The Lone Assassin

by Helmut Ortner

  For six months now, he had been in Königsbronn helping his mother on the farm and occasionally assisting his father with the lumber trade. He had not found a job as a carpenter. Meanwhile, the household expenses were paid with the modest revenue from the farm work, for the lumber trade generated only deficits. His father reacted to criticism dismissively and aggressively. The whole family was oppressed by this situation. Georg—who had planned to exert his influence after his return to change the demoralizing circumstances in his parents’ house—was the most deeply disappointed of all. Gradually, he had to admit to himself that he had no chance against his father’s alcoholism, against his moods and angry outbursts. He felt powerless. It affected him profoundly to witness how his mother was demeaned by his father, how she toiled on the farm alongside her household duties in order to put any food on the table at all. He suffered from the fact that all this was no secret to the neighbors. He felt ashamed when he imagined how his father, under the influence of alcohol, drank away what little money they had. In this dismal situation, there were no signs of improvement.

  At night, when he woke up, he felt distraught and longed for morning, but the new day was only a copy of the previous one. Was there any way out? Later he recalled this time.

  My father’s drinking kept increasing. As a result, the debts kept growing, and he frequently had to sell fields to meet his obligations. I had repeatedly tried to influence my father in a favorable way, but had no success. My father did not listen to anyone, including me. The household expenses were paid with the proceeds from the harvest.

  My father always came home late. When he was drunk, he would make a scene and rail against my mother, my brother, and me without any cause. He always declared that it was our fault that things were going downhill.

  Georg joined the Königsbronn zither club and, a few weeks later, the choir Concordia. I was looking for diversion from the circumstances at home in music, he later said about this decision during his interrogations.

  When the orchestra needed an upright bass, he spontaneously took up the instrument. After a few weeks, he was able to play the upright bass at public performances. Georg was well liked in the groups, but he himself did not seek much contact with the other members. Just as he had relished participating in practice every Saturday evening at the Zum Kratzer inn as a member of the Upper Rhenish Traditional Costume Society during his time in Konstanz, he loved the rehearsals now, which took place every Friday in a side room of the Hecht tavern. Most of the time, the members’ families, friends, and acquaintances were present at these rehearsals. It was always a large social gathering. When a concert or a dance was held in the Hösselsaal, things really livened up; on those occasions, Georg would forget his private problems for an evening and have a joyful time.

  Apart from his participation in these groups, he had close contact only with his old childhood friend Eugen. He told him about his unsuccessful efforts to persuade his father to swear off alcohol, his arduous attempts to keep in check his father’s increasing debts and save his parents’ land from being put up for sale. He also spoke to his friend about his difficulties in finding a new job. Since his return, he had tried repeatedly to get a job as a carpenter, but to no avail.

  Because he received no wages for his assistance in his parents’ business, Georg had set up next to their house a small carpenter’s workshop, which he called the “shed.” There he made small repairs for neighbors and acquaintances, from which he earned some money.

  Not until July 1934 did he find work again. The Königsbronn master carpenter Friedrich Grupp, a tall man with chiseled features and a friendly disposition, offered him a job as a journeyman for an hourly wage of 0.55 reichsmarks, and Georg immediately accepted. He finally had another opportunity to demonstrate his handicraft abilities and practice the occupation he loved.

  Over the previous years—especially during his travels—he had acquired a great variety of skills and qualifications in his craft. He took each task as a challenge; the more difficult the work was, the more interesting he found it. He was most content to work alone and undisturbed. He didn’t like it when his master looked over his shoulder, gave him well-meaning advice, or even nagged him. In the workshop, too, Georg was a loner and at times even an eccentric. Sometimes he overdid his desire to give everything 100 percent. Master carpenter Grupp later described his journeyman’s work habits.

  When he was done with his work, he would stand over it, staring thoughtfully for a long time. Then he would circle the worktable two or three times, viewing the piece from all sides. He knocked on it, shook it, checked everything, stepped back again to observe it from a distance, scrutinized it again thoroughly—and only then was the piece delivered. Then you could count on Georg to show up the next day at the people’s home and say he would like to look at the piece again and make sure that everything was all right. He would then examine it again. He really had a downright fussy nature. He worked extremely meticulously.

  Georg saw himself as an “artistic carpenter” as opposed to an ordinary one. He never looked for a job merely for the sake of a secure existence, but rather in order to be creatively active, as he once put it. Perhaps this was a central motivation for his frequent changes of employment. What mattered to him was not only receiving fair, standard compensation, but also being able to work independently and without a master hovering over him. What was most important to him was the inner satisfaction he felt after completing a piece of furniture. Creative self-development was a priority; he based his identity on it. Master carpenter Grupp later recalled:

  He was a good craftsman, thoroughly decent and honest. And to my delight, he worked overtime. When something had to be done, he did it. It was only necessary for my wife to put a piece of cake on the workbench for him, and he was content. He always built for himself alone. He was a real loner. Once I considered producing a complete bedroom. At the time, that was out of the ordinary for a small workshop.

  Grupp had received the catalog of a furniture factory and called his journeyman over to ask him whether they should make a bedroom like that, too. “Let’s do it,” said Elser. “But I have to redesign it. I’ll make it better.”

  The next day, recounted the master carpenter, his journeyman brought polished drawings, which he had apparently made the previous night. They had spoken about it for at most half an hour, and then Elser set to work. In the days that followed, they said scarcely a word to each other. Grupp gave no instructions at all, and his journeyman didn’t have any questions. After fourteen days, the bedroom was finished; the work was so clean and precise that his wife didn’t want to sell it. But then an acquaintance from the village absolutely had to have it and bought it. It was a magnificent piece of work that Georg had carpentered, Grupp recalled.

  When Elser quit after only four months, the master carpenter was, understandably, not exactly thrilled about it, but nothing he could say was of any use. Elser would not change his mind. Might his quitting have had something to do with the fact that any amount over twenty-four reichsmarks was taken out of his weekly wages to pay alimony? Twice the youth welfare office had inquired with the master carpenter regarding the alimony payments for Elser’s illegitimate son. At that point, Grupp suggested an internal solution with which they might be able to avoid the authorities’ access to Elser’s weekly wages. But the journeyman declined. “No, that’s all right. My quitting had nothing to do with that. I have to deal with our property at home before it’s too late.”

  Like most Königsbronn residents, master carpenter Grupp knew about the alcoholic escapades of Georg’s father. Secretly, he even respected his journeyman’s decision to quit his job in order to help save his family from financial ruin and a fall in social position—a risky undertaking at a time when things did not look rosy with jobs up in the eastern Swabian Alps. In the big cities, the National Socialists had to some extent been able to convey the impression that they were getting the mass unemployment under control, but that was not the case here in
the provinces, where increasing industrialization had caused serious distress for the traditionally medium-sized trades in the countryside. Small businesses, such as that of master carpenter Grupp, were not equipped for mass production. Many carpenters’ workshops had to close, including in the eastern Swabian Alps.

  As before, Georg helped his mother on the farm and tried as much as he could to restrain his father’s erratic and irascible character, but his efforts were all in vain. The illusions of his mother—who after Georg’s return had still believed that things would somehow be all right and that her husband’s drinking would, at last, come to an end—increasingly dissipated. Her hope had turned out to be mere naïveté. Georg later described the fatal development.

  At the end of 1935, the debts were so large that my father had to sell the property, which by my estimate was worth between 10,000 and 11,000 reichsmarks. He sold it for 6,500 reichsmarks to the cattle dealer M. in Königsbronn, who regularly drank with him in taverns. From the proceeds of the sale, my mother demanded and received 2,000 reichsmarks. The remainder my father used to pay his debts and to keep drinking. After the property was sold, the cattle dealer M. moved in. During the sale, it was agreed that a small room would remain available to my father.

  The sale spelled the temporary end of the marriage. Shortly thereafter, Georg’s mother moved in with her daughter Friederike, who had her own apartment with her husband Willy in nearby Schnaitheim. She took with her all the household items, fearing that her husband might sell them, too. Georg’s father stayed behind; the new owner allowed him to continue living for a while under his former roof. Georg’s brother Leonhard went into the labor service.

  Georg rented a room in Elsa Heller’s house. He had met her three years earlier on an excursion with the Königsbronn hiking club, which had since been compulsorily assigned to the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement, the state-controlled leisure program. On a hike into the Steinernes Meer near Bartholomä, a landscape typical of the eastern Schwabian Alps between Königsbronn and Aalen, the two of them had immediately felt a strong attraction to each other. Both sought a sense of security and emotional warmth. Their fates were extremely similar: Georg often felt lonely and oppressed by his father’s alcoholism and the problems in his parents’ house. Elsa lived with a carpenter to whom she was unhappily married, a coarse fellow who only sporadically pursued his work and was quick-tempered, unjust, and brutal toward her. He, too, drank a lot. Frequently, when he came home after a bout of drinking, he would beat her. Elsa told Georg how afraid she was for herself and her little daughter Iris. She trusted him. Georg was so different from her husband in every way. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and was diligent and humble—never loud and unrestrained. In December 1935, Elsa had given birth to her second child, a boy, and more than a few Königsbronn residents who knew about the relationship between her and Georg suspected that he was the father. The entry in the birth register nonetheless listed Hermann Heller as the father.

  In the spring of 1936, Georg moved into the Hellers’ house as a tenant under the husband’s suspicious glances. Hermann Heller had long suspected a love affair between his wife and the quiet, slight-looking tenant who had set up a workshop for himself in the basement of their house. From the beginning, living together under one roof turned out to be oppressive, even agonizing, for everyone—especially for Elsa. She, who now longed more and more for the end of her marriage and was thinking about divorce, reached the limit of what she could physically bear. She suffered from her husband’s daily reproaches, his moods and outbursts, but also from the inaccessible proximity of her lover, who spent every evening puttering around in his workshop after he had finished his often ten-hour workday.

  At that time, Elser was again working as a journeyman in the Königsbronn workshop of master carpenter Grupp—though not for long, as the transcript of his later interrogations shows.

  In the spring of 1936, Grupp was commissioned to manufacture desks for the Wehrmacht, which had to be delivered at a specific time. For that reason, he had approached me to work for him. After finishing this delivery, I was working on apartment furnishings and putting in window frames in a building under renovation. In the autumn of 1936, I gave notice to Grupp, because, for one thing, the payment was too low for me and, for another, he always wanted to instruct me, even though he did not have the skills I had. I parted amicably from Grupp; I quit for the reasons mentioned in the firm belief that I would find work again soon.

  As it would turn out, however, Elser was mistaken. At a time when handicraft abilities were in decreasing demand in favor of the efficient production of factory-made furniture, his prospects of finding a job in keeping with his ambitions diminished. Eventually, he also had to abandon his great dream of one day opening his own small workshop as a cabinetmaker. In addition, he faced growing debts due to neglected alimony payments for his illegitimate son. He thus increasingly had to suppress his secret wishes and longings.

  After three months of renewed unemployment, Elser finally started a job at the end of December 1936 as an unskilled laborer in a fittings factory in Heidenheim.

  I ended up there through the auspices of Wilhelm H., who was a foreman there. At the time, he was living in Itzelberg near Königsbronn, and I had met him in mid-December 1936 at the Rössl tavern in Königsbronn. I knew H. personally from his frequent stays in Königsbronn. In the course of our conversation, I told him about my current circumstances, and he suggested that I work as an unskilled laborer in the fittings factory in Heidenheim. I don’t recall exactly whether I had already been looking for a job as a skilled carpenter at that time, but I think that I had found nothing of the sort, which prompted me to accept the job as an unskilled laborer. As far as I can remember, H. offered to inquire at his company, where he was a foreman, whether there were any openings. After a few days he informed me that the answer was yes, and I should introduce myself. I went to Heidenheim either by train or by bicycle, introduced myself, and was able to begin one or two days later as an unskilled laborer in the fettling shop, where H. worked as well. I was told that I would not do the dirty fettling work for long, but would soon be able to perform a more pleasant task. Indeed, I had to do this job for only about half a year, until the summer of 1937, when I entered the shipping department. There I was responsible for checking the completeness of the incoming material, etc.

  He was not thrilled with his new work, but there were nonetheless reasons to stay.

  In the fettling shop, I received 0.58 reichsmarks, later 0.62 reichsmarks per hour. It’s true that as a skilled carpenter I would have gotten more elsewhere, but I was not interested in earning more, only in liking my work. If I had earned more, I wouldn’t have reaped the benefits of it anyhow, because any amount over twenty-four reichsmarks was taken out of my weekly wages for the payment of alimony.

  Elser was unhappy with his living situation as well. Since he had moved in with the Hellers, there had been a tense atmosphere. Elsa and he tried to arrange their love affair to the extent possible. But in December 1936, there was a quarrel. It began when Georg took on the task of making some kitchen furniture to settle the rent payments. Suddenly Elsa’s husband forbade him from doing any more carpentry in the house. I did not finish the kitchen cabinet after Mrs. H.’s husband called a halt to the work for reasons unknown to me, he said in his interrogations regarding the confrontation.

  In the spring of 1937, Elsa’s husband terminated the rental agreement. Georg was almost happy about it. From the beginning, he had had a bad feeling about living under one roof with a couple whose marriage was falling apart while he was the wife’s lover. Now this misbegotten situation had come to an end. But what options did he have left?

  Once again, he returned to his parents, who had in the meantime reconciled and now lived in half of a duplex house on Sumpfwiesenstrasse in Königsbronn, which they had been able to buy with the proceeds from the sale of their former property. In my parents’ house, I stayed in an attic room. I al
so took with me my workshop, which I had set up provisionally in the H. house, and again set it up provisionally in a basement room of my parents’ house.

  Eugen Rau, his childhood friend, who had in the meantime gotten married and started a family, lived next door. The two of them had remained friends, trusted each other, and often talked about circumstances and developments it had long since become unsafe to discuss publicly.

  * * *

  On June 22, 1933, the Nazis, newly in power, had issued a decree to combat the so-called “defeatist attitude,” making the mere expression of dissatisfaction a punishable offense as a form of “Marxist agitation.” In the years that followed, the National Socialists carried out all the necessary steps to become a Führer state: The party’s organizational schema divided the country into thirty-two regions, which were further divided into districts, local branches, cells, and blocks. Hitler had once said, What is the point of socializing factories and such things? We are socializing the people. With his party organizations, he had after a short time achieved his goal of making an individual life in Germany almost impossible. First you were a Pimpf (a member of the Jungvolk, the ten- to fourteen-year-old subsection of the Hitler Youth), then you joined the Hitler Youth, and then you entered the SA or SS or went directly into the Nazi Party. As a driver, you were in the National Socialist Motor Corps; as a young girl, you were in the League of German Girls. No sports association, no hiking group, no amateur theater could escape the reach of Gleichschaltung.

  Königsbronn was no exception. The traditional village fairs had long been supplanted by the Nazi holiday calendar. On January 30, swastika flags fluttered in the village streets, as the Reich Flag Law prescribed. With an abundance of rallies, commemorations, and parades, the local party branches ensured that the image of the Führer appeared virtually ubiquitous.