The Lone Assassin

by Helmut Ortner

  The camp had expanded considerably over the previous years, mainly through the forced labor of the inmates themselves. Despite the expansion, the camp was hopelessly overcrowded. Often three or more prisoners shared the wooden frames designated as “beds”; inadequate nutrition and hygiene bred illnesses and epidemics. Documents would later reveal that in 1944 alone, over 30,000 people were imprisoned in the main camp—a camp that had initially been designed for 5,000 prisoners.

  Fachner stood outside the camp gate and showed his papers unprompted. The guard on duty waved them away almost indifferently and then escorted him to the commandant’s office. It was only a few hundred yards away. Fachner saw the electrically charged fence and behind it the rows of uniform barracks—the actual camp.

  A senior officer greeted him. “So there you are. You are a man of many distinctions. I welcome you. Yesterday something crazy happened here. One prisoner ran amok, then another. It was a terrible day for us. We had to hang some of them. But don’t be surprised. You’ll see all sorts of things. Now read this through,”—he pressed a document about secrecy into his hands—“and then sign it.”

  Fachner was too excited to understand the text he read. His eyes darted over the paper, and then he signed.

  “You will be in the censorship office,” the SS man went on. “There you have to censor the prisoners’ letters, all the letters coming in and out. For example, the prisoners are not permitted to receive razor blades or photos of their family members in the letters. Above all, they are not permitted to write negatively about the Dachau camp. Be attentive.”

  For four weeks, Fachner inspected the prisoners’ incoming and outgoing mail. His colleagues, mostly older SS men, did their work routinely and emotionlessly. They had long ceased to take note of the fact that the letters were written by people in distress and fear. All that mattered to them was their own security, not other people’s fates.

  Then, on a Thursday, Fachner was instructed to report to a lieutenant on the second floor. The uniformed man had a close-cropped mustache and deep-set eyes. He greeted Fachner and said, “Come with me,” beckoning him to follow. They left the building in which the censorship office was housed and walked the few yards to the actual camp gate. They went through the gate, crossed a small open area, and turned right, passing countless barracks, behind which guard towers rose at regular intervals. The lieutenant stopped in front of a heavy iron gate. “Do you see the prison building over there?” he asked Fachner, pointing to a one-story, long, stone building with barred windows. “Starting today, you’ll be working there.”

  In the days that followed, his new superior, a perpetually grumpy SS-Obersturmführer, gave him a camp key with which he could also open all the cell doors.

  Fachner was responsible for the wing for so-called “prominent prisoners.” Two longtime inmates were assigned to him as helpers. Both were Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been sent to the camp for “religious opposition.” In the wing, Fachner was confronted with people who had been classified by the National Socialists as opponents, collaborators, and conspirators despite their prominent political, social, or economic positions and were now being kept in “protective custody”—often under privileged circumstances. Thus the former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg lived with his wife and daughter Sissy in two cells; the former Reichsbank President Schacht did not have to go without his customary high, stiff collar here; and the geopolitician Karl Haushofer could not complain about a lack of technical literature. Military officers in disfavor—such as the former General Staff Chief Halder or the military commander of Belgium, General von Falkenhausen—were under Fachner’s supervision, as were church dignitaries. The abbot of the Metten Abbey, a Greek archbishop, Pastor Martin Niemöller—they had all been interned in the camp as members of the opposition. They could only speculate on their ultimate fate. Even the Nazis were still indecisive about what should happen to many of their prominent prisoners: long-term isolation or extermination?

  In the meantime, Fachner had come to terms with the terror system. Sometimes he had quiet doubts, when he thought about what was done to people in the camp: humiliation, torture, execution by firing squads, or hanging. Death was part of everyday life in Dachau. In the crematorium, death commandos performed horrific work around the clock. In special departments, medical experiments were conducted: People were infected with malaria or put in tubs full of ice water for hours in order to observe what stresses a human body could endure. The death of experiment subjects was factored in from the beginning. What counted here as a human life?

  Fachner pushed aside any doubts that arose. After all, it was wartime, he reassured himself; drastic measures had to be taken, as his superiors had always told him. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” was the word among the camp guards, and by broken eggs, they meant death—thousands of deaths. Actually, Fachner was glad to work in the so-called Kommandanturarrest, a “little camp” within the camp, where there were “special conditions” for the prominent prisoners. Perhaps they will be put on trial after the war, thought Fachner. That’s for the regime to decide, not us. It was not his job to think about it. He was only doing his duty—nothing more.

  On an ice-cold Wednesday, four SS guards brought a small, inconspicuous man to him in the Kommandanturarrest. “A transport from Sachsenhausen. You will get a phone call shortly,” one of the four said before they left. Fachner led the new arrival to the guardroom. The telephone rang. “The new prisoner will get cell number six. You’ll be given all further information later,” the voice commanded brusquely. By now, Fachner had gotten used to the rude tone that prevailed among the camp management. Language had adapted to the system—it was efficient; there was not one word too many. Orders came tersely and aggressively, usually loudly and clearly. There was a lot of contempt and cynicism in the words, especially when they were directed at prisoners.

  Fachner brought the man to cell number six. He looked ill. His face seemed sunken, his body emaciated. A wreck, thought Fachner. “What’s your name?” he asked the prisoner.

  The answer came softly and hesitantly: “Elser … Georg Elser.”

  Fachner opened the cell door with his large key and said: “I’ll have you brought to me later to take down your information.”

  But that would not be necessary. Shortly thereafter, Fachner found out that the inconspicuous prisoner in cell six was the man who had carried out the attack on the Führer in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall. He was informed that Elser had been interned for the past five years as a “special prisoner of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt” in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

  In 1939, after the interrogations were concluded, the Gestapo had brought him there, twenty miles north of Berlin. The camp guards had regarded the slight man with the Swabian dialect as a good-natured fellow, a reserved, quiet prisoner, who never complained, rebelled, or caused trouble. He could be found every day in his small camp workshop, which had been set up for him in accordance with instructions from Berlin. Elser had become a heavy smoker over the previous years, but cigarettes were in short supply. To have them was like having cash, for cigarettes had long ago become the unofficial camp currency. Supervisors paid him with them for small jobs: bookshelves and chairs, drawers and candlesticks, which Elser made for them now and then in his workshop.

  Smoking became the only pleasure that remained for him besides playing the zither. He submitted to his fate without complaints—a broken, lonely man, a prisoner whose “special purpose,” in the view of the Nazi rulers, was yet to come, a prisoner under special protection—a dubious protection, to be sure. Sometimes he felt like a bird locked up in a luxurious cage. His cell was three times larger than the usual size and contained his small workshop; he got better food than the other camp inmates; and his guards had instructions to treat him well. However, the special treatment also included complete isolation from the other prisoners, as well as permanent supervision by two guards assigned to stay in his cell around the clock.


  Elser was the best-guarded prisoner in the Sachsenhausen camp—a prisoner without a chance of release, without a future, completely cut off from the outside world. Even the rare letters he had written to Maria and Elsa remained unanswered. They had been confiscated in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in Berlin along with the mail addressed to him.

  That afternoon, Fachner did not have to fill out the usual obligatory file card for his new prisoner, who had been brought from Sachsenhausen to Dachau, as had other prominent prisoners, because of the advance of the Russian Army. “He is under the direct authority of the Gestapo in Berlin,” the Obersturmbannführer had told him; therefore the man had to be guarded particularly carefully. “We don’t want him doing something to himself and then it’s our mess and we get the blame.”

  Fachner found his superior’s concern somewhat excessive—almost cynical, in light of the daily murders in the camp. A human life was not worth anything here unless it was in some way useful to the system—even if only as a tragic figure in a show trial. The prisoners held in the protective custody cells had one thing in common: They did not have to fear death in the immediate future; their status guaranteed them survival for the time being in the midst of the machinery of death.

  As in Sachsenhausen, a workshop was set up for Elser in his Dachau cell. During the day, he again did carpentry jobs for the camp management with the same care and meticulousness that had always distinguished his work.

  In the evening, he played his self-made zither. The songs that came from his cell sounded heavy and melancholy. Sometimes Fachner sat down with him, watched him over his shoulder, and enjoyed the Viennese melodies; he had grown as fond of them as his prisoner was. Sometimes they got into a conversation and talked about music. Fachner had promised to get Elser some sheet music. They rarely spoke about politics, still less about the war, and not at all about the conditions in the camp. As an inmate, Elser was not permitted to speak about such subjects; as a concentration camp guard, Fachner was strictly forbidden to discuss them with prisoners. He knew that, but who adhered to official regulations at that time? Each of his colleagues was a master of life and death, an absolute ruler of the small domain under his control. Fachner knew many who took excessive advantage of that role. They fancied themselves “living devils” and recognized no laws other than their own.

  The camp system endorsed their brutality, their unrelenting destructive impulses. The radical contempt for humanity among individual guards conformed seamlessly to a total system of state terror. Fachner was part of this murderous system. He attempted repeatedly to soothe his conscience with the fact that he did not personally participate in the machinery of death and spared the prisoners under his control beatings and torments. He made an effort to behave “humanely” toward them. Was that even possible in the midst of an inhuman system?

  At one point, after he had again been listening to Elser play the zither, Fachner was overcome by curiosity. “Did you actually do it on your own, the attack in Munich?” he suddenly blurted out. “I mean, without helpers?”

  Elser sat down on his plank-bed. “I can tell you, since it’s in every transcript anyhow: I did it on my own. I had to do it, because Hitler was and is the downfall of Germany.”

  He stood up and walked to the cell window. Then he turned around to face Fachner. “You know, I’m no die-hard communist. I knew I was taking a big risk—and now I’m sitting here and waiting for them to execute me.”

  Fachner saw that Elser’s hands were trembling and gave him a cigarette. Elser reached for it eagerly. He then went back to the table, sat down, and lit the cigarette.

  “Now I have a question for you,” he said, to Fachner’s surprise. “You must know all about it. What is actually easiest to endure: a gassing, a hanging, or a shot in the back of the neck? I mean, which causes the least suffering?”

  Fachner was horrified and searched for words. “But, Herr Elser, you have been interned for such a long time. You are handled with kid gloves. Nothing will happen to you.”

  Elser interrupted him. “Don’t tell me that. I know better. I’m not going to be alive much longer.”

  Fachner silently left the cell. The situation struck him as strange. Thousands were dying in this camp from medical experiments; only a few hundred yards from the Kommandanturarrest, people were beaten to death and tortured. And yet these terrible facts bounced off him. He suppressed the brutal everyday reality; he pushed it away. But here, in the prison, he had a direct relationship with the inmates. He spoke to them; he was confronted with their fears, hopes, and desires. He did not see them as anonymous prisoners, but as individual inmates. He had a secret respect for many of them; for some, he even felt sympathy. Georg Elser was one of them. The question he had asked unsettled him.

  Fachner went back to his office. He thought about Elser’s words. “I believed I was doing something good. Now I have to bear the consequences,” he had told him as he left the cell.

  Like most of the “special prisoners” in the block, Elser was afraid—afraid of the end, afraid for his life. Though the camp leaders did everything they could to leave the prisoners in the dark about the true situation of the war, many in the camp also knew by now how things were going for Germany. Some SS guards had dropped hints; prisoners in the so-called “priest block,” in which oppositional priests from all over the world were interned, had received information via secret channels of the camp resistance that the war would soon be over and the Americans were only sixty miles from Dachau.

  The prisoners were faced with the fear that the SS would now order more mass killings in order to erase all traces of the annihilation. Germany’s cities had been reduced to rubble; the “Thousand-Year Reich” sank deeper into ruin with each passing day. Hitler and the National Socialists had brought misery, suffering, and death upon millions of people—not only in the Reich, but also in the rest of Europe. The national frenzy of joy had long since turned into a horrible dance of death.

  And yet there were still fanatical supporters of National Socialism, who even now, under the hail of bombs from the enemy’s planes, denounced any “comrade” and invoked the threat of death for anyone who dared to publicly oppose this madness. They occupied positions in town halls, administrative offices, police stations, and courts. They were as active in the Swabian Alps as they were in Stuttgart or Berlin. A people of triumphant enthusiasts had turned into a disillusioned, insecure people devoid of identity. But in the eyes of the National Socialists, it was still necessary to salvage what they could. Here in Dachau, in concrete terms, that meant erasing the traces.

  Shortly before the end of the war, on April 5, 1945, an express letter from the chief of the security police in Berlin—recorded under file number 42/45—reached the commandants of the Dachau concentration camp. It read:

  … The matter of our special protective custody prisoner Elser has also been discussed again at the highest level. The following directive has been issued: During one of the next terror attacks on Munich or in the vicinity of Dachau, Elser will purportedly meet an accidental death. To this end, when such an occasion arises, I ask you to liquidate Elser in an absolutely inconspicuous manner. I ask you to ensure that only very few people, who are bound to secrecy, are informed of this. The message to me that this has been accomplished would then read something like: “On … during the terror attack on … the protective custody prisoner Elser was fatally injured.”

  In Dachau, these instructions were carried out to the letter.

  “You have to go to an interrogation,” Fachner told Elser on the evening of April 9, as he fetched him from the cell.

  “Do I have to bring anything with me?” Elser asked, surprised at this command.

  “No, you’ll be right back,” Fachner said, playing dumb. He knew he was lying. A few minutes ago, an SS man had given him the order to bring Elser to an “interrogation.” As he said this, he had winked and smiled at him. Fachner suspected that this was the end of Georg Elser.

  After the
war—as a concentration camp guard, Fachner would be among those called to account and would serve a prison sentence—he recalled Elser’s last walk.

  He was led away by us along the electrically charged fence. He passed the camp gate and then crossed the camp. Then came a stone wall with a small iron door. Behind it was the crematorium. It was an inconspicuous building. In the front building of the crematorium sat an SS-Unterscharführer, who said to those entering, “Come with me.” Then he led them into the execution room. Everyone executed by us had to undress. The person in question was told that this was in order to bathe. When the prisoner was naked and at some point happened to turn his back, he was shot unexpectedly. Elser must have been killed in the same way.

  I myself was not present, but people talked about it in the camp. Oberscharführer Fritz, whom I asked about Elser’s last minutes, said that Elser had been hanged from a meat hook and then incinerated in the crematorium. Incidentally, shortly after Elser was executed, Oberscharführer Fritz came to the Kommandanturarrest. He took the zither that Elser had made for himself. I saw him walk down the corridor. On the way out, he brushed his thumb over the strings.

  On April 29, 1945, at around 5:15 PM, the first American soldiers—among them a reporter from The New York Times—drove a Jeep onto the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp. The escaped prisoner Karl Riemer, at the behest of the underground camp committee, had managed to make his way to the American troops at Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm and had persuaded the American commanders to advance toward Dachau instead of Munich. 32,332 prisoners, including inmates from other camps, were waiting to be delivered from their suffering.