for aiding in the murder of Georg Elser. The investigation was conducted by Dr. Naaf, whose thoroughness is evidenced by the five large volumes produced by the investigation. The direction of the investigation changed once more. As Naaf wrote to the criminal police in Konstanz in 1950, the purpose of the investigation was “primarily to establish the historical truth.” Naaf soon determined that Elser had acted alone, but in the mind of the public nothing changed.

Around this time, a psychic known to the police in Augsburg announced a revelation he had had: the bomb had been built in Höchst am Main by a Herr Assisi, who had learned “time bomm [sic] manu-facture” in England. The man described his vision to the police and included a sketch of the explosive device. He stated that while Hitler was speaking at the Bürgerbräukeller, Assisi was sitting at a table in a large room and the “time bomm [sic] with a small gas bag” was on a chair. First the gas bag bomb in the room exploded, then a second later “the bomm [sic] in the cellar.” According to the psychic, Herr Assisi had an errand boy warn Hitler fifteen minutes beforehand. The Augsburg police department wrote that the man making the claim had been known to them since 1927 as a schizophrenic and believed he possessed supernatural powers. But this shouldn't have been a reason to ignore him—after all, this psychic was no crazier than many Germans, as well as many historians and journalists who at the time still firmly believed in the Nazi connections to Elser's attack.

In 1946, the same year that Niemöller announced his theory, the historical truth found a controversial proponent. With his statement that Elser had acted alone, Gisevius was honoring the legacy of his friend Arthur Nebe, who had been executed. As early as December 1939, Nebe had stated that Elser had carried out the assassination attempt on his own. Twenty years later, Gisevius expanded significantly on this thesis in a fascinating study on Nebe.

The first step toward a fundamental change in public opinion was made with a film broadcast in 1965 by NDR. In the discussion following the broadcast, which included Heinz Boberach of the German Federal Archives, Elser was considered by the participants to be the sole perpetrator of the assassination attempt. In East Germany, the producers managed to track down former prisoners who had built up an archive on Sachsenhausen, but they were so mistrustful of the West that they were unable to deal with the Elser question. The assassin remained taboo in the East until the end. He appeared in none of the works on antifascism—for East German history the attack simply did not exist.

During the television discussion, it turned out that several of the experts had already read the unpublished transcript of the interrogations. The Ministry of Justice in Bonn had turned over the recently rediscovered transcript to the Federal Archive in Koblenz in 1958. It was nevertheless another twelve years before it was finally published.

The appearance of the essay by Anton Hoch in 1969 and the edition of the Berlin interrogations by Lothar Gruchmann in 1970 sparked a discussion in Heidenheim that resulted, in 1971, in naming a small park in Schnaitheim the “Georg Elser Gardens.” The next year, the Heidenheim chapter of the Association of the Victims of Nazi Persecution erected a simple stone memorial with a bronze plaque on the site. In 1979, Hermann Pretsch, a Catholic priest in Schnaitheim, seized upon the occasion of the demolition of the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich to write a wide-ranging newspaper article on Elser. As Pretsch had observed, doubts had arisen with regard to Elser's actions, even in Schnaitheim where the craftsman had conducted his first test with explosives: “Even contemporaries of Els-er's, workers in Schnaitheim, who before the war had belonged to the German Communist Party—even they admit that the suspicion among their ranks has not completely disappeared, even though it cannot be supported by a single fact.”

The English Germanist Joseph Peter Stern dealt with Elser in a somewhat unconventional way in his book
Hitler: The Führer and
the People,
which appeared in 1978. Suddenly even the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
conceived an affinity for the much maligned assassin. For Stern, Elser was “the man without ideology—Hitler's true antagonist.” Stern was opposed to overemphasizing the July 20 attack, but then glorified Elser as a classic exemplar of the “little man.” He found in him “simple moral and political ideas” and felt that Elser was not capable of abstract thought. He found him old-fashioned like the world of craftsmen that was disappearing along with him. Even if Stern ultimately elevated him a bit too much by juxtaposing him with Kafka's sense of the world, his interpretation nonetheless enriched the discussion over the next twenty years. Of course, ascribing to Elser a lack of ideology meant ignoring many of his social motives. His commitment to workers' causes became obscured; his individuality was lost.

In the late 1970s, Elser's standing continued to improve. There were many new publications about him including a play by Peter Paul Zahl, a biography by Helmut Ortner, as well as a flood of newspaper articles, which familiarized the public with the information available at that time. But no one went looking for new materials.

Since 1988, the Georg Elser Study Group in Heidenheim has succeeded in opening new avenues of investigation. The founder of the group was Gerhard Majer, who wrote the play
Schorsch: The People's Assassin.
The book by the study group is still essential reading for anyone interested in the case. Many members were annoyed by the local glorification of Rommel while hardly a word was said about the resistance fighter Georg Elser, and they were dissatisfied by the lack of public recognition in Elser's hometown of Königsbronn. The mayor there would send inquiring journalists to Heidenheim. After a lecture in Heidenheim in 1979, Georg Elser's cousin Hans Elser received a personal challenge from Stern to undertake something on Georg's behalf.

With the release of the Elser film by Klaus Maria Brandauer in 1989, Georg Elser became known throughout Germany. At the premiere, Georg's brother Leonhard Elser, his friend Eugen Rau, and his son Manfred Bühl sat next to Brandauer.

If recognition is to be lasting, it requires public memorials in addition to published materials. After the one in Schnaitheim was established, Koblenz followed suit in 1983 with a plaque at the spot where Elser was arrested in the garden near the border. It was placed there on the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's assumption of power and was accompanied by the usual debates. In these, Elser was at least not accused of being in the SS, but the assassination attempt was viewed with some defensiveness. The conservative elements in Konstanz wanted nothing to do with the whole subject, but the progressive side adopted the cause of seeking recognition for the resistance fighter. The local paper, the
Konstanzer Anzeiger,
expressed understanding for the reluctance of some, claiming the lack of much local connection to Elser, but thereby demonstrating its own lack of familiarity with the subject: “It is not even known how long the woodworker from Königsbronn lived in Konstanz.” A glance at the transcript of the interrogation would have answered this question within a few minutes.

In 1989, ten years after the Bürgerbräukeller was demolished, the city administration of Munich installed a memorial plaque on the very spot where the pillar with Elser's bomb had been located, now within the new Gasteig cultural center that was built on the site. The location of the plaque—it is mounted flush with the floor—and the cramped text make this tribute to Elser's memory almost invisible. Anyone who does not know about the plaque will probably walk past without noticing it.

The same year, a Georg Elser Square was established in the Peterhausen section of Konstanz. It is actually little more than a grassy area next to the police station. There is no traffic through the square, no one lives there, and the name does not appear in the postal listings. Finally, in 1995, a plaque appeared in Königsbronn, mounted on the building that was to house the Georg Elser Memorial. In the Elser Memorial there are photographs (which are also on permanent display in Berlin) and possessions of Georg Elser's, such as his musical instruments, clocks for which he fashioned ornamental cases, and a workbench that he built for his little brother Leonhard.

In 1997, after much resistance and a great lack of interest on the part of Munich officials, a local initiative succeeded in getting a Georg Elser Square established. It is located on Türkenstrasse, close to the room Elser lived in and the workshops of the craftsmen who unwittingly assisted him in preparing for the attack. The most recent activity of this kind to date was the decision by the City of Stuttgart to name a stone stairway connecting Diemershaldenstrasse and Gerokstrasse the Georg Elser Stairs. It should be noted, however, that when Georg's sister Maria Hirth was living there in 1939, it was on the other side of the valley, at Lerchenstrasse 52, next to the Hoppenlau Cemetery.

In 1997, the Memorial to the German Resistance in Berlin was at last able to achieve general recognition for Elser with its excellent exhibit. Since then, two duplicates of the exhibit have been on tour throughout Germany. In the meantime, lexicographers have recognized Elser's status as a resistance fighter—his name appears in all the latest reference works.

I
WOULD LIKE TO
express my gratitude to Professor Peter Ecke of the University of Arizona for meticulously comparing my translation with the original text. His thoughtful suggestions and criticisms have led to much discussion and many improvements.

William Odom
Vienna, 2012