A new film shows how a plot to blow up the Fuhrer came within 13 minutes of success, says Nigel Farndale.
By the summer of 1944, the British and Americans had dropped all plans to assassinate Hitler. They had realised that the Fuhrer had become their secret weapon; such was his irrational behaviour and strategic incompetence.
There was also a growing understanding, gleaned from bugging the prison cells of captured German officers, that the Nazis were so fanatical they would have to be defeated unambiguously. An assassination, such as the one attempted by Col von Stauffenberg on July 20 1944, could have been interpreted as a stab in the back by treacherous officers and a version of the Nazi Party may have remained in power for decades after the war.
Everyone has heard of the 1944 plot, thanks, not least, to the film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg. But that was not the first time Hitler escaped assassination at the hands of one of his own people.
An earlier attempt, now little remembered, came on November 8 1939, two months after the war began. The story behind it has now been made into 13 Minutes, a gripping and thought-provoking film by Oliver Hirschbiegel, the award-winning director of Downfall. The plan was that a huge time-bomb would be detonated in Munich's Burgerbraukeller, in a column immediately behind the lectern where Hitler spoke every year, in the same place, at the same time, to mark the anniversary of the 1923 "Beer Hall Putsch".
Unfortunately the Nazi leader left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than scheduled that night, 13 minutes before the bomb went off. Had that attempt on his life succeeded, it might have saved the lives of 40?million people: Hitler's senior henchmen - including Himmler, Goebbels and Hess - were also there, sitting in the front row. As it was, they left with him. When the bomb brought down the ceiling and the walls, seven members of the audience and a waitress were killed instead.
So why was the timing out by 13 minutes? Fate, according to Hitler. He had cut his two-hour speech to one because fog was forecast, meaning he would have to return to Berlin by train that night rather than plane. Of his escape, Hitler said it was proof that "Providence wants me to reach my goal."
Perhaps what is most remarkable about the 1939 attempt is that, unlike the elaborate 1944 plot, only one person was involved. His name was Georg Elser (pictured below), a 36-year-old carpenter known for his affability. However, he had watched the brutal rise of the Nazis, with the daily life of his fellow villagers poisoned and Left-leaning friends arrested, he decided that something had to be done.
His assassination attempt took a year to plan. On November 8 1938, the eve of Kristallnacht, he went to watch the anniversary speech at the Burgerbraukeller, but wasn't allowed in until Hitler and his entourage had left. As the crowds dispersed, he studied the column behind the lectern and decided that would be the best place to hide a bomb the following year. He then spent months appropriating cartridges of pressed gunpowder, as well as fuses, from the quarry where he worked, and then, without any training in, designed one of the world's first time bombs using a car indicator and the mechanism of a clock.
In the autumn of 1939, he broke into the Burgerbraukeller to hollow out a space in the column where he could install his device. As the place was patrolled at intervals by a guard with a dog, he had to work in the dark, with a torch held between his teeth. It took him 30 nights to complete his mission. On November 5 he set his two-timer fuses to go off at 9.20pm in the middle of Hitler's speech three nights later. He then disguised where the bomb was hidden with a false wall.
On his escape to Switzerland, Elser was caught in possession of wire cutters, firing pins, bomb designs and, most incriminating of all, a postcard of the interior of the Burgerbraukeller. He was sent to Berlin for interrogation.
When Hitler heard that his would-be assassin was a country carpenter he refused to believe it, seeing himself as champion of the ordinary working man. He assumed that Elser must have been working for the communists or the English. But no amount of torture could get Elser to change his story that he had acted alone.
Only when he was able to show the Gestapo in detail how he made his bomb, and explain exactly how he got hold of the materials, did they finally accept his story.
Nebe, his interrogator, later confided to a diplomat friend: "Elser laid out for me passionately and in simple sentences how, for the masses in all countries, war means hunger, misery, and the death of millions. Not a pacifist in the usual sense, his reasoning was quite simplistic: Hitler is war - and if he goes, there will be peace."
Instead of being executed as soon as he confessed, Elser was sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he remained until the end of the war. He was eventually shot, on Hitler's orders, just three weeks before Hitler killed himself.The fact that Elser wasn't executed immediately has led conspiracy theorists to speculate that he was actually a stooge of the Reich. The Nazis staged the assassination attempt, this argument goes, so that Hitler could claim it was divine providence that he escaped. "No, the truth was more mundane," says Hirschbiegel. "Hitler was planning to stage a show trial, in the way that Stalin did. But then he ran out of time."
One of the many extraordinary things about this story is the fact that it remained largely untold in Germany for years. Why? Perhaps it made Germans feel uncomfortable to know that resistance was possible in the Nazi era, after all.
I ask the director what comfort he, as a German, draws from that. "I find Elser is someone to be proud of because he wasn't an aristocrat or an educated man, he was an ordinary German craftsman and he chose to resist. He had that moral courage inside him."
