Other Forces

The non-conspiracy that almost killed Hitler (4).

This is Georg Elser. Elser was a modest, quiet individual, a practical, non-ideological socialist more on British than on the (more ideological) German lines. This put him firmly in a stance hostile to the Nazi regime. At some point, he decided that it was necessary to remove Hitler from the scene, and that he himself should do so - no plot, no co-conspirators, no conspiracy. Over a period of about a month, Elser entered the Burgerbraukeller after hours and prepared a hidden cavity in a pillar close to the speaker's rostrum in the Festhall, in which he placed a powerful time-bomb set to go off during the period of time on 8 November in which the Fuhrer gave his "November Putsch" commemorative speech to the faithful every year. The bomb worked perfectly, but it was Hitler's devilish good luck that the left early from the 1939 renewal. Elser was, unluckily, arrested as he attempted to cross from Germany into Switzerland, and the whole story then came out (with the usual "encouragement" from the Gestapo). He was not immediately executed, but consigned first to Sachsenhausen, then to Dachau concentration camp as a "special prisoner" - perhaps to be held for a possible show-trial after the war. That was not to be. As the Allies closed in, Georg Elser was shot to death on the orders of SS-Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Muller, Head of the Gestapo, at Dachau, on 9 April, 1945. He came so close - closer than most of the long-fermented, highly-connected conspiracies that aimed at Hitler's life in the 1938-1944 period. Makes me wonder ... In any event, I wish him Gods' rest. Best regards, JR.