Bombing Hitler (16 page)

Elser's sister Anna Lober testified in 1950 that “after the downfall,” many newspaper people had come, wanting to find out something about Georg. “We refused and turned the people away because we preferred not to see anything else about this in the newspapers; my mother always became so upset when she read anything about it in the paper.”

At that time, the family did not know what had happened to Georg. At some point, there was no further news of him in Dachau. Around 1940, a Gestapo man came to Georg's mother to tell her that her son was in a concentration camp and that she could write to him. She was to address any mail to Reich Security Headquarters. She wrote only once, received no answer, and then lost all hope. “There's no point in writing,” she said. In her letter, upon the advice of the Protestant pastor of Königsbronn, she wrote only of very personal matters. She was crippled by a general feeling of anxiety, as she explained in 1950: “I immediately got suspicious and thought that I might get caught up in this too and that they would come get me if I said anything wrong in the letter. I am still convinced that they were just trying to set a trap for me and that my son never got that letter.”

The Elser family had difficulty coming to terms with Georg's assassination attempt. As late as 1950, his mother continued to place the blame on others: “I don't think my son would come up with anything like that on his own. I think it's likelier that there was somebody behind it who put the idea into his head.” Asked where she had gotten this idea, she responded, “That's just what I think—somebody was behind my son.”

That same year, Georg's sister Friederike Kraft recalled after her return from Berlin how the people in the area reacted: “It wasn't a good time for us once we got back to Schnaitheim, because people saw us only in connection with this one issue. For a long time, I didn't go out among people, and the people in Heidenheim, where my husband was working at the Voith company, acted like they wanted to throw him out.”

Georg's brother Leonhard Elser, on the other hand, said in 1959 that people were neutral toward the family and that everything had slowly been forgotten. However, Elser's best friend Eugen Rau—the only person to whom Elser gave any indication about the planned assassination, which he did shortly before leaving for Munich—had a different view. In 1988, Rau recalled the principal complaint of people in Königsbronn: “We can't have friends like this, who might get us sent to the gallows!” But no one from Königsbronn went to the gallows. The quarry owner Georg Vollmer was put into a concentration camp because of his negligence in dealing with explosive materials.

Their relationships with Elser also had a lasting effect on two women who had been romantically involved with him at one point. Mathilde Niedermann of Konstanz, the mother of his son Manfred Bühl, broke off the relationship with Elser in 1930 after an argument. He did not want her to have the child, tried twice to arrange an abor-tion in Switzerland, and paid her little or no alimony. The court in Konstanz later garnished about half his salary, leading him to seek self-employment so he could avoid paying. Understandably, Mathilde Niedermann was bitter at Georg Elser and ashamed that her child was born out of wedlock. She concealed the identity of the father until Manfred was “enlightened” on the street one day by another boy. Later on, Manfred came across the passport photo of a man in his mother's jewelry case; it was Elser. When he asked who it was, his mother ripped up the photograph.

Mathilde Niedermann later married, and thus her son was legitimized. Her husband died in the war, and she married a second time. Despite all this, “Assassinville” remained a burden for her throughout her life. When the magazine
Stern
tracked her down in 1959, she resisted talking about the matter, expressing the wish that the magazine “shouldn't stir everything up again, with the risk of endangering her son.” She begged them not to list her name or her son's name. She wanted only to be called “Hilde from St. Gebhardstrasse.” She had not talked with her son in detail about his father until he was eighteen. Later on, Manfred Bühl began to delve into the subject of his dead father. The first time he spoke about him was to a small group in Meersburg in 1995. Two years later, six months before his death, Manfred spoke at the dedication of the Georg-Elser-Platz in Munich. Clearly, even the second generation was able to free itself from the grasp of “Assassinville” only after much time had passed.

In 1939, Mathilde Niedermann was interrogated over a period of several nights. She said the interrogations took a great toll on her. She was not, however, able to comment on Georg's political orientation; she considered him to be “completely uninterested in politics.” This was odd, because in Konstanz Elser had become friendly with Communists. Fear of the Gestapo, the tactic of denying everything, and the general tendency in the fifties to suppress certain aspects of the past all appear to have had a significant influence on Mathilde Niedermann.

According to Elsa Härlen, another woman involved with Elser, he “led a double life and completely separated his political life from his private life.” After Elser's arrest, the local people at first would not speak with Härlen either. But that changed over time. “When it was clear that the war would be lost, and especially in the period immediately following the war,” she suddenly had more friends than ever, she said. People tried to bring her ration stamps for groceries, but she turned them down. She told her story in 1959 to a journalist in an interview that lasted for four hours. She didn't want any restitution, she said, because the government of the Federal Republic had not caused her any loss; it was “those gypsies that were there before”— by which she meant the Nazi regime—who had brought harm to her, and she couldn't blame that on the current government.

The Munich locksmith Max Niederhofer, one of Elser's unwitting accomplices, was also not treated gently by the Gestapo. He was detained at Gestapo headquarters in Munich for two weeks, bound, and beaten. Since he had produced metal parts for the explosive device, he was considered highly dangerous. For a long time afterward he had to report in to the Gestapo at nine o'clock every morning; the fact that he had been born in London alarmed the Gestapo greatly.

Two other businesses located on Elser's home turf came under close scrutiny by the Gestapo: the Waldenmaier Company in Heidenehim and the Vollmer Quarry in Königsbronn. At Waldenmaier, Elser had obtained some explosive material and detonators, and it was from Vollmer that he got the majority of the explosive material. Both companies were suspected of not only assisting Elser, but possibly of acting on behalf of foreign agents. On November 15, 1939, shortly after midnight, businessman Erhard Waldenmaier was rousted out of bed and arrested. The Gestapo set up an office at the company and over a period of six months conducted interrogations of numerous employees. In 1940, Waldenmaier joined the Nazi Party in an effort to provide cover for himself.

It struck the Gestapo as very suspicious that Frau Waldenmaier maintained contact with a woman in England whose father was a pro-fessor of Hebrew, then teaching in the United States. This constituted an ideal bit of evidence for their conspiracy theory—in the eyes of the Gestapo, these foreigners were agents of the British Secret Ser-vice. Even before the assassination attempt, communications that the Waldenmaiers conducted with anyone abroad were being monitored. During the interrogations, the Gestapo brought in many transcripts of letters they had intercepted.

Erhard Waldenmaier was not only the owner of an important arms manufacturing company, but also from 1934 until the end of the war he was also a contractor for the
Abwehrstelle
(district military intelligence office), charged with overseeing “military production.” He reported to the
Abwehrstelle
in Ulm. When the Gestapo began its investigation at his facility in November 1939, the
Abwehr
summoned Waldenmaier to Ulm.

During the night—in one of the standard games played during the Nazi era—the munitions commander and his
Abwehr
officers advised him what and what not to say to the Gestapo. In their zeal, the Gestapo also wanted to know whether the increase in arms production at Waldenmaier might be due to orders from abroad. In reality, though, Hitler was responsible for the arms buildup.

Once quarry owner Georg Vollmer had been locked away in the concentration camp at Welzheim, Waldenmaier feared a similar fate. As recorded in his denazification file in November 1945, he described his feeling of despair at the time: “For hours on end I was deathly afraid, and I intended to take my own life.” The head Gestapo officer announced to Waldenmaier that after England was conquered he and Elser would be put on trial. Then comes a sentence that stands out starkly, the kind of statement not made in 1945, when dozens of sup-posed eyewitnesses and some historians were spouting Nazi legends. Back in 1940, the Gestapo man had assured Waldenmaier: “In spite of repeated torture, Elser had stuck to his story that he had carried out the attack, in order to save the working people and the entire world from war.” Then in 1945, the businessman whom Elser had unwillingly placed in grave danger stuck by Elser: “Elser, who believed he had to do away with Hitler for the good of the German people and the world, is now being portrayed in the press as an SS man and SS leader.” This voice from Heidenheim was soon drowned out.

But then the situation started improving for Waldenmaier. Thanks to his advocates in the
Abwehr,
he was awarded the War Service Cross Second Class in November 1940 for his company's arms production, and in September 1944, when the end was in sight, he received the War Service Cross First Class. He made significant contributions to the Nazi Party Motor Corps and the Winter Assistance Drive of the Party's Welfare Organization, was put on the city council in 1944, and with an annual income of 40,000 marks, he clearly profited from the war.

It was the death of a Polish slave laborer that cost Waldenmaier his life. The man had been employed by Waldenmaier, who turned him over to the Nazis at their request. The man was killed by the Nazis, and after the war the Poles blamed his death on Waldenmaier. In October 1946, an American court extradited Waldenmaier to Poland, where he died in a Polish prison on September 20, 1947.

Affected worst by the events was quarry owner Georg Vollmer from Königsbronn. On November 15, 1939, he was arrested along with his sixteen-year-old son Ernst, as well as the bookkeeper and the chief explosives expert. Vollmer had further enraged the Gestapo by removing Elser's name from the payroll list right after the first arrests were made in Königsbronn—the Gestapo caught the deception right away. Vollmer was an
Alter Kämpfer,
a Party member, and, since 1931,
Ortsgruppenleiter,
the top Nazi in the community. He did not establish a regimented rule, but acted more as a patriarch, and after 1933 he was no longer particularly supportive of the Party. In 1937 he was removed because of rivalry with the district leader in Heidenheim. This provided fuel for the fable that he had been part of the resistance.

Most of the explosive material in Elser's bomb had come from Vollmer's operation; for that reason the Gestapo subjected the Vollmer employees to severe beatings during their interrogations of them. In 1947 Vollmer wrote to the
Spruchkammer,
the body in charge of denazification proceedings, “During the interrogations I was beaten. I was kept for four weeks in complete darkness, given only watery soup and bread, and was repeatedly bound. Over and over they screamed in my face that all of my life I had been a Communist and a traitor to the Fatherland, that I was indirectly responsible for the attack, that I should be shot and all of my relatives eradicated.”

After Vollmer was released in 1941, he saw his wife suffer a total collapse. “They tormented my wife so that she completely lost her mind. After my return from the concentration camp, she would get up at night and roam around the house in the crazed conviction that the officers [the Gestapo] were coming to get me again. Six months later she had wasted away to skin and bones and died of acute appendicitis.”

While Vollmer was still in the concentration camp, his wife managed, under great duress, to pull off two coups. Thanks to old Party connections in Berlin she was able to get access to an adjutant for Rudolf Hess. As a result, her husband, whom Himmler had sentenced to twenty years in a concentration camp, was released on April 19, 1941, along with the bookkeeper and the explosives expert.

The second coup had ramifications that extend up to the present. In an attempt to wipe out once and for all the devastating accusation that her husband had given Elser access to explosives, she made up a remarkable story about a Zurich music dealer named Kuch, who was from Königsbronn. This man, she said, was the instigator they had all been looking for—with a group of three Communists he had put Elser up to the assassination attempt.

A
LL DURING THEIR
investigations, the Gestapo focused on estab-lishing the extent to which Elser's heredity might have predetermined the assassination attempt, as if a propensity for assassination could be inherited. Right from the beginning, however, Georg Elser showed none of the tendencies that the Gestapo found significant: He didn't drink, a trait that attracted attention in the Bürgerbräukeller; he had never had a venereal disease; and he didn't associate with Jews. Most important, there were no members of the clergy among his relations.

There were, however, throughout Elser's family history, numerous illegitimate children, but this was fairly common in Germany at the time. Contraception was not accessible to many living in rural areas, and marriage was often put off until people could afford a dowry and a place to live. Georg Elser's illegitimate son Manfred was by no means an anomaly in his family history.