Bombing Hitler (17 page)

His maternal grandmother, Karolina Müller, had been illegitimate. On December 29, 1879, she bore a daughter by the name of Maria—Georg's mother. Nine days later she disappeared from her childbed. Her child remained with the father and Karolina was never heard from again. The child's father first took his daughter to a children's home and did not return for her until he had married into the family of a carriage maker in Hermaringen, a village south of Heidenheim.

Grandfather Elser was also illegitimate. He took over the family farm in Ochsenberg, near Königsbronn, where he generally enjoyed a good reputation. During a fight at a wedding he hit a wedding guest on the head with a beer mug, for which he spent two months in jail. This incident hardly qualifies as evidence of a hereditary defect. In the end, he died of food poisoning from eating a sausage—a real Swabian, he couldn't bear to throw away food, even spoiled food.

Georg's father, Ludwig Elser, was born in 1872 in Ochsenberg, had eighteen siblings, and was a good student in elementary school. When his eldest child Georg was conceived in 1902, Ludwig was a wagoner at a mill in Hermaringen. Georg's mother Maria worked in the same village at her parents' farm and helped out there in the household. Georg was born on January 4, 1903, in Hermaringen.

After getting married in 1904, Georg's parents moved to Königsbronn, a community north of Heidenheim. There Ludwig ran a hauling business—at first with two horses, then later on with four—and he dealt in wood. With the help of an inheritance, he was able to build up a farm. However, it was Maria who had to manage the farm, even though they had small children—the father paid little attention to it.

Georg's relationship with his father was very difficult for him, but that relationship was of no interest to the Gestapo, even though it was marked by extreme rage and brutality. Georg's long-standing and deeply rooted aversion to the Nazis had its basis in his experiences with his father. In the interrogation in Berlin, Elser was questioned extensively about his father. This part of the transcript, like most passages in the record, had to be laboriously patched together from many side questions. For his part, Elser felt no need to criticize his father. The questions touched a sore spot inside him: his depressing family life, which forever remained traumatic for him.

During the interrogation in Berlin, Georg tried at first to conceal, or at least play down, the difficult relationship he had had with his father. Only persistent grilling succeeded in dragging the unpleasant memories out of him:

The Elser family in front of their house in Königsbronn in 1910. From left: unidentified girl holding Ludwig Elser, who died in 1915; Maria; Georg; Friederike; and their mother Maria, holding Anna Elser.

Not every day, but very often, my father came home quite late. As far as I know, he was frequently at a pub. My mother told us children that my father beat her often—however, I never saw this. Whether my father just hit her with his hand, or maybe with a chair, a lamp, or something else, I can't say. Sometimes when my father came home at night, he would get us out of bed for some reason—to help him take off his boots, for example. And I can't remember, but I don't believe that he ever beat us at night when he was drunk. The only time my father ever beat me—and this happened fairly often—was when I had been up to mischief. And my mother beat me too—every once in a while, but not often.

After a family quarrel over the house on Wiesenstrasse in Königsbronn, which was purchased in 1938, and in which Georg felt he had been cheated out of his rights, he became estranged from his mother and almost all his siblings. And it was this circumstance that gave rise to the legend of Georg the loner. His father was the only family member with whom his relations later improved. This was in part because his father was living in a summer house out on the Flachsberg and was suffering greatly, as the Gestapo attested in their outline of the family history: “Because of a rheumatic illness that he has had for years, both his legs are almost paralyzed. He appears to be suffering greatly; only when it is absolutely necessary, he is able to get around with the help of two canes.”

Georg Elser's father Ludwig at his wood storage site in Königsbronn, around 1920.

A photograph taken around 1920 shows Ludwig Elser at his wood storage site in Königsbronn. Standing in front of some large woodpiles is a short, stocky man—all the Elsers were small. During this time Georg had to constantly help his father, who, it must be said, did not have a real knack for the wood business. He was abrupt, ill-tempered, ambitious, and easily provoked. At wood auctions he would arrive with a few beers under his belt, so competitors— sometimes as a joke, other times on purpose—took advantage of him by pushing his bids higher than he could justify from a business perspective. At the end of the auction, Elser looked like the winner, but then incurred losses upon selling that ate away at the family estate. Situations like this may well have provoked his drinking and taking out his rage on his family.

In 1910, when Georg was seven years old, Maria had finally had enough and took her children to her parents' wagon shop in Hermaringen. A week later, Ludwig's sister managed to work out a reconciliation, and Maria and the children returned. Georg's early experiences with his father's violence probably gave rise to his strong sense of justice, which was a major motivating factor in his anti-Nazi views.

It was widely known in the community that the parents' marriage was a disaster. In 1959, as a journalist was tracking down Elser's background in Königsbronn, he met Anton Egetemaier, a tailor and mailman who had been in the zither club with Elser in the 1930s. According to Egetemaier, Elser's father was “extremely hot-tempered, inconsiderate, and violent. . . . At the slightest provocation he would fly into a rage, grab the nearest thing to use as a club, and then wale away indiscriminately at the whole family. This likely included his wife.” In 1950, Maria said nothing about the grim family circum-stances, but she lavished praise on Georg in a belated effort at reconciliation with her eldest son, who had been driven away. “Georg was an obedient boy and gave us no trouble. He was fairly quiet—almost too quiet, we thought.”

As the eldest, Georg was in every way the most severely affected. Since the next of his siblings were girls, he was the only one who had to work in the wood business, as well as the farm that his mother ran. He didn't even get an allowance for his labor—yet his father found money to squander in the taverns.

In addition, Georg had to be “nursemaid” to his younger siblings. As was often the case with farm families, Georg was able to do his homework only after he had finished his chores. His parents had no interest in his schoolwork—they never even asked about his grades. Later, during the interrogation in Berlin, Georg Elser recalled that such treatment had made learning “rather difficult” for him. The only way he could develop his talents was autodidactically.

In school, things were not quite as difficult for Georg as they were at home, but he liked only the subjects that he did well in—penmanship, arithmetic, and drawing. There was no shortage of beatings at school—but Georg was simply inured to them. “I didn't get any more beatings than the others, and I only got them when I hadn't done my homework properly.” And since he had to work on the farm, this was frequently the case. Most of the teachers, Elser recalled, were fair—for him an important factor in judging people's character. In the interrogation in Berlin he said of his first teacher: “As far as I know, he administered beatings only when they were called for.”

It was a different story with his teacher in the fourth and fifth grades, who “would sometimes just beat everybody in the whole class.” But such behavior was the exception, even back in those days. It was during this very period that Elser was rewarded on two occasions—even though it was in a typically modest Swabian way: One time, he received a notebook for a drawing he had done, and another time he got ten pfennigs for his good performance in arithmetic.

Maria's only respite—and only comfort—was in attending Bible study on Sunday afternoons, which took place at the Protestant Church. The Bible study harkened back to the days of Württemberg Pietism, but was not a Pietist “lesson” as such. This may have had an influence on Georg because as he became more nervous during his preparations for the bomb attack, he sought solace in reciting the Lord's Prayer in a quiet church, regardless of the denomination. Throughout his life, his only other comfort lay in his handicraft and in music.

Someone who could identify with Georg Elser's traumatic childhood was his girlfriend Elsa Härlen. She had been through a marriage similar to that of Elser's mother: Her husband was a drunkard, worked only sporadically, and then drank up the money. She called her marriage her “martyrdom.” Georg Elser was able to pour out his heart to her, as Elsa Härlen recalled twenty years later. He had never had a real home; his father frequently drank away the family income, and Georg, as the eldest, had to look after his mother and his siblings. “He must have had a dreadful childhood,” Elsa concluded. Elsa enjoyed baking pastries, which Georg ate with particular gusto, having never had anything of the sort at home. “My mother didn't even have the money to buy half a pound of sugar once in a while,” he said.

At the start of World War I, Elser's father was ordered to Ulm as a driver for the construction work on the fortress. Toward the end of each year during the war, the Elsers suffered from hunger. A certain portion of their farm production had to be given up, and they were allowed to keep only a small amount for themselves, which had to last them for the entire following year. For Georg Elser, the war constituted a dramatic and portentous turning point, even though he was not drafted into service. Later on, the Gestapo had difficulty under-standing why someone like Elser, who had not been a soldier, would try to prevent war.

Because of his family, which was on the social fringe in Königsbronn, and because of his troubled life, Georg Elser did not exactly enjoy great popularity among his young peers. But his best friend Eugen Rau sat next to him at school from the first grade on and played an influential role in Georg's first choice of occupation; he also lived next door to him on Wiesenstrasse, where the family's second house was located. During the interrogation in Berlin, in which Elser strove to divert the suspicion of the Gestapo away from everyone he knew, he pulled off a clever move. Rau could consider himself fortunate that Elser downgraded their friendship, calling it no longer very close, and then craftily named Hans Scheerer, who had emigrated to America and not been heard from again, as his only friend. Elser was successful in concealing the names of other friends, such as the Communist Josef Schurr.

In 1917, Elser finished seventh grade, the final year of elementary school. While waiting to start an apprenticeship in the fall, he worked at his father's wood business and on his mother's farm; he received room and board, but no wages. His thriftiness, which was to stand him in good stead during the preparations for the assassination attempt, took on a quality of stinginess, as Robert Sapper, his foreman in Königsbronn, later remarked. Elser didn't know the meaning of spare time. The first chance he got to develop his own skills outside the family came later on, at Lake Constance.

On the advice of Eugen Rau, Elser started an apprenticeship as a lathe operator at the Königsbronn Iron Works, one of the oldest industrial plants in Württemberg. The deciding factor for Elser in choosing this occupation over the objections of his father was that Eugen was working at the same plant. Elser considered it worthy of note that he had not received a beating from his father for this decision. His father advised against it, but his mother supported him. Ludwig wanted the boy to continue working at home—as unpaid help, to be sure. Then he managed to get Georg to turn over all of his wages as an apprentice. Only when Georg wanted to buy something specific did he receive any money—and then it was the precise amount he needed for the purchase.