Georg Elser: The lone wolf hero who nearly killed Hitler

The carpenter who came agonisingly close to killing Adolf Hitler at the start of World War Two eventually met his end in a concentration camp.

But his story is brought to compelling life in a new film by the director of Downfall, the acclaimed depiction of Hitler’s last days. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film 13 Minutes tells the fascinating story of how Elser, an ordinary worker convinced that Hitler was dragging his country towards disaster, planted a time bomb in the Munich beer hall where the Fuhrer and his cronies were holding a reunion.

Months in the planning, his scheme almost worked.

On November 8 1939, just weeks after the Germans had conquered Poland, Elser’s home-made device, hidden in a pillar behind the speaker’s dais, exploded with devastating effect.

Eight people died. But as luck would have it, Hitler had left earlier than scheduled. Had he stayed just 13 minutes longer, he would almost certainly have perished too.

Elser paid for his act with his own life after being captured trying to cross the border into Switzerland. It’s a remarkable tale of courage and self-sacrifice. As Hirschbiegel told me, the film has alerted his fellow-Germans to a hero who had been overlooked for too long: “13 Minutes reminded everyone that there was one guy, a worker, who saw it all coming and proved that a single person could stand up against it and do something. At the same time I feel there is a certain unease. Because if there was one person, why were there not more?”

It is a salutary question.

“Elser corrects the idea that the opposition was just a lot of counts and barons acting in July 1944,” says historian Giles MacDonogh, an expert on the resistance to Hitler.

“Elser was a real man of the people.”

Yet while Claus von Stauffenberg’s army bomb plot continues to capture the public’s imagination – Tom Cruise played him in the film Valkyrie – Elser’s lone mission slipped into obscurity.

Was it because he lacked aristocratic glamour or was it because people still found it hard to believe a lowly carpenter could have devised such an ingenious plan on his own?

That latter point was certainly uppermost in the minds of the Gestapo in the days after the explosion. Aware that Elser was a Communist sympathiser, they were convinced he had to be a pawn in an elaborate network of plotters. Enraged by Elser’s persistent claims that he acted alone, interrogators tortured him at length, certain that he would name names in the end.

But their prisoner remained steadfast and when he demonstrated how he had built the elaborate mechanism for his bomb, he began to win over the sceptics. Never brought to trial, he was imprisoned in concentration camps and survived until the fi nal weeks of the war.

Then, like so many other top-security prisoners who were deemed to have no further value as potential witnesses or hostages, he was murdered. Now Hirschbiegel’s scrupulously researched film brings him triumphantly back to life.

The Elser we see on film is no dour ideologue or embittered misfit but an outsider with charm and wit, a ladies’ man who is a gifted musician as well as a fine craftsman.

Photographs taken of him after his capture show, understandably enough, a downbeat, unkempt figure. But Hirschbiegel insists that the Elser who emerged during research was much more debonair.

“I had descriptions, by ladies basically, all describing him as a very beautiful man, with very good manners,” he says.

“And they say he had beautiful hands. Overall he felt like a character out of time, you know – a bit like a hippy, a smart hippy. He’s totally uneducated but he’s a free mind, a pirate.”

Elser was raised in a rural community in southern Germany, had limited schooling and eked out a modest living in a succession of jobs including cabinet-making and work in a clock factory.

Later he watched in silent horror as his fellow citizens succumbed to Nazi propaganda. One of the film’s strengths is the way it shows how the Nazi Party’s rustic pageants and rituals appealed to the communal instincts of country folk.

Still, Elser was no firebrand. As the historian Roger Moorhouse writes in his book Killing Hitler: “He was a practical man at heart and was not interested in political discussions. He had no desire to change other people’s minds, but he steadfastly refused to make any accommodation with the new regime.

When Hitler’s speeches were broadcast, he would silently leave the room.” By 1938 Elser’s quiet loathing for the Party prompted him to become an assassin. Looking for an opportunity to strike, he began staking out the Burgerbraukeller, the beer hall where Hitler gave his annual address at the celebration of the Nazis’ abortive uprising of 1923.

After stealing explosives, he built his bomb and its elaborate timer and then, remarkably, spent weeks hiding in the hall after closing hours so that he could dig a cavity in a pillar. Proceeding with painstaking care, he timed his blows to coincide with noises of passing trams or the automatic flushing of the venue’s toilets.

The Nazis’ lax security staff failed to spot anything. But on the night Hitler was due to speak, he decided to leave early so that he could return to Berlin the same night. When the dictator learned of his lucky escape he took it as a sign that divine intervention had spared him for greater things.

(Moorhouse points out that Pope Pius XII even sent the Fuhrer a telegram congratulating him on his escape.)

But what would have happened if Elser had succeeded?

Other senior Nazis, including Goebbels, were also in the beer hall that night. They could well have died too. Roger Moorhouse believes the course of the war would almost certainly have been changed.

“Britain and Germany were not yet in outright conflict in November 1939 so it would have been possible for both sides to draw back from the brink. Also in 1939, Hitler would most likely have been succeeded by a comparative moderate in Goering - in 1944 it would have been Goebbels and Himmler.

"So it is not an exaggeration to say that Elser’s attempt held the real promise of altering history.

"World War Two might even have been halted." If things had turned out differently then, Georg Elser might have become a saintly equivalent of that other lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Strangely though, postwar Germany was slow to acknowledge his sacrifice. Seventy years after his death, a new generation is learning the truth about him.