Bombing Hitler (4 page)

There was only one item in his pockets that belonged to Elser: the wire cutters. With these, he would have gotten through the border fence in only a few minutes. Perhaps once there he would have been considered a refugee. Perhaps in the cantons of Baselstadt or Schaffhausen, which were governed by the Social Democrats, but certainly not in Thurgau. Here the sentiment was inclined toward Hitler—with a good dose of anti-Semitism and enmity toward the left. In the best-case scenario, Elser might have been shunted off to France, as was Otto Strasser the next day. Through physical evidence of his work, Elser wanted to lay creative claim to the explosion in the Bürgerbräukeller. But the Gestapo would have immediately demanded of the Swiss that he be extradited as a felon, and the police in Bern would have complied with the demand. Elser's itinerary would have remained the same: Berlin, Sachsenhausen, Dachau.

Viewing the border episode this way places it in a new light. If Elser had succeeded in fleeing to Switzerland, his fate would not likely have been any different than it was following his capture in Konstanz. The case of Maurice Bavaud demonstrates that the Swiss at that time had no sympathy for a Hitler assassin. The Swiss ambassador in Berlin, Hans Frõlicher, could have arranged to exchange Bavaud, who had planned to kill Hitler with a pistol in 1938, for several Gestapo spies imprisoned in Switzerland. But he didn't want to. So Bavaud was executed by guillotine in Berlin-Plötzensee in 1941.

While Elser was being searched, he was threatened with beatings because he tried to pass off the detonator parts as clock parts. The threats were left out of the interrogation record, as they were considered standard tools of the trade. From this point on, until he was delivered to Sachsenhausen—more than a year later—Elser received frequent beatings; most were severe and sometimes life threatening.

When they were done, the customs officials called Gestapo head-quarters, located at Mainaustrasse 29 in the former Villa Rokka, and Gestapo officer Otto Grethe was sent to pick up Elser and bring him there for further questioning. Grethe's impression of Elser was that he was “an unremarkable man, at most 1.6 m. (5' 2”) tall—wavy hair, haggard, sullen expression.” From this point forward, Elser was addressed by his first name and du, the familiar form for “you.” (This would later be interpreted by some of Elser's prison inmates to mean that he was somehow entangled with the SS.)

Grethe interrogated Elser on the second floor at Gestapo headquarters. He believed none of Elser's excuses and noticed right away that he was “very unapproachable” and would admit nothing. Elser resisted the pressure; divulging nothing and giving out meaningless information as a defense. He even became “hostile,” claiming he had been arrested without cause and banging his fist on the table.

Around 11:00 p.m., after an hour of interrogation, which had produced nothing of substance for the Gestapo, news of the assassination attempt in the Bürgerbräukeller came in over the teletype, with instructions to close the borders and maintain strict surveillance.

Georg Elser appeared uninterested as one teletype after another containing the words “bomb attack” arrived at the Gestapo headquarters. There was no indication at this point whether or not Hitler was dead.

The Gestapo continued their interrogation of Elser until 4:00 a.m., when they finally locked him into a holding cell on the ground floor. Because he had detonator parts in his wallet, Elser would be interrogated by the next level of command. A message from the Gestapo central office in Karlsruhe was forwarded to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and to the Special Commission in Munich. The same day, Elser was transferred in a Gestapo car to Munich.

Later, in Berlin, the Gestapo asked Elser what he felt when challenged by the patrol at the border. His dry answer was: “Annoyance at myself and my thoughtlessness.” He regretted not having first looked around more carefully—a mistake he had not previously allowed himself. For the deed itself had been superbly prepared—his explosive device had functioned with great precision.

E
VEN BEFORE
Hitler arrived at the main train station in Munich, the Bürgerbräukeller lay in ruins. Hitler knew nothing more than that. The explosion that occurred at 9:20 p.m. was experienced by the eyewitnesses in very different ways, depending on their position in the hall and what they were doing at the time.

It was waitress Maria Strobl's job to wait on Hitler's table, but not on Hitler himself. In 1959 she told a journalist about that night. During Hitler's speech, she and some of her coworkers—there were thirty on duty—were standing near the restrooms smoking. At the end, when “Deutschland über alles” started up, they went to the entrance of the hall. The sound of chairs being pushed back was their cue to clear away the beer mugs and collect payment from the customers. The hall was emptying out quickly—Hitler was of course already gone, and there were only about 120 people left, including many musicians and technical support staff.

I wanted to clear the table, so I picked up ten large mugs. It was right by the column where Hitler was—I was waiting on those tables. I picked up the ten mugs and all of a sudden there was a blast that knocked me through the door into the entranceway. Rocks and all kinds of junk were falling on my head. Then I went out to the doctor's room. We thought a bomb had fallen somewhere. We didn't know anything. Then I got a cop to take me home.

The wreckage of the Bürgerbräukeller after the debris had been cleared.

When she got home, Maria Strobl realized that she had forgotten her purse and papers at the restaurant, so she had to go back. In the meantime, the SS had arrived. “It wasn't until then that I saw how the hall looked—everything had collapsed; the SS guys were making a fuss because somebody was smoking—nobody was supposed to smoke because they didn't know what was going on, right?” At first it was thought to be a poison gas bomb.

For a long time afterward, Maria Strobl could not hear and she suffered a serious nervous breakdown. She ended up experiencing permanent damage due to the blast. Night and day she could hear a rushing sound in her ears, and later on she became deaf in her left ear. And because of the abrupt end of the event, the men had not paid their tabs. Maria had to go to Party headquarters (known as the “Brown House”) nine times before someone finally agreed to cover the tabs run up by those who had skipped out on them that evening.

Four of the waitresses had to go to the hospital. Part-time waitress Maria Henle was killed immediately. A coworker who was clearing tables with her on the gallery said the whole gallery was rocking so hard during the explosion that she had the feeling she was on a swing.

In the days that followed, political elements began to creep into the recollections of the eyewitnesses, elements that had previously hardly been present at all. For example, on November 11, after returning from Munich, a recipient of the Nazi
Blutorden
(Blood Order) from Hamburg reported to the
Hamburger Tagblatt
that at the Bürgerbräukeller that evening, just as he was going through a door into the Bürgerbräustübl to get a snack, he was hurled to the floor by the blast. “At first, I didn't know what had happened,” he said. And then the
ex post facto
ideology sets in; everyone's first suspicion—that it was a bomb dropped from a plane—has now been pushed aside:

Our very first thought was: Thank God nothing happened to the Führer! From the scene of the tragedy we could hear the cries of pain from our injured Party comrades, men and women. Their cries for help sounded like a heartrending outcry against the bloody assassins who had executed this attempt on the life of the Führer and thereby on Germany itself. . . . After they had been told repeatedly that nothing had happened to the Führer, their eyes filled with tears of deep gratitude to Providence and then they appeared to forget all their pain.

The first report from the hospital mixed medical information with eyewitness accounts. The injured were covered with thick dust; the faces of many were bloody; most had injuries to the upper body—bruises, abrasions, skull fractures—caused as the ceiling and walls collapsed and the chandelier fell. The blast alone had had devastating consequences. “Several Old Soldiers were hurled from the gallery twenty feet down into the hall. Others were thrown under the tables with enormous force, and yet more were struck by falling beams.” As many recalled, “[. . .] a gigantic flame seemed to shoot up over the column where the Führer had been standing just a short while before. Then a mighty cloud of dust shrouded the hall in an impenetrable darkness. For several seconds longer, one could hear the masonry crumbling and the columns bursting. And throughout, loud cries for help reverberated through the hall.”

A prescient eyewitness, who had already been quoted in the
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
on November 9, expressed a suspicion not commonly heard at first: “There was a time bomb in the hall!” and, in true Hitler fashion, he drew the conclusion “The Führer was to be murdered—my God, what bestial mind could conceive and execute such horrors?”

In the
Berliner Lokalanzeiger
of November 11, other eyewitness reports appeared. An engineer named Jakob Royer, also a recipient of the
Blutorden,
was lucky. At the moment of the explosion, he was “about twenty feet away from the pillar and was flung unconscious under a table by the blast, thus being protected from the falling debris.” When he regained consciousness, he thought a bomb had been dropped, but he realized his error when he saw flames leaping head-high in the back of the hall.

Another witness, Emil Wipfel, was an engineer employed by the
Reichsautozug Deutschland,
a technical division of the SA which was responsible for providing power and water at mass assemblies of the Party. During the explosion, this group was in the process of disassembling the PA system and was therefore in the vicinity of the speaker's platform.

Suddenly, there was a brief, bright fiery glow around us. At the same moment, we heard a horrific bang. I was knocked back about six feet and landed on some debris; then everything started cracking and crashing down on me. When things quieted down, I was lying on my belly with my arm around the foot of my comrade Schachta. At that moment I was not yet aware that he was already dead. I couldn't move my left arm, and my feet were completely pinned down. It's astounding how cool one can remain in such a dire situation. At first, I had only one thought: that I had to remain still in order to prevent any further shifting of the beams or other debris lying on top of me. As I later learned, a part of the ceiling that had collapsed on the spot where the Führer's podium had been was lying on top of me. I suspect that it was supported just enough by a smashed table that was next to me—and maybe also by the body of my dead comrade—that I was not crushed. I could hardly breathe. Very close to me I soon heard the cries of trapped comrades and then started to call attention to myself. Over and over we shouted that no one should walk on the debris on top of us. However, it took a considerable time until the police could get us out because the debris was especially deep at precisely the location where we were trapped by it.

The most extensive eyewitness report was written by Dr. Wilhelm Kaffl, editor-in-chief of the National Socialist weekly,
Die Post,
and a staunch supporter of Hitler:

For a fraction of a second, it's eerily quiet and dark. But a few light bulbs have remained intact—I see the first people pushing through the exit—dark figures, totally covered in dust! Mechanically, I reach for my coat, which the deathly pale attendant has just tossed to me. Screaming loudly, a young girl, who is probably coming from the nearby kitchen, rushes past me. I'm still standing there shouting, asking what's happening. Understandably, I receive no answer. A couple of people close to me run to the entrance to the hall—as do I! But we can't swim against the stream now flooding out of the hall. But even worse: A yellowish-gray opaque wall—probably made up of dust and residue from the explosion—moves toward us. The indescribable stench of the fog causes someone next to me to shout: “Air attack—poison gas—everybody out!” I already have my hand over my nose and mouth and am digging for a handkerchief. I give up trying to get into the hall. From somewhere there came a shout: “Lock everything—nobody leaves the premises!” I try to make myself useful and join with others to form a barrier. In the meantime, it has become clear that there had been no air attack and that no gas bombs had been dropped—rather, that something far more horrible must have happened:
a crime, an assassination attempt, a murderous attack on the Führer!
We were seized by a nameless rage. Where are
the murderers,
who are they? We have no time to think. Covered in blood, some of the wounded have dragged themselves out of the hall. That was shortly before 9:30, and the explosion had happened perhaps five minutes before. Did I say wounded? Correct! God knows what else might have happened there in the hall. We have to help! We quickly break away from our human chain. The way into the hall, which is almost dark, is open. Our eyes take a moment to adjust.
Then we see what happened here.
Our first concern:
wounded comrades.
We find them: in a corner, on a broken chair, lying in broken glass and debris. And we get waitresses out as well. In the mean-time it has cleared up somewhat—or perhaps it just seems that way to us. Suddenly there are medics among us with stretchers and bandages. Several women in nurse uniforms are setting about their work quickly yet calmly. From the courtyard we hear the bell of the fire department and the sirens of the bomb attack squad. At last! Those few minutes of waiting after the alarm seemed like hours to us. Now at last we find time to look around us in the hall: a picture of gruesome destruction. A good part of the suspended ceiling has crashed down into the hall. A mountain of debris—boards, iron girders, broken chairs and tables—is piled high as a man from the main entrance to the middle of the hall.
Yes, to the middle of the hall
—right to the spot where, twenty minutes before, the Führer was standing and speaking, where Rudolf Hess, Dr. Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and many more of our leaders were sitting—all the way to this point the wreckage was piled, standing in indictment of one of the most vile and brutal crimes in the history of the world.
The Führer lives!
Three words—we spoke them as the most fervent prayer ever to issue from our hearts and mouths. The hatred, the malevolence of this criminal rabble—were shattered by him.
He lives
—and we shall stamp out this pestilence which threatens to take over this world, sending out its putrid breath against justice, honor, and manliness, and stopping at nothing, however base or low.