Bombing Hitler (9 page)

When he arrived on the scene, Huber wondered how the assassin must have worked on the bomb chamber—surely on his knees, given its location right above the gallery floor. So when he interrogated Elser, he ordered him to drop his trousers, and noticed traces of old bruises on one of his knees. Elser had in fact suffered from the bruises on his knees for quite a while.

Immediately afterward, Elser asked what one got for doing such a thing—he meant the assassination attempt. Huber answered noncommittally that it depended on the circumstances. Then he said that Elser was ready to make a confession, which he then did, “voluntarily.”

In fact, even before Huber's appearance, the Commission had been closing in on Elser, largely through the testimony of the Bürgerbräu personnel. Based on this, Himmler had an arrest warrant issued, which stated that the preparations for the attack had begun as early as August. “Under strong suspicion in this matter is an individual who frequently appeared at the Bürgerbräukeller, supposedly as a craftsman, and busied himself there on the gallery in the hall.” Description: “5' 5”-5' 7” tall, thirty to thirty-five years old, normal build, dark hair, not parted. Clothing: dirty yellowish gray-brown work smock, reportedly knee breeches and sport socks.” When Maria Schmauder heard this description on the radio news in Schnaitheim at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 12, she was startled and told her mother that Elser was definitely the assassin at the Bürgerbräukeller.

On the evening of November 11 or early in the morning of November 12, the attention of the Special Commission lit upon a clue—the Swabian dialect. Finally they looked around in their own cellar and discovered the prisoner from Konstanz who had been forgotten until now. Bringing the innkeeper of the Bürgerbräu and the night watchman to Elser provided a further connection: It turned out they had once stopped Elser on the gallery, but he had had the presence of mind to talk his way out of it.

On Monday, November 13, the Gestapo announced: “The evidence is steadily mounting.” The previous day the Stuttgart Gestapo had found important clues of Elser's preparations in Heidenheim-Schnaitheim at the Schmauders' residence. Bits of information like this were driving Elser more and more into a corner. In the end this was why he made a “voluntary” confession. But to describe the confession as “voluntary” is a painful lie.

Germany would not have been a Gestapo state if the investigation had relied solely on circumstantial evidence. It was after all Himmler who was heading up the proceedings. On his own initiative and without the consent of Kripo boss Nebe, he ordered up a full-fledged Gestapo interrogation and involved himself in it right away. What Elser was subjected to next is to this day still cloaked in the euphemistic language of suppression known as “intensified inter-rogations.” These consisted of bouts of questioning accompanied by the most brutal abuse, including torture sessions in which he was beaten to a bloody pulp. Even so, to this day no police officer associated with the Elser case has ever been brought before a court and sentenced.

Only one person lifted the veil of silence—the head of the Munich Kripo, Dr. Albrecht Böhme, who was a jurist, not a police officer. He was responsible for securing the evidence and did not feel himself bound by the code of the Gestapo. During the course of events, he wound up joining the resistance struggle in Bavaria. Dr. Böhme attested to the atmosphere prevailing during Elser's torment:

I saw him [Elser] only once; I never spoke with him. When I saw the prisoner, I by coincidence became witness to a brutal scene that was playing out—in the presence of Nebe and me—between SS Reichsführer and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and the prisoner Georg Elser. Elser was bound up, and Himmler was kicking him hard with his boots and cursing wildly. Then he had a Gestapo man unknown to me drag him into the washroom of the Munich Gestapo chief and beat him there with a whip or (I couldn't see it) some similar instrument, so that he cried out in pain. Then he was hustled, quick time, before Himmler, who kicked him again and cursed at him. Then he was dragged back to the washroom, where he was beaten again horribly, then brought back to Himmler and kicked again. But Elser, who was groaning and bleeding profusely from his mouth and nose, made no confession; he would probably not have been physically able to, even if he had wanted to.

The next day, police president von Eberstein informed Dr. Böhme that the Gestapo had “yet again demonstrated their clumsiness by apparently beating Elser horribly,” so now Elser would probably not confess anything. Dr. Böhme remarked that Himmler himself had been present at the beating. For Eberstein, this rash criticism might have been very dangerous. According to Böhme, “Von Eberstein grew pale and said in a fearful tone to me: ‘Oh, Herr Böhme, please completely disregard my remark about the beating.' I was then treated with courtesy—with unaccustomed courtesy—as I was shown out.”

On the night of November 13, Elser was so battered that he saw no further point in continuing his denial. Only out of ignorance could one make the claim, as Rothfels, Hassel, and others have done, that Elser unnecessarily made a complete confession. Even hardened resistance fighters such as Communists or military opposition leaders had a rule of thumb: Nobody could withstand the savage torture of the Gestapo for more than twenty-four hours—and live.

In the meantime, the Gestapo had made progress along another path. On the morning of November 12, an order arrived via teletype at the office of the Stuttgart Gestapo to proceed immediately to Königsbronn and inquire into Elser's personal and political back-ground. His family members were to be taken into custody as a precaution. If former Gestapo man Wilhelm Rauschenberger recalled correctly in 1950, the teletype mentioned only that when Elser was detained at the border crossing he had in his possession grenade detonator parts, which he had taken from the Waldenmaier company.

Georg Elser during the Berlin interrogation, November 19-23, 1939. The man interrogating him is probably Arthur Nebe.

The counterespionage arm of the Gestapo in the person of Otto Rappold took charge of the matter. He and Rauschenberger went immediately by car to Königsbronn, where at the town hall they acquired personal information on the family members, with the intention to start making arrests on November 13. Rauschenberger struck pay dirt right away at the Schmauder residence in Schnaitheim at Benzstrasse 18, where Elser had spent the final months before his departure for Munich. The daughter, Maria, only sixteen, turned out to be very chatty. Elser had certainly not told her anything about his assassination plans, but he had teased her a bit with all his secret doings. Once, when she discovered him opening the secret compartment of his wooden suitcase with the false bottom where he kept his sketches, he became a funny, mischievous storyteller. The sketches, he had told her, were for his invention, “a new kind of device for display windows, which had to be able to automatically lift a weight of about 1 1/2 pounds.” He said he had been working on the invention for months and wanted to apply for a patent on it in Munich. She said he had told her that “if this thing works and it gets patented in Munich, he would become a rich man with 2 1/2 million marks. He said he would go straight from Munich to Switzerland, and then he would bring her to Switzerland and marry her.” In actuality the two were still quite formal with each other, using the German
Sie;
Elser was still attached to Elsa Härlen, whose photograph remained on his table in his cell block at the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.

Things got worse when Maria started talking about Elser working at the quarry and having something to do with gunpowder. She said that he had been in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller in 1938 and that he “had finished drinking a glass of water that Hitler had not finished,” that he knew the hall well and had shown her photographs of the Bürgerbräukeller taken November 8 and 9, 1938. So when she heard the radio report that morning, she became suspicious.

The Stuttgart Gestapo officials changed their schedule and spent the rest of that Sunday interrogating Maria Schmauder at the Kripo office in Heidenheim. The suspicion of Elser's guilt continued to grow; the news went immediately to Stuttgart and from there to Munich, so that by the evening of November 12 Elser's probable involvement was known in Munich. By this time at the latest, Elser was repeatedly being tortured.

Georg Elser's fingerprints, taken November 15, 1939, in Munich and containing Elser's signature.

For her willingness to cooperate, Maria Schmauder received special treatment: On the orders of Gestapo Müller, she was taken into “informal custody.” In Stuttgart, unlike the Elsers, she did not have to go to the Gestapo prison on Büchsenstrasse, but was sent instead to the family of a prison warden as a maid—nonetheless under house arrest. The Schmauders were otherwise treated more gently, even though Elser had worked out the construction of his bomb right in their house and had conducted explosives tests from there. The Elsers, on the other hand, who had nothing to do with the attack, were imprisoned, threatened at times with death, and tyrannized for months, with lingering effects that continued well into the postwar period.

Town hall in Königsbronn, where the Stuttgart Gestapo began its investigation on November 13.

The next morning, Monday, November 13, the Gestapo stormed into Königsbronn. Five or six Gestapo people moved into the König Karl in Heidenheim, and two to four of them were housed at the Hirsch in Oberkochen. Above and beyond family members, everyone was questioned who had known Elser: people involved with the zither club, the glee club, or the dancing lessons; workers from the quarry; all relatives. There might have been well over a hundred individuals—almost every family was affected. Under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo, the town felt compelled to collectively renounce this dangerous man.

After the Gestapo had shown themselves to be negligent in guarding the Bürgerbräukeller, they now wanted to cast the unassuming Georg Elser in the fiendish image of a born assassin. The Gestapo wanted to leave no instant of Elser's life uninvestigated. Incapable of establishing priorities, they went after every minuscule detail. Thus one of the Gestapo people had as his duty to trace Elser's childhood and youth, from childhood diseases to toys. Georg Holl, who did social work with the parish, was perhaps one of the few who, after the war, was able to view this pressure on the residents of Königsbronn with some humor: “A wonder that they didn't interrogate the midwife who was there at his birth!” The Gestapo fell victim to its guilty conscience, its “biologistic” view of life, and its global conspiracy theory. It was impossible for the people of Königsbronn to comprehend this world of madness. Anywhere—even on the playground or in the laundry room—an agent for the English might have been hiding, or perhaps a tendency toward criminal behavior or some perverse interest had become apparent. The story of the Elsers became the subject of “research into criminal biology” (criminal tendencies were considered hereditary). And in fact everyone in Königsbronn appeared as a borderline accomplice in the crime—this kind of thing was catching.