Bombing Hitler (11 page)

Several days earlier, on November 23, during his last interrogation, Elser had said he firmly believed that, in accordance with his religious beliefs, he had committed no sin with his assassination attempt against Hitler. This was likely what Elsa Härlen had read in his gestures.

Heinrich Himmler frequently interjected himself into the inter-rogations of the Königsbronn group. On one occasion, he had them all brought face to face with Georg at the same time, but with no results. One night Elsa Härlen was awakened at 1:30 a.m. and taken to Himmler's office. He was strikingly pleasant to her and had her tell him the smallest details: the troubles with her ex-husband, who drank, and how friendly Elser was by contrast. Himmler rarely interrupted her and did not appear mistrustful or haughty. She did not perceive the situation as an interrogation. After two or three hours, Himmler stood up, patted her on the shoulder, and said approvingly: “Hats off to you, Frau Härlen; you are truly a fine Swabian woman!”

Two days later at noontime she was taken by car to the Reich Chancellery to see Hitler. After leading her down endless corridors and past many rooms, two SS men flung open a door and Elsa Härlen was suddenly standing in a large office. At a desk sat Hitler in a field-gray uniform. Not looking up, he continued reading. An SS man announced Frau Härlen; Hitler glanced up but said nothing. She wanted to raise her arm in salute, but she couldn't. She got a poke in the ribs from the SS man, but all she could manage to do was stammer, “My Führer!” Her arm wouldn't react—it was as if it had become lame. One thought raced through her mind, a mixture of comedy and horror. Seeing Hitler there before her, the only thing she could think of was: “Der Schnurrbart-August!” (“Mustache August”
¹
). Charlie Chaplin would surely have been pleased with her.

Now Hitler began to interrogate Elsa Härlen, but, unlike Himmler, he wanted to twist her every remark, make her feel guilty. He insinuated that she had maintained contact with Elser when he was in Munich. She determinedly stuck to the truth: “No, my Führer, that's not how it was.” Hitler expressed interest in Elser's character and habits; he wanted to know everything about him. The interrogation with Hitler lasted until around 8:00 p.m., without a meal break. At the end Hitler started playing tough, threatening her, saying that he wanted to talk to her again, that she was still hiding something from him. She made reference to the friendlier tone used by Himmler, saying also that he had believed her.

A few days later, Elsa Härlen was interrogated by Martin Bormann, again in the Reich Chancellery. Bormann too was pleasant, she stated. Hitler and Himmler had anticipated that the hot-and-cold treatment of terror and luxurious comfort, punishing interrogations and friendly attention by top-level Nazi officials, would so confuse the little people from the Ostalb that they would say whatever was required of them. But the elaborate undertaking in Berlin was a failure—not a single detail was revealed that was not already known. Above all, Elser could not in any consistent way be forced to dream up foreign agents of some kind nor to implicate others whom he had intentionally excluded from his plans.

On November 28, all those from Königsbronn except for Maria and Karl Hirth were released, but first they had to execute the customary agreement to maintain absolute silence. As they were returning home unaccompanied, the Elsers did not speak a word to Elsa Härlen. She had never been considered one of them. As a divorced woman, she had always been rejected, thereby once again making Georg Elser's isolation within the family clear. Once they were back at home, the interro-gations started again in earnest and went on for six months—over and over the same humiliating trip to the Gestapo, over and over the same mindless questions that had already been answered dozens of times. The Elsers, with their country ways and lack of education, looked far brighter than the vaunted Gestapo. At least at the Stuttgart Gestapo, the conclusion was finally reached that Georg Elser had acted alone.

Maria Hirth and her husband were not released from Gestapo custody in Berlin and allowed to return home until February 20, 1940. For a long time afterward, both remained out of work—no one wanted to employ family members of the assassin. Then after her nervous breakdown, Maria was not able to work at all for some time.

¹
The reference in this mocking remark by Härlen is not clear, possibly a popular clown figure or cartoon character.

I
N THE GESTAPO
cellar during the night of November 13 or early morning of November 14, 1939, Elser concluded that there was no way to escape the interrogations, which were becoming increasingly coercive and brutal. The mistreatment had taken a heavy toll on a body severely weakened by months of working at night. Even the Kripo was not able to protect Elser from the torture ordered by Himmler, despite the fact that Kripo chief Nebe had reportedly ordered that the violence be stopped. Nebe's word carried weight only in the absence of Himmler and Gestapo Müller.

Elser's explanations for his three-month stay in Munich and the attempted border crossing were gradually falling apart. In Munich, he claimed, he had intended to take a course and then go work abroad as a skilled craftsman; but he couldn't give a description of the course. He also indicated that he wanted to go abroad in order to “get out of paying support for a child born out of wedlock.” But the contents of his pockets pointed to work in espionage and explosives. In addition, Elser was recognized by more and more employees of the Bürger-bräukeller, including the former errand boy, whose job he tried to get in exchange for a payment of some fifty marks—easily more than a week's salary for a skilled worker. And then he was recognized by the man who sold him the insulation plate that had been found in the pile of debris. There were simply no loopholes left.

One thing was accomplished by the friendly approach of the Kripo officers under Nebe. They had experience in dealing with an untalkative type who had been driven into a corner; they knew how to soften him up by taking the right tone—by being soothing and encouraging, by making promises.

Huber was a master at this. With his knowledge of the area— he was from Munich—he had frequently taken Elser on imagined walks around the city, including the Bürgerbräukeller. He became suspicious when Elser, with his peasant shrewdness, “misheard” it as “Löwenbräukeller.” This had to be a weak spot.

On November 14, Elser was brought face-to-face with Maria Schmauder from Schnaitheim. When he saw her, although it was only briefly and in passing, Nebe, Müller, and other Gestapo men noticed that he winced and turned pale—a fairly flimsy “clue.” At other times, an informant was placed in the cell with Elser in order to prevent any attempt at escape or suicide. Elser had no interest in either—it was the informant who brought up the subject.

Finally, Elser declared to a commissar that he wanted to make a confession. The interrogation was interrupted immediately. Present at the ensuing night interrogation were Nebe, Huber, Lobbes, and Huber's secretary. It lasted from 12:30 a.m. until 4:00 a.m. on November 15. Huber later said that Elser had simply been allowed to talk without being interrogated. This was not really believable since Elser was anything but talkative. But Elser possibly had more of an opportunity to present his own view here than he had later on at the five-day interrogation in Berlin. He may also have believed that here he was talking to save his neck, that he might still get off—the understandable hope of a man destined to die.

In Huber's version given in 1966, the confession occurred in an almost relaxed atmosphere:

We were all sitting around a table. Frau Kranz was handling the transcription splendidly—she even captured the Swabian dialect as in a photograph [!]. I knew Swabian dialect as well, and that may have been one reason why I was able to establish a good relationship with Elser from the start. . . . At the beginning Elser said something like: ‘Well, it was me!' Then he began to talk; he was awkward and confused at first, but after a while he spoke easily. He related the details of the precision work that he had performed. He said nothing at all about his reasons or any possible instigators. We also asked no questions; we just occasionally said, “Aha,” or asked, “And how did it go from there?” Elser was obviously under great strain. During this time, he drank two entire bottles of seltzer. He also told us about having a small hiding place on the gallery. There was all kinds of junk lying around there; the work apron he left there along with a chisel and a drill attracted no attention. When using his tools, by the way, he always wrapped them in cloth in order to avoid creating unnecessary noise. He also told us about befriending Ajaxel, the innkeeper's dog.

The transcript of Elser's confession was clearly not satisfactory, and it must have been filled with Swabian expressions which would never do in Berlin. So on November 15, a proper written confession was created. After listening to the prisoner, a commissar reformulated the sentences himself and dictated them directly to a typist.

What Elser said during these two days in Munich must have gone into the final two-volume report of the Special Commission, which appeared in a limited edition bound in red, for internal use only. All Gestapo stations received a copy for training purposes. Unfortunately, not a single copy has survived. At the end of the war, these volumes vanished either in the bombardments or in the mountains of files that the Gestapo burned in order to destroy the records of their crimes.

Hitler, who even today still has the reputation of having good intuition when it came to assassination attempts, declared to Goebbels on November 14, “Probably the perpetrators . . . are long since out of the country.”

On November 15, Goebbels noted: “Himmler has now found the first of the Munich assassins—a technician from Württemberg. But we're still missing the instigators. For this reason, we will not yet publish anything.” The Gestapo worked on proving that Elser was a stooge of the British Intelligence Service and of Otto Strasser, a member of the Nazi opposition.

Since November 9, the matter of the Venlo abduction of the two British Secret Service men had continued to simmer. Heydrich, the man in charge, kept his plans secret for days, even from Kripo boss Nebe. Even Army Intelligence did not learn about it until November 15. The Gestapo interpretation made its way into Goebbel's diary on November 16: “[. . .] the actual assassin is a minion of Otto Strasser, who was in Switzerland during the crucial period. After the attempt he made tracks for England, apparently to report to those issuing the orders and the payoffs—the work of the Secret Service. We're still keeping everything secret in order not to tip off the instigators.”

All the connections were wildly invented. Strasser had already been expelled by the Swiss political police on November 9, before the Nazis had even brought him into the picture. The expulsion had already been decided upon sometime before this date. Later on, it was postulated that Elser had gone to Zurich for several days to see Strasser—another theory the Gestapo dreamed up. Nebe's criminal division did not buy this foolishness.

After Elser's written confession was made, the Kripo wanted to visit the scene of the crime with the perpetrator. Elser considered this superfluous; he said he knew the premises well enough and still had the measurements in his head, including those for his explosive device. Later, on November 16 and 17, under the close watch of the Kripo, he filled several large pages with sketches. Unfortunately, these components of the confession were destroyed as well. During the Berlin interrogations of November 19 through 23, he made five new sketches, on a life-size scale, but these too were lost during the war or in the postwar period.

Why did Elser go so far in cooperating with the Kripo? It had nothing to do with some self-important desire to tell all or a sudden eagerness to confess. Elser had been declared guilty, so he saw no reason to withhold technical details. Of course, his artisan's pride had probably been stirred. The Nazis simply didn't consider this man, the little cabinetmaker from the Ostalb, capable of such a sensational deed. By producing precise sketches out of his head he demonstrated two things: the high level of his technical skills and— more important to him—his sole responsibility for the attack. The more extensively he described his activities, the more indisputable it became that he had been the only one involved. This made it possible for him to keep others out of the proceedings who might have had some peripheral connection to the preparations. He wanted to assume full responsibility and not drag anyone else into his misfortune.

This was a basic tenet of the best resistance fighters, from the military opposition to the Communists: If one of them had to go to the gallows, then he went alone and took no one else with him. Elser developed this tenet out of his own fundamental sense of ethics—he almost certainly never had any contact with resistance movements. His greatest success during the entire ordeal was probably that he was able to convince the Kripo and even the Gestapo of his sole involvement in the commission of the act. Under this regime, which saw in every individual only a puppet manipulated by outside forces, this was an extraordinary accomplishment.