Bombing Hitler (29 page)

Even in his final days, Elser remained true to himself: “I at least have the satisfaction, even if it is no longer really satisfaction, of knowing that each and every one of them will be hanged!” This was only partially true. While the Americans executed the twenty-eight most notorious mass murderers after the Dachau trials of 1945, the Soviets spared the life of every murderous thug in the hope of being able to win over the war generation politically.

The relatively cordial attitude in the camp toward the unknown special prisoner changed when Pastor Niemöller heard of his presence. The only thing the pastor had seen on Elser was the photograph in the 1939 SS magazine. The final proof of the prisoner's identity for him was the workbench. Niemöller, a special prisoner and internationally respected man of the cloth, became the self-appointed judge of this helpless man without ever having spoken a word with him. Niemöller informed the other clergymen, all of whom were Catholics, about Elser's identity (he called him “Eller”). The clergymen elected to call him by the code name “The Zither Player.”

When Elser's prediction that he would not leave captivity alive became known, the enmity toward him among his fellow prisoners began to abate. Elser made a pitiable impression upon Dr. Michael Höck, director of the Catholic Seminary in Freising and a Gestapo prisoner since 1941, and this impression helped to break down the prejudice against him. Höck conferred with Johann Neuhãusler, who before his arrest was a cathedral canon in Munich. The clergymen would then “pluck up their courage,” as they put it, and persuade an SS officer to take “an Easter package to Elser containing Easter eggs, flatbread, etc.” It was Easter week, on Maundy Thursday—April 5, 1945. Elser wept with joy that there were still people thinking about him.

The time of Hitler and his assassin was coming to a close. After March 11, Hitler did not leave his bunker in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery. On April 2, he dictated his political will and testament to Bormann. One last time, his deranged logic manifested itself as he proclaimed that victory would be more certain even as the situation became more dire: “The more we have to suffer, the more striking will be the resurgence of the eternal Reich!” Hitler believed that people would be forever grateful to him for exterminating the Jews in Germany and central Europe.

Three days later on April 5, after an audience with Hitler, Himmler issued the order to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the SD, that he was to decide the fate of the special prisoners. At the very center of this group of victims was Georg Elser. Gestapo Müller signed the order of execution the same day and handed it to SS man Wilhelm Gogalla to take with him as he traveled south to Dachau. The dispatch was labeled “express letter,” but the trip took four full days.

The express letter was addressed to the commandant of the concentration camp at Dachau. It established the procedure for transferring the prominent special prisoners to the facility, ordered good treatment of others, and specified that Secret Service men Best and Stevens were to have no contact with each other—which was nothing new. But in the case of Elser, who was referred to throughout as “Eller,” there were special instructions emanating from the “highest level,” meaning of course Hitler, the one whose name could not be spoken. The instructions read:

During one of the next terrorist attacks on Munich or the area around Dachau [this was standard jargon for bombing raids], “Eller” was apparently fatally injured. It is my order that, when such a situation arises, “Eller” be liquidated in a completely inconspicuous manner. I further order that extreme caution be taken to inform as few individuals as possible and that these be sworn to absolute confidence. . . . After this communication is read and understood, I order that it be destroyed.

Elser was considered among the most dangerous of the prisoners still alive. Hitler had not forgotten him; after almost six years, the blow from the Bürgerbräu attack had still not lost its effect on him.

SS officer Gogalla, a butcher by trade, started off in a truck with a Gestapo escort, taking special prisoners from Buchenwald with him and then stopping in Flossenbürg where, along with an execution order, he dropped off Canaris, Bonhoeffer, and others who were then hanged on the morning of his departure on April 9. At the makeshift concentration camp at Schönfeld, Gogalla picked up the Englishman Best and the Russian Kokorin. He arrived at Dachau around nine in the evening.

Gogalla handed over the sealed order to the commandant, who opened it and relayed it to the man in charge of the bunker, Edgar Stiller. The insidious bureaucracy of SS operations functioned until the bitter end. The “Political Department” placed its stamp in the upper left-hand corner, noting the admission date, 4/9/1945, and the day book number. In early May in South Tyrol, Best would succeed in spiriting this letter out of Stiller's briefcase, managing to do so before the liberation and before Stiller could destroy it.

From the commandant's office at the camp came a call for SS officer Ludwig Rottmaier, giving the order: “Schorsch to the gate!” That evening Elser was having his favorite meal, semolina pudding with cherry compote, which, given his almost chronic stomach problems, agreed with him best. Rottmaier proceeded from the guard cell to Elser's cell, where he called him out of his cell, telling him that he had to report for interrogation. But Elser hadn't been interrogated in years. Why now, when the end of the war was so near and one would sooner expect orders to evacuate the camp? That same evening his two cells were reassigned to the French special prisoner Léon Blum and his wife.

Wearing a coat but no hat, Georg Elser walked out into the corridor, where he saw Dr. Lothar Rohde in the cell across from his. He exchanged a glance with him, from which Rohde concluded Elser was expecting the end. He simply left without showing emotion or offering any resistance. Such things were futile in the camps.

An SS officer named Fritz, who was a recent arrival from Buchenwald and known for his brutality, led Elser to the guard house at the camp entrance. Elser might have believed that there was still hope for him until he was taken down the final path, past the electric fence to the end of the camp, and then across the brook to the Old Crematory.

What happened to Elser between the two crematoriums has never been determined. In the account of the assassination attempt, Elser's murderer is not identified. The crematorium was, like the bunker, completely isolated from the rest of the camp, and it was pitch black that night. The only people allowed to go there were those who had duties to perform. Thus there were hardly any witnesses.

The crematorium lay on the other side of the large wall, in the middle of a small park with beautiful old trees. Beginning in March 1943, regular executions were conducted here by shooting the victims in the back of the head. A special setup was constructed for the executions. In front of a backstop for bullets, there was a wooden grating placed over a trench. Many prisoners knew of this murder facility— they could hear the gunshots in the camp. Previously, Jewish prisoners had done the cremation work. A former prisoner named Ziegler reported the following: “The men on the work detail before me were all Jews, and according to Mahl, Bongartz forced all of them to hang themselves.” The hangings at the crematorium were handled primarily by a prisoner named Mahl who functioned as an overseer. The Gestapo used the duty rooms to conduct interrogations, which were accompanied by torture—if they had been carried out in the general camp area, the screams of the subjects would have attracted too much attention.

At the crematorium there was an eight-man work detail under overseer Mahl. The man in charge of the crematorium was SS Oberscharführer Theodor Heinrich Bongartz. Beginning in 1950, in an extensive investigation carried out by District Court Munich II, all individuals who could be contacted were questioned. The one who should have been most familiar with the circumstances of Elser's death was the prisoner Mahl, a Nazi from Karlsruhe who had been found guilty of embezzlement at Party headquarters. After serving his time in jail, he was transferred to Dachau. As overseer at the crematorium he volunteered, against the advice of the prisoner functionaries, to be the hangman—for increased bread and schnapps rations.

After the war, Mahl appeared along with thirty-seven SS men before an American military court in the first Dachau trial, and in December 1945 was sentenced to death. His sentence was then reduced to ten years in prison, and in 1952, he was released from the fortress at Landsberg am Lech “on account of good behavior.”

While still in prison, Mahl was questioned as a witness and indicated that one night he and the prisoners at the crematorium had been ordered not to leave the building. The work detail was housed in the back rooms at the crematorium. Mahl said that he later heard one or two gunshots outside. Around 11:00 p.m., he was called by Bongartz to come with two men and pick up a body. Bongartz was standing about fifty yards away and in the darkness could only be recognized by his voice. The work detail could see only the beam of a flashlight. Mahl ordered the two prisoners to get on with it. Shortly afterward, three or four SS men walked through the small gate into the camp. Mahl could not rec-ognize who they were. He and his two men met Bongartz next to a body. Bongartz gave the order to cremate the body immediately. In contrast to the usual practice, the clothes were not removed from the body. The dead man was a little taller than 5' 6”, of slight build, with no beard or signs of balding. The next day Mahl had to remove the blood from the grass.

Apparently Mahl was ignorant of what was going on. He had no idea who the dead man was. Only after the prompting of the investigating judge Dr. Nikolaus Naaf did he conclude that it must have been Elser, because only two prisoners had been shot to death in the past several days, and the execution of Charles Delestraint, a French general of the resistance, took place during the day.

Execution site of Georg Elser and French General Delestraint on a sketch made by former prisoner Emil Mahl on November 3,1952.

A year later, in July 1952, Mahl was calling himself an antifascist in hopes of receiving restitution for his imprisonment. He wrote to the Munich District Court for Reparations asking that, “without exception, all details and all murders be cleared up and substantiated.” He stated that he would address any discrepancies: “Yes, at my appearance I am prepared to make clear to all nations the crimes of the SS, along with all details.” In the style typical of the antifascists of the time, he cited his reasons:

In declaring my readiness to testify, I do so only because, as a former prisoner, I feel a close connection to my comrades, living and dead, and know that I am not guilty of anything. The world should and must know of every murder and the location of the remains. What is more, all should know what means were used to send these comrades to their deaths. For no grass should be allowed to grow over this heinious [sic] spot, out of respect for the memory of our ded [sic] comrades in suffering.

Mahl even proposed that he give them a tour of the camp.

During the questioning by the court he became even more brazen, making the grand declaration that everything reported about Dachau thus far had been based “on deceit and deception,” and that he could pinpoint where every single murder in Dachau had been carried out, with one or two exceptions. Nevertheless, Dr. Naaf took the trouble to continue questioning Mahl in Karlsruhe for two days.

On the evening in question, according to this testimony, Bon-gartz ordered the work detail not to leave the crematorium. When they heard shots, they were to come immediately with a stretcher. Assigned to this task were the prisoners August Ziegler from Man-nheim and Franz Geiger from Augsburg.

Around 11:00 p.m. the three men heard gunfire. They took the stretcher and moved in the direction of the flashlight, which appeared to be about eighty feet outside the door to the new crematorium in the park. At the scene there was a dead man lying face down on the ground. Mahl's conviction was that Bongartz had committed the murder alone. “I can confirm with a clear conscience and absolute certainty that in my experience as an overseer, it was Bongartz who personally committed all such murders on the premises of the crematorium. He has many crimes to answer for, and in my opinion he was a completely ruthless criminal.” At the end, Mahl recalled that with Elser the only wound visible was a gunshot wound in the back of the head, and that when the work detail arrived he was already dead. Mahl had not known Elser previously. It was not until he found Elser's picture in a magazine while he was in prison in Landsberg that he recognized the dead man from that night.

In 1951, August Ziegler gave a more precise description. Around Christmas 1944, the number of cremations started increasing—there were 200 to 250 bodies a day, and there were four ovens in operation. Later on the SS started using mass graves in order to save on coke. At the time of Elser's execution, only those who had been hanged or shot were cremated. Shootings took place in the area in front of the new crematorium. The victims had to strip naked and were taken out into the yard to the backstop, where they had to kneel facing the backstop and were shot in the back of the head by Bongartz and occasionally by camp director Ruppert. Sometimes there was a doctor present. Eyewitnesses were strictly forbidden, but curiosity drove the prisoners to come out, as Ziegler admitted: “We were able to watch the shootings from a distance.” Then the prisoners had to rush out with the stretcher and carry the dead to the morgue. They had to inform Bongartz if a victim was still alive, and he would finish him off with another shot.