The Bürgerbräukeller Bombing

Johann Georg Elser (born January 4, 1903 in Hermaringen, Württemberg; † April 9, 1945 in Dachau concentration camp, Bavaria) was a German cabinet maker and resistance fighter against National Socialism. On November 8, 1939, he carried out a bomb attack on Adolf Hitler and almost the entire National Socialist leadership in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller, which only narrowly failed.

Elser was an opponent of National Socialism early on. After 1933 he refused to give the Hitler salute. According to eyewitness reports, he left the room when Hitler speeches were broadcast on the radio. In the early phase, the main reason for his dislike, as he stated in a later Gestapo interrogation, was the deterioration in living conditions after 1933:

"So for example, I noticed that wages were getting lower and deductions higher. […] The hourly wage of a carpenter was one Reichsmark in 1929, today only an hourly wage of 68 pfennigs is paid. [...] The worker can e.g. no longer change jobs as he wants; Today he is no longer the master of his children due to the Hitler Youth, and he can no longer be so freely active in religious matters."

From around 1938 onwards, another motif shaped his aversion. Elser recognized the preparations for war and the yielding of the Western powers with regard to the territorial demands of the German Reich:

“The observations I made produced the result that the situation in Germany could only be changed by removing the current leadership. By leadership I understood the 'colonels', by which I mean Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. Through my deliberations, I came to the conviction that by eliminating these 3 men, other men would come to the government who would not make any unacceptable demands on foreign countries, who would not want to include a foreign country and who would ensure an improvement in the social conditions of the workers."

Elser wanted to eliminate the leading political figures of the National Socialist state with a time bomb and thus single-handedly stop the war against Poland and which had expanded into World War II.

After the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, Elser was finally convinced that Hitler was planning a new war and that only his murder could avert great disaster. Now he started planning a bomb attack. As Hitler is known to give a speech in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on the evening of each anniversary of his failed coup attempt on November 9, 1923, Elser decided to build a time bomb into the pillar directly behind the lectern. He was initially hired as a worker in Georg Vollmer's quarry in Königsbronn-Itzelberg to steal 105 dynamite cartridges and 125 detonator caps for his time bomb. On August 5, 1939, he moved to Munich and rented a small workshop there. According to the neighbors he pretended to be an inventor and was able to construct a time fuse without being noticed.

From the end of August 1939 Elser went to the Bürgerbräukeller every evening, first of all ate a simple workers' meal there for 60 pfennigs and waited for a good opportunity to hide in the broom closet without being noticed. He stayed there for several hours until the inn was locked. In over 30 nights he then dug out a pillar in painstaking, risky work in order to deposit the bomb with a time fuse in it. Elser closed the opening with a partial board of the pillar cladding, which he attached like a door, while he covered the interfaces in the pillar with the strips of the cladding. The cavity created by the work was at the top of a pillar that stood directly behind Hitler's lectern. In order not to draw attention to himself through noises, he had to interrupt his work for ten minutes each time until the automatic toilet flushing of the Bürgerbräukeller started again. He hid the accumulating rubble in a self-made sack, which he initially carried out in a box and later in a suitcase under the eyes of the waitresses during the day and emptied them into the Isar. In the first days of November he built his self-constructed time bomb, including dynamite cartridges, detonators and black powder, into the cavity in the column. On the night of November 7th to 8th, he checked the ticking of the clockwork of the time bomb by listening in the Bürgerbräukeller.

On November 8, 1939, there were around 1,500 to 2,000 people in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller, and according to other sources even 3,000, including a large part of the National Socialist leadership, to commemorate the 1923 Putsch. The party leadership sat tightly packed in front of Hitler's lectern.

Because the Führer's planned return flight to Berlin was canceled due to fog and instead had to use a special train, he ended his stay in the Bürgerbräukeller earlier than expected by Elser. He and his command staff left the building thirteen minutes before the time bomb exploded.

The bomb exploded at exactly the time Elser had planned at 9:20 p.m. The explosion of the explosive device devastated the hall, in which at that time there were only one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty people. The bomb killed eight and injured 57 people, fifteen seriously. The sound of the explosion could be clearly heard by radio listeners following coverage of the event.

The pillar in which the time bomb with the dynamite was hidden collapsed as a result of the blast from the explosion. In the area of ​​the speaker's platform, the entire ceiling construction fell onto the lectern and the surrounding chairs and tables. Three people were killed instantly and dozens were buried under masonry, roof girders and wooden beams. Five died after being admitted to the hospitals.

According to a press report in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten of November 10, 1939, the fatalities were:

• Maria Henle, 30
  temporary waitress at larger events in the Bürgerbräu, left behind a husband and two small children
• Michael Wilhelm Kaiser, 50
  Long-time Hitler supporter, SA-Sturmhauptführer (equivalent to captain), Deputy. Leader of the NSKK motor standard 86
• Emil Kasberger, 54
  Long-time NSDAP member, flutist in the Gaumusikzug in the traditional district of Munich-Upper Bavaria, left a wife and daughter
• Franz Lutz, 53
  Long-time Hitler supporter, SA-Sturmhauptführer (equivalent to captain)
• Leonhardt Reindl, 57
  Member of the NSDAP since 1923, holder of the green permanent ID card for old fighters
• Eugen Schachta, 32
  SA member, chief operations officer at the Reichsautozug, was responsible for assembling and dismantling technical equipment in the hall, and has been married for eleven months
• Michael Schmeidl,
  NSDAP member, old fighter, senior bailiff a. D., was seriously injured at first and died a few days later
• Wilhelm Weber, 37
  SA member, Reichsautozug, was responsible for assembling and dismantling technical equipment in the hall, leaving behind a wife and two small children

On his escape, Elser reached the port of Constance at 8:40 p.m. on November 8, 1939, coming by steamer from Friedrichshafen. He took the route Marktstätte, Rosgartenstraße, Bodanplatz, Hüetlinstraße, Kreuzlinger Straße to Schwedenschanze.

At around 8:45 p.m. (more than half an hour before the explosion in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller), Elser was still on the German side by customs assistant Xaver Rieger and border assistant Waldemar Zipperer from the customs border guard in Konstanz in the Wessenberggarten while trying to escape to Switzerland arrested in the Schwedenschanze and taken to the main customs office 200 meters away. He had made himself suspicious because his border card had expired and his bag, contained a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller and parts of a detonator. Under the lapel of his shirt he wore a badge of the Communist Red Front Fighters Association. There were several pieces of paper in one envelope.

After the body search in the customs building at Kreuzlinger Tor, Elser was brought to the Gestapo headquarters in Konstanz at Mainaustrasse 29. After his arrest had been reported to Karlsruhe and from there to Berlin, he was taken to the state police headquarters in Munich.

A special commission Bürgerbräukeller was set up to investigate the day after the attack. It consisted of a crime scene commission headed by department head Hans Lobbes from the Reich Criminal Police Office and a perpetrators commission headed by Franz Josef Huber, head of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

Elser was interrogated by the Gestapo in Munich and Berlin, sometimes under torture. It soon became clear that he had been responsible for the attack in Munich, which Elser finally confessed to. Among other things, he betrayed himself by his swollen knees, which resulted from his work in the Bürgerbräukeller in preparation for the assassination attempt, during which he had to slide around on his knees for nights.

Five days after the assassination, Elser's sister Maria Hirth, who lived in Stuttgart, was arrested by the Gestapo while she was working, as was her husband Karl Hirth and her ten-year-old son Franz (* 1929). Father and son were taken from their family's previously searched apartment in Lerchenstrasse in the west of Stuttgart for interrogation to the Stuttgart office building of the Gestapo (“Hotel Silber”), to which Maria Hirth had also been brought. Karl Hirth had previously been arrested in the morning at his workplace in the Hotel Württemberger Hof. In his own words, Franz Hirth first heard of the assassination a short time later with great horror during a radio broadcast. He had previously lived in the Elser house in Königsbronn for a few years, and Georg Elser, his uncle, was the most important person he could relate to alongside his parents.

From November 19 to 23, Elser was interrogated in the Secret State Police Office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin by the detective inspectors Herbert Kappler, Schmidt and Seibold. The protocol of this interrogation (Berlin interrogation protocol) was discovered by chance in 1964 and is the most important source about Georg Elser.

After the Berlin interrogation protocol had not provided any information about the people behind it, the investigation continued. The logistical effort required for such an attack seemed too great for an individual. Walter Schellenberg reports in his memoir that the Führer demanded from Reinhard Heydrich:

“I want to know what kind of guy this Elser is. You have to be able to classify the man somehow. Tell me about it. For the rest, you use all means to get this criminal to talk. Let him be hypnotized, give him drugs; make use of everything our science today has tried in this direction. I want to know who the instigators are, I want to know who is behind it."

The psychiatrist Oswald Bumke examined Elser and his motivation. Elser's statements were kept secret. Dr. Goebbels wanted to pass off his act as a joint action by the British secret service and Otto Strasser, who was then living in Switzerland. A later show trial was supposed to "prove" these connections. The doubts about Elser's sole perpetrator were also based on the fact that he was not trusted to have the knowledge and skills to build the time-controlled bomb. Since Elser insisted that he had designed and manufactured the bomb himself in every detail, he was asked to build it a second time under supervision. Elser drew up an exact list of the individual parts required and made the bomb again.

On November 22nd, 1939, the German press informed about the convicted perpetrator and established a connection with the Venlo incident in which two British secret service officers had been kidnapped at the Dutch border to Germany.

In the envelope that Elser was carrying when he was arrested, there was, among other things, a note from Elser about the loss of one of twenty blanks for a steel fuse that Rheinmetall-Borsig AG in Düsseldorf sold to Waldenmaier in September 1938 Heidenheim. This led to investigations by the Gestapo in Düsseldorf in December 1939. The results of the investigation do not allow any other conclusion than that Elser, who was responsible for checking incoming materials at Waldenmaier at the time, had stolen the part.

Elser was imprisoned from 1941 as the “Führer’s special prisoner” without trial in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, later in the Dachau concentration camp under the code name Eller. In Sachsenhausen he was housed in the "cell building" in cell 13, which had been combined from three cells especially for him. He was treated comparatively well, he had his own workbench. It is believed that after the "final victory" he would appear in a show trial as a witness against the British government and be tried.

On April 5, 1945, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police and the SD, appeared in the Führerbunker and reported to the Führer about the police security situation. The Führer ordered the execution of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and the “special prisoner” Georg Elser.

Elser was executed in secret and without a court sentence on the same day after more than five years in prison. The SS Oberscharführer Theodor Bongartz carried out the execution order at around 11 p.m. at the execution site by the crematorium with a shot in the neck. Elser's body was then cremated in the crematorium. This happened one month before the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht and twenty days before the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.