The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Meanwhile, Hitler and his senior officers were facing difficult decisions. Many of his generals deemed the plan to invade western Europe—most notably France—suicidal. Few believed that Germany, strong as it might be, could defeat France and the Low Countries.21 The plan was strongly opposed by General Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, and even a Nazi officer as staunch as Walther von Reichenau didn’t back his Führer. Because of the tense circumstances, Hitler decided not to attend the ceremony at the beer hall that year, and he sent his deputy Rudolf Hess in his place. On the evening of November 2, 1939, Elser went again to the beer hall, this time taking the bomb in its wooden suitcase. Before leaving his apartment, he set the two watches. The bomb was set to explode on November 8, in six days, or exactly 144 hours.

  Over the next three nights, Elser installed the device in the hollowed pillar. On the morning of November 6, he checked the system one last time. It worked splendidly. Then he returned to his apartment, gathered his things, and hurried to the main train station. Back in autumn 1938, when he made the decision to kill Hitler, he understood well enough that he ought to leave Germany before the explosion. He planned to escape the Gestapo by fleeing to Switzerland and working there as a carpenter. Not wanting others to be convicted in his stead, he intended to write a detailed letter to the authorities in Germany, declaring that he alone was responsible for the assassination. He also intended to give the Swiss a small “gift” for accepting him as a political refugee: a document specifying everything he knew about the munitions workshop where he had worked in Germany. If he wasn’t given asylum in Switzerland, he planned to go on to France. Paris was already at war with the Reich and would surely be happy to protect the man who had killed its sworn enemy.

  But on November 6, it wasn’t yet time to escape. Final arrangements had to be made. First Elser traveled to Stuttgart to say farewell to his beloved sister, Maria, the last family member to whom he was close. Her husband, Karl, a kind-hearted butcher, was fond of his mysterious brother-in-law. When Elser arrived at the station, at noon, he headed to the hotel where Karl was working. Maria’s husband welcomed him, left work right away, and helped him carry his suitcase from the train station to their apartment: “During my short stay at Stuttgart, my sister and my brother-in-law always asked me where I was going. ‘Must cross the fence [the border],’ I said. When they asked me time and again why, I just said: ‘I must.’”22

  Elser stayed with Maria and Karl for one night only. On the afternoon of November 7, he took leave of his sister for the last time. However, on a whim, he decided not to head for the Swiss border but to go back to Munich instead. Fears were haunting him, and he just had to check the system one last time. All his worldly possessions were a suitcase with clothes, half a sausage, a little money, working tools, and some spare parts. At 9:30 p.m., he reached Munich and headed to the beer hall, which was still open: “Immediately upon my arrival at the hall I climbed the gallery . . . Putting my ear against the pillar, I heard the clock ticking softly. Then I opened the secret door with a knife . . . [and] checked with my pocket watch whether the clock was running too fast or too slow. Everything was fine.”23

  Elser was happy. His masterpiece, laboriously assembled through those long, lonely months, was ticking away undiscovered. He left Munich and took the first train to Konstanz, near the Swiss-German border.

  The next day, Elser benefited yet again from factors outside his control. Hitler changed his plans abruptly and decided that he would speak at the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch after all. On November 8, while Elser’s train was pulling into Konstanz, Hitler left his Munich residence and traveled in a black Mercedes to the beer hall. There, he was greeted by an electrified crowd of veterans. Hitler stepped into the great hall and climbed onto the podium. The time was 9:00 p.m., and just behind the Führer, Elser’s two clocks ticked away.

  In his speech, Hitler attacked the capitalist West and contrasted Britain’s warmongering with the peaceful foreign policy of National Socialist Germany. This time, England was the main target of his abuse:

  The lies of that time [1914] are identical to the lies of today. Why did England join the war? Already in 1914 they said: England is fighting for the small nations . . . Later we have seen how . . . her statesmen treat the liberty of these small nations, how they are repressing minorities, abusing nations . . . Moreover, they said: England is fighting for justice . . . For three hundred years England has been fighting for justice, and has therefore taken 40 million square kilometers of this Earth . . . They declared: the British soldier does not fight for his own interests, but for the right of self-determination of other nations. England has also fought for civilization, which exists of course in England alone. Only where miners live, in Whitechapel and the other neighborhoods of the miserable masses, only there one can find civilization and social degeneration.24

  The veterans applauded and cheered. Then, at 9:05 p.m., rather than rambling on for hours, as was his habit, Hitler abruptly finished his speech. He had barely said farewell to the veterans before he was gone—ordering his driver to hurry to the main train station. He had some pressing duties in Berlin and wanted to get there as quickly as possible. The way to do so was to board his special train (the weather did not allow a plane), and considering the traffic in Munich that day, he had to leave early in order to catch it. Elser’s plan had been saved again and again by chance. This time chance betrayed him.25

  The veterans were in no mood to leave the hall. They went on drinking, chatting, and relating stories from their glorious past. The waitresses hurried about carrying trays full of Bavarian beers. One of them, Maria Strobl, passed by the pillar at exactly 9:20 p.m.

  The watch ticked for the last time. The cogwheel took a final turn, triggering the pin. One strike on the charger and the device went off. The pillar exploded, burying Hitler’s podium under two tons of rubble. The poor waitress was severely wounded, a colleague of hers was killed, and seven veterans died on the spot. Screams pierced the hall. People pushed their way outside. Many believed it was an air raid. Near the doors, uniformed women were weeping loudly. All looked pale and anxious. Ambulances were dashing past, and police appeared. Arrested persons were being taken away. The power of the blast was enormous.26 Elser’s masterpiece went off as planned, and on time. Had Hitler stayed just a little longer, he would have died.

  A few minutes earlier, while the Führer was still speaking at the beer hall, Elser was trying to steal across the border. The night was freezing, and the young would-be assassin, in his torn clothes, was tired and scared. He forgot to get rid of the remnants of the bomb and some spare parts, and, worst of all, he still had the drawing of the beer hall in his coat pocket. Around 8:45 p.m., he passed a dark garden near the border customs office. Inside the bright building, two officials were sitting and listening to Hitler’s speech. One of them looked through the window and saw Elser sneaking by in the direction of the border. He called out to him to halt. “I stopped right away,” he recalled later, “and if I’m asked what my first thought was that very moment, I must say I was angry at myself, and my own recklessness.”27 The policemen searched him and found the incriminating evidence. A short while later, a telegram came to all border stations, informing them of the assassination attempt, with instructions to look for infiltrators. One of the policemen, a former soldier, inspected the spare parts and recognized them immediately as bomb components.28

  Hitler heard about the blast on his way to Berlin, when he stopped in Nuremberg for a short break. When he reached Berlin, Göring and his other close associates congratulated him on his good luck. The Führer viewed the episode as yet another “proof” of the divine protection he believed he was under.29

  Elser was brought to the police in Konstanz, and quickly became the main suspect in the assassination attempt. The bomb components and the drawing of the beer hall found in his jacket did not leave room for much doubt about his guilt. The Gestapo headquarters in Berlin ordered Konstanz to hand hi
m over to the Gestapo station at Munich. There, he was interrogated by a special committee chaired by the commander of the criminal police, Brig. Gen. Arthur Nebe. Nebe had been a major player in the September 1938 conspiracy, which included a plan to assassinate Hitler. In this surreal scene, then, a person who tried to assassinate his head of state was interrogated by a senior police officer who had tried to do the same thing a short time before.

  In any case, Elser confessed that he had tried to assassinate Hitler and insisted that he had no accomplices. This true statement was accepted by Nebe and his committee, but not by their superiors in Berlin.30 On November 9, two British intelligence operatives were kidnapped from a town called Venlo on the German-Dutch border. Hitler and Himmler guessed that these were Elser’s “operators.” The contact man, it was presumed, was a German anti-Nazi exile in Switzerland. Otherwise, how did Elser have the know-how and financial resources to build his elaborate bomb?31

  Elser was moved to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin for yet another round of interrogations. There, he was beaten up, tortured, and abused to try to squeeze out the names of his accomplices. He insisted again and again that he had worked alone, moved only by his belief that he was doing the right thing. When the Gestapo officials confronted him with his mother, he wept, but his story remained unchanged. Finally, the Berlin Gestapo, too, adopted Nebe’s conclusion, that Elser was a lone wolf. But the interrogators went on, asking Elser about his religious and political beliefs, through his sexual and drinking habits, to the assassination attempt and the structure of the bomb. When asked whether he knew that Jewish organizations offered money for the Führer’s head, Elser replied, “No,” and that in any case he had never hoped to enrich himself.32

  The interrogation protocol indicates that Elser was almost always calm, even unmoved by the interrogators’ questions. The only time that he was really upset was when his interrogators told him that innocent people had died in the explosion. “I wanted to kill the leadership,” he said. “Today I wouldn’t have done it again . . . because the goal wasn’t reached.” Afterward, he told the interrogators that his failure might have been ordained, “because the intention was wrong.”33

  Once the interrogation was concluded, Elser was moved yet again, this time to Sachsenhausen. There, he was jailed with the two kidnapped British intelligence operatives, who some still believed were his operators. He enjoyed relatively good conditions in return for some requests—for example, to rebuild the bomb—and he was allowed to fashion things from wood and to play his zither to while the time away. In early 1945, he was moved to the Dachau concentration camp.34

  Elser’s luck ran out only when it became clear even to the most fanatical Nazis that the war was lost. One of his SS guards later recounted that Elser knew that his days were numbered. “I do not regret what I did,” he told the guard. “And anyway there is no use. I believe I have done something good, but it failed, and I must suffer the consequences. Yet I am afraid. Day and night I think how my death will be.” Then, he played the zither one last time, his eyes wet with tears.35 On April 9, 1945, the air raid sirens were sounded yet again in Dachau. Elser was taken by guards to an unknown location near the camp and shot to death.

  Elser’s story shows that a conspiratorial network is not a precondition for a promising assassination attempt. However, such a “near hit” relies on other factors: an individual who is well traveled, highly talented, and diversely skilled and who enjoys the benefits of a dense network of employers and technical educators, and a fortuitous, unexpected set of unrelated circumstances. Only such a set of coincidences could have created the breach in Hitler’s personal security that Elser exploited so skillfully.

  But luck, which helped him get so close to his target, failed Elser in the end. When one is part of a network, teamwork can remedy many of the unexpected challenges posed by ill luck. Inside information may be obtained about the target’s plans; a partner may help to fix the problem; a new assassination attempt may be planned. When an assassin works alone, without any intelligence on his target or cooperation with its inner circle, unexpected circumstances are almost impossible to work around. He must have perfect luck all the way. Elser had this luck until the final throw of the dice, when all his efforts were brought to naught.

  7

  The Point of No Return:

  Pogrom and War

  ON NOVEMBER 7, 1938, a young Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and demanded to see an official. The desk clerk directed him to a junior diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. When asked why he had come, he pulled a gun and shot vom Rath in the abdomen. Grynszpan was arrested by the French police and questioned. He told them that he had committed the act in “revenge for the Jewish people.” Only a few days earlier, his sister had written to tell him that their parents, Polish Jews who lived in Hannover, had been expelled, along with several thousand of their coreligionists, to the Polish border. On October 26, Nazi authorities had ordered seventeen thousand Polish Jews to leave Germany immediately without their property (which was left to be looted by the government and private citizens). The refugees, rejected by both Germany and Poland, were languishing at the border. Among them were the Grynszpans.1

  Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was quick to use the opportunity to reach both ideological and personal ends. A rabid Jew hater, even by the standards of the National Socialist leadership, he wanted to strike out at the Jews—the more, the better. Moreover, his personal standing was somewhat compromised following a racially problematic love affair with a Czech actress. Hitting the Jews, the common enemy of all Nazis, was an efficient way to rehabilitate himself. Vom Rath finally died on November 9, and on the same day the entire Nazi leadership came together to celebrate the Beer Hall Putsch at Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. (Unbeknownst to any of them, Georg Elser was also there, planning his assassination attempt for the following year.) Goebbels gave a speech of incitement, calling all but explicitly for violent riots.2 Even before his intervention, “spontaneous” pogroms had begun in the Magdeburg region. Nazi thugs, abetted by large segments of the population, had burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish shops, and violently harassed local Jews. Goebbels saw the assassination in Paris as a chance to turn the local riots into a nationwide tsunami of violence. On November 9, all hell broke loose. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the security police, orchestrated the pogrom and issued detailed instructions to its executors. According to historian Leni Yahil,

  A pogrom that burgeoned into a mass frenzy of destruction spread around the country. According to figures that Heydrich issued on November 11 in a preliminary report to Göring, 191 synagogues were set ablaze and another 76 were completely destroyed . . . The next day Heydrich reported that seventy-five hundred Jewish businesses had been demolished. The debris of the shattered shop windows gave the pogrom its name [the Night of Broken Glass] . . . In his first report Heydrich related that thirty-six Jews were killed and another thirty-six severely injured; eventually the number of murdered reported was ninety-one. Thirty thousand Jews or more were arrested and incarcerated in Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, as planned in advance, and hundreds of Jewish-owned apartments were looted and ruined.3

  The Nazi leadership used the pogrom as a starting point for further blows against German and Austrian Jewry. Under special decrees of Göring and Heydrich, the Jews were expelled from nearly all sectors of the German economy. The community had to pay one million marks as blood money for vom Rath and rebuild the ruins of the Night of Broken Glass by itself. Insurance policies were unpaid. Jewish children were expelled from German schools, and almost all public places were closed to them and their families. For the first time, Jews were incarcerated in concentration camps only because they were Jews.4

  The cruel pogrom found the anti-Nazi conspirators shocked and unprepared, fueling their motivation but also their deep feeling of impotence. They had still not recovered from their failure in September, when the coup had seemed to be aro
und the corner. They could hardly keep pace with events. Contrary to their predictions, Hitler did not fall into disgrace. Rather, his star rose even higher. Goerdeler, for one, was also shocked by the cooperation of many common Germans with the rioters. He understood—partially, reluctantly, and maybe for the first time—that he and his friends were a tiny drop within a Nazi ocean. Others were deeply disappointed by the silence of the generals.5 At the same time, the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, was the point of no return in their struggle against the Nazi regime. For Goerdeler, all bridges had been burned, all chances for future reconciliation gone forever. Hitler, he said to a British friend, was “beyond redemption.”6 His confidant and later biographer Gerhard Ritter related the feelings shared by the former lord mayor and his closest circle: “We loved Germany; we were proud of Germany. But so far had we come, as to be forced to be ashamed for her in front of the entire world. Anyone who did not experience these dark November weeks as a German cannot fully comprehend the extent of the humiliation and helpless despair evoked in countless German hearts. Now, even for the many among us who still hesitated, there was no possibility for reconciliation with the tyrannical regime.”7

  Kristallnacht influenced not only consistent opponents of the regime, such as Goerdeler, but also people who were sympathetic to some aspects of National Socialist policy. Prof. Johannes Popitz, for example, served as the finance minister of Prussia. As an intellectual with Nazi sympathies and ingrained hostility toward the Jews, he had so far not opposed the “removal of the Jews from German public life.” Now, however, he felt that things were going much too far; such inhuman violence should not be tolerated, as it violated both “law and morality.”8 Unlike most German high officials, who supported the pogrom or remained silent, Popitz decided to do something. He went to see Göring, and demanded the arrest and prosecution of “those responsible” for the pogrom. “Popitz, my dear,” answered the stout Reichsmarschal, “do you want to prosecute the Führer?” That was his turning point. A member of the Wednesday Society, he already had good relationships with fellow members and resistance fighters such as Ludwig Beck, Ulrich von Hassell, and Prof. Jens Jessen.