Bombing Hitler (8 page)

Among the Protestants, the bishop of the state of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, really went overboard. Like the majority of his pastors, he was staunchly nationalistic and anti-Semitic as well. He declared: “Together with all the German people we are deeply shaken by the criminal attempt on the life of the Führer in Munich. The clergy will take the opportunity in services this coming Sunday to give thanks to God for His merciful protection and renew our fervent prayer that God may continue to keep watch over the Führer and our people.” Wurm was apparently in a state of shock over the attack. In his eyes, Hitler had been protected by God despite whatever unjust or criminal acts he may have committed.

The reactions of the other pastors in Württemberg fell into a gray zone. At many church services there were informants for the Gestapo—those there on an official basis as well as many volunteers. The bishop had left it up to the pastors how they were to proceed. It would have been possible to address the assassination attempt in the prayer of intercession at the end of the service—a text that is not customarily preserved in the record. But no proclamations about the attack were recorded, even though, starting on November 12, hordes of Gestapo officials descended on the community, interrogating and arresting dozens of residents.

In the Catholic Church, the reaction was delayed. The newsletter of the bishopric of Freiburg ran a remarkably extensive text, which gave the impression that the delay should be offset with more commitment. The twenty-four lines comprising the first section might well have appeared in the
Völkischer Beobachter,
judging by the content and the choice of words. The second section expressed thanks to “God's Providence,” but it was not until the third section that the text declared that Pope Pius XII, through the Apostolic Nuncio in Berlin, had expressed to Hitler his “best wishes.”

The newsletter of the bishopric of Limburg claimed that the attack had been planned by a “diabolically murderous mind,” but that “Divine Providence” had thwarted the plan and “God's hand guides history.”

And then Rudolf Hess delivered his lengthy speech at the official state ceremony commemorating the dead. God was “with the righteous cause,” he said, and would therefore “let the Germany of Adolf Hitler prevail.”

It should be taken into consideration that this position was to be heard in the Catholic Church only at the higher levels, and not in all dioceses. Nothing of a similar nature was reported from the bishoprics of Rottenburg and Trier. In contrast to the Protestant clergy, there were, even at that time, numerous German priests in concentration camps. By the end of the war there were almost five hundred in Dachau alone. Many of them provided assistance to other prisoners while there and even assumed the duties of the prisoners. They did not, however, allow the SS to use them in their persecution of the Communists.

W
HILE STILL ON
his private train the night of the attack, Hitler ordered Himmler to put the police crime division in charge of the investigation. He did not trust the SS or the Gestapo with the work of gathering detailed information. At first, Reich director of criminal investigation Nebe suspected a “Party maneuver”; but once Hitler demanded a serious investigation, this option was eliminated.

Alongside the rather politically motivated search for evidence there was a less conspicuous line of investigation being conducted that addressed the question: How was such an attack even possible, given that the Gestapo was responsible for organizing security everywhere, especially security for Hitler? There soon emerged a body of evidence that was quickly buried, causing repercussions that persist today. There was no long-term security service for the Bürgerbräukeller. Throughout the year, there was no one to conduct security inspections of the hall, which was used not only for Party functions, but for dances as well. Even the night before the memorial celebration, no guard had gone through the hall. The
Alter Kämpfer
Josef Gerum, an official in the central office of the Gestapo in Munich who was in charge of security matters, appeared just an hour before people were admitted in order to inspect the entire building from roof to cellar. He looked for any explosives that might be lying around, but never thought of looking at the pillars in the hall.

Until then, a comprehensive security service for Hitler had been considered unnecessary—and every year it had been demonstrated anew that this view was correct. The dictatorship relied on two myths that had sufficed for protection. One myth presented the Führer as sent by God to fulfill his historic mission as the Savior of Germany. So far, each encounter with danger had proved that the Führer stood under the protection of “Providence”—however one might want to interpret this term. Wherever Holiness was present, such mundane matters as security had no place—Providence would take care of things. The second myth was the Gestapo myth: the belief in a perfect police state. Not only the Germans, who were directly affected, but foreign observers as well assumed that the Gestapo 
(Geheime Staatspolizei
or “Secret State Police”) had created a seamless police state that was infallible, invincible, and omniscient. Even the
St. Galler Tagblatt,
a Swiss newspaper otherwise cautious in its use of Nazi sources, seemed to be taken in by the story that the assassin had gotten through “three armed Gestapo lines of defense.” At first, the thought of a time bomb occurred to no one.

Security at the hall on the day of Hitler's appearance was—as it had always been—the prerogative of the
Alte Kämpfer.
This led to rivalries with the police, but Hitler had already decided years before that at the Bürgerbräukeller the responsibility of the police ended at the hall entrance—inside he would be protected by his old comrades.

The generally positive attitude toward the regime led the security apparatus to believe that such an assassination attempt would be unlikely. Hitler was not in any particular need of protection; he could remain relatively confident of the people's support—at least as long as he did not lead them into a devastating defeat. Hitler himself, who fostered the legend that he could smell any danger of assassination, actually felt more threatened in the Bürgerbräukeller by the mineral water he consumed there among all the beer drinkers. The waitress who was assigned to his table was instructed to serve his companions their beer, while he had his own water which was brought along especially for this purpose. In the hall, the best personal protection was provided by the cheering crowd itself,
Blutorden
recipients, one and all. Even high-level officials of the Party, the government, or the Wehrmacht were admitted only if they had taken part in the Putsch of 1923 and had subsequently received the
Blutorden
from Hitler for their participation. Anyone not wearing the medal was brusquely denied admission at the door. After the war began, exceptions had to be made, and local dignitaries were admitted, in part so that the hall could be filled. Hitler declined to impose sanctions for the failure of his security forces that evening.

During the night of the attack, Himmler offered a reward of 500,000 marks “for the capture of the perpetrators”; another 100,000 marks was added to this, ostensibly from private sources. For informants abroad, 100,000 marks in foreign currency was supposedly made available at the German embassies. The money remained unclaimed. Two customs officers in Konstanz had performed their duties correctly.

Although Arthur Nebe was responsible for the Bürgerbräukeller Special Commission, he reported directly to Himmler, and Himmler assigned control of the investigation to the Gestapo's Heinrich Müller. Thus from the very beginning, the dominance of the Kripo ordered by Hitler was undermined by the Gestapo. Before Nebe arrived at the Munich airport at 11:00 a.m. on November 9, Müller had called from Berlin at 10:00 a.m. and issued orders that he should be kept informed of developments by telephone. Müller was in fact in charge of the case; Nebe oversaw only the detailed work of the technical investigation assigned to him. So Müller, in the name of Himmler, immediately ordered the arrest of all employees of the Bürgerbräukeller.

At first Hitler steered the investigation toward evidence that supposedly pointed at England, but Nebe knew from the first day that the conventional explosive did not fit in with this theory. Himmler and Heydrich, who was head of SS security services and Nebe's immediate superior, at first pursued a suspicion that had been discussed that night on Hitler's private train: a group of Bavarian monarchists (also known as legitimists) was responsible. Heydrich, who was also considering the possibility of embittered
Alte Kämpfer,
is said to have initially ordered monarchists to be shot, apparently after the example of the Rohm bloodbath of 1934, but Hitler was not so inclined. He wanted exact information.

The Bavarian minister of the interior was allowed to pursue the monarchist angle. He berated the Gestapo command post for not including Catholic clergy on their list of monarchists. To appease him, they were added immediately, as was the former mayor of Nürnberg. On another occasion the minister also wished to see on the list “personal acquaintances of the former crown prince.”

The SS constantly got in the way of the investigation. On the afternoon of November 9, their secret service group led by the head of SD interior defense, Walter Schellenberg, met with Sigismund Payne Best and R. H. Stevens of the British Intelligence Service just across the German-Dutch border in Venlo. The SD people identified themselves as representatives of a resistance group of German generals and tried to coax the names of resistance generals out of the Englishmen.

At a time when British secret agents could have known about the Bürgerbräu attack from newspapers and radio, Best and Stevens were lured into a café thirty yards from the German border. Without any cover from their own people or Dutch security forces, they quickly fell prey to an armed SD riot squad. They were at first kept in custody in the prison at Moabit, then at the headquarters for Reich security, and afterward in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, in the same cell block that later housed Georg Elser. After a lengthy and terrifying term of imprisonment, they got out alive. The memoirs Best wrote while imprisoned were later used against Elser.

The SS and Hitler seized upon the opportunity to cast the two Englishmen as Elser's backers, even though Hitler surely understood the crassness of this lie. Swiss newspapers recognized this as rank nonsense—if the two agents had actually had anything to do with the attempt, would they have gone to the German border on the day after “their” attack? After years of manipulation by the Nazi propaganda machine, readers of German newspapers were no longer capable of recognizing the lies surrounding the Venlo story.

The truth regarding the attack soon became apparent. In the piles of debris, brass plates from the two clocks were found, still bearing parts of their patent numbers. The mystery of the clocks in the explo-sive device was quickly resolved. According to the opinion issued by the patent office, one of the clocks was manufactured between 1925 and 1929 by the firm Haller Benzing AG in Schwenningen. With this evidence, searching for clues abroad seemed pointless. Nonetheless, Himmler released a statement to the Saturday papers that “the com-position of individual metal parts” pointed to “foreign origins.” Elser had either received the clocks in Meersburg as compensation for back pay or had ordered them and had them sent to him in Konigsbronn. In any event, he used clockworks from the Black Forest.

Things were in a state of turmoil at the Munich Gestapo headquarters located at Brienner Strasse 50; the mass arrests were creating a hectic situation. The Catholic priest Rupert Mayer, who was imprisoned in the cellar (and later on, while imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, proved a brave witness of his faith) noted on the evening of November 9 “an unidentifiable agitation and unrest” that continued the whole night. The next morning there was “enormous unrest in the courtyard of the Gestapo prison”; all cars were quickly readied and soon left with Gestapo officials in them. Most returned that evening.

* * *

Georg Elser, fetched up to Munich from Konstanz, did not attract attention for quite a while. He was considered a deserter and spy—a small fish. He was also helped by his appearance of harmlessness. After November 12, however, the situation became more threatening for him as a series of face-to-face meetings with Bürgerbräupersonnel took place. At first, the waitress Maria Strobl couldn't remember Elser. Only after she talked to the other women under arrest did she recall who Elser was: He was usually poorly dressed, ate the regular worker's meal for sixty pfennig, and—this was suspicious—he never ordered anything to drink. Elser himself, however, claimed that he had always had a beer with his meal. But in a Munich beer hall, what does one beer amount to? He could not conceal that he was opposed to alcohol. These meetings continued without any changes in the participants' responses. Since they were repeated ad nauseum, sooner or later the desired result had to be achieved. Elser's clever approach of gaining access to the building as a harmless regular customer was now entrapping him. A plan that originally offered him protection and a chance to get away if he should ever be caught on the gallery now worked against him. The endless interrogations revealed more evidence: Elser had identified himself as a craftsman who was either taking a course or working on an invention. And he couldn't hide his Swabian dialect—he spoke the broad Swabian of the Ostalb. On the basis of this dialect he was ultimately recognized by a shopkeeper who had sold him a “sound-damping insulation plate,” with which Elser made the ticking of his clocks less audible.

On the evening of November 10, Nebe called Franz-Josef Huber in Vienna, who had once been with the Munich police and was now head of the Vienna Gestapo. Huber was an old friend of Gestapo Müller's from the Munich days and a good friend of Nebe's as well. With a couple of top officers and his secretary, who would take down testimony at the interrogations, Huber got on the night train to Munich and was picked up the next morning by Heydrich and Müller at the main station.