Bombing Hitler (22 page)

On September 8, Waldenmaier files a claim regarding the missing item. Rheinmetall Borsig answers on September 14 “that it is not possible that an item could have disappeared from the shipment if the shipping container arrived in sealed condition.” The container had not been damaged. But Elser did not come under suspicion until much later, when detonator parts were found in his clothing after he tried to cross the border into Switzerland.

The incubation period for the decision on the assassination attempt might have begun as early as fall 1936 when he left his position as a cabinetmaker with Grupp because of the low pay of fifty-five pfennigs an hour. He admitted to his interrogators that he could have easily found a better-paying job as a cabinetmaker, but even so, he took the job working in the dirty conditions of the fettling shop, making only fifty-eight to sixty-two pfennigs an hour. Previously, he would have rejected such work with indignation.

In Berlin Elser explains to the Gestapo, “I had no interest in making more money; I was just looking for work that I enjoyed.” He added: “If I had earned any more, it wouldn't have done me any good because any wages over 24 RM [Reichsmark] a week would have been docked for payment of alimony.”

According to Josef Schurr's letter to the editor of 1947, he and Elser had met up again in 1937 when they were both employed at Waldenmaier. Schurr noted that Elser's politics had not changed: “I immediately started to feel him out to find out to what extent he had remained committed to his antifascist position. To my amazement, I saw that Elser had become even more radical in the fight against Hitler's fascism than he had been in years past. We renewed our mutual commitment with a pledge: ‘May Hitler die a horrible death— and soon!' “

Elser dates what they did next (perhaps in an effort to protect Schurr) to two years later, when he was living at the Schmauders' place in Schnaitheim. As Schurr wrote in his letter: “We frequently got together at my apartment [Heckenstrasse 9 in Schnaitheim] to learn the truth about what was going on in the world over the radio.” Foreign stations were always “a source of strength” for them, he wrote.

At the time when Elser started working at Waldenmaier, reports of increasing levels of dissatisfaction and fear of war were becoming more frequent. The main reason was the worsening civil war in Spain, in which Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin had become involved. Restrictions regarding materials necessary for arms production were put in place. The radio stations in Moscow and Strasbourg were casting doubts on Hitler's willingness to seek peace, doubts that Elser saw confirmed in 1938.

More clearly than those in the military opposition, who appeared content with each new victory that Hitler chalked up, Elser observed that Hitler was provoking war. After the Munich Pact, Hitler insisted hypocritically that the Sudeten areas would be his last territorial demand. However, because Elser was able to witness firsthand the rapid increase in arms production at Waldenmaier, he never believed Hitler's claims that he wanted peace.

During the interrogations in Berlin, the Gestapo employed an ideological strategy in an effort to get at Elser's motives for the attack. But as victims of their own ideology, they used as points of departure religion, faith, and
Weltanschauung
and were thus not able to under-stand Elser, who was a calculating, intelligent workman. On this level he was much more modern than his adversaries. His motivation lay not in an ideology; rather, it was to be found in people's living conditions and in the entirely predictable collective catastrophe brought on by Hitler's politics of war.

Elser's motives and his rejection of the Nazi regime become most evident on the third day of interrogation. The chapter entitled “To the point” in the printed record takes up five pages, rep-resenting about two hours of interrogation. Elser begins with a bombshell the likes of which the Nazi leadership rarely got to hear. Under other circumstances, the man being interrogated would have immediately been beaten to a pulp. But Elser was shielded for two reasons: First, Hitler and Himmler were interested in the criminal aspects of his case, and second, the Gestapo commissars were gaining increasing respect for this impressive assassin from such humble origins.

Elser begins with an economic assessment commonly voiced by the working-class opposition at the time: “In my opinion, conditions for workers since the national revolution have in many ways gotten worse.” Only here does Elser allow himself to be forced into using the otherwise detested expression “national revolution”; otherwise he holds fast to his condemnation, going quickly into considerable detail: “For instance, I saw that wages kept decreasing and the deductions kept increasing. . . . While I was working at the clock factory in Konstanz in 1929, I was earning on average 50 RM a week; at the time the deductions for taxes, health care, unemployment, and disability came to only about 5 RM. Today the deductions on a weekly salary of 25 RM amount to that.” And then there were the significant wage reductions. In 1929 a carpenter earned between 1.00 and 1.05 marks an hour, now it was sixty-eight pfennigs (Elser had worked at Grupp for less). He cites conversations with workers from other trades—all of whom confirmed the worsening wages. He reports on the dissatisfaction he observed in all the communities where he had lived. By this testimony, Elser was clearly not the isolated loner—a mischaracterization that was an apparent attempt to remove his name from the history of the Resistance.

Another element that fuels Elser's radicalism is his commitment to independence. He is a socialist, but a liberal one—not one in favor of strict regimentation. In his view, the working class at the time is “under some coercion.” Elser points out that a worker may not change jobs at will—and he views this as a fundamental right, one that he has often exercised. He notes that workers' children are being alienated from their parents by the Hitler Youth, and that workers are losing their religious freedom. Elser says that the Nazis' assault on the churches is abhorrent. Even though he is not a churchgoer, he feels that people should have the freedom to choose in the matter of religion as well.

Observing such widespread dissatisfaction leads Elser to draw a radical conclusion, one that undermines the very basis of the Nazi system: “During this period I have become convinced that, because of all these things, workers are outraged at the government.” And he observed this negative attitude everywhere he went: in factories, in taverns, on trains. In the course of his descriptions we learn about the places in which his political views took shape.

Finally, Elser makes a remark that is a logical conclusion stemming from his observation of the poor morale among workers: “In the fall of 1938, from everything I observed, working people generally assumed that war was inevitable.” He comments that even though things had calmed down after the Munich Pact, he had gained a different perspective on the situation. On this point Elser shows himself to have had better foresight than the entire military opposition, which intended to topple Hitler in the fall of 1938 but canceled plans when Hitler prevailed against England and France in Munich. In Elser's view, Hitler was just beginning to become dangerous.

His view sounds like an article of faith, his first in the course of this interrogation: “Last year [1938] at this time, I had already come to the conclusion that the Munich Pact wouldn't be the end of it and that Germany would make more demands on other countries and continue to take over other countries, so that war would be inevitable.” He went on to say that listening to foreign radio broadcasts had strengthened his convictions.

In his next statement, Elser makes clear the point alluded to at the beginning of the chapter: “The dissatisfaction I had observed among the workers since 1933 and the war I had considered inevitable since the fall of 1938 occupied my thoughts constantly.” Here at last we learn what it was that preoccupied the taciturn Elser. But he does not just speak of the fear of war as most others do; he plainly wants to “avoid war.”

Point by point Elser continues; he is ready to articulate his political views, having spent many solitary hours refining them: “My observations led me to the conclusion that conditions in Germany could only be improved by removing the current leadership.” He is immediately asked who the leadership is. Heretofore Elser has been circumspect regarding ideological questions, but he is well aware of who his target is: “By leadership I meant the ‘uppermost authorities'. . . “ Again the Gestapo fires a question, not letting him off the hook, and he is forced to add: “. . . by this I mean Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels. Through my deliberations I came to the conclusion that, by removing these three men, other men would come to power who would not make unacceptable demands of foreign countries, ‘who would not want to involve another country', and who would be concerned about improving social conditions for the workers.”

Expansionist-style nationalism, which has influenced broad segments of the opposition among the military and the bourgeoisie, leaves Elser unmoved. He has no interest in foreign countries. The commissars find his exhortations to cease further conquests so shock-ing and embarrassing that they place them in quotation marks. With comments as dangerous as these their police jargon is of no use; they are unable to translate them into standard Party terminology, thus rendering them less inflammatory.

Elser's pragmatism extends to politics as well. He assumed that the Nazis would not relinquish power after the assassination and did not believe that he could destroy National Socialism on his own. His goals were more modest: “I was simply of the opinion that removing these three men could bring about a modification of the political objectives.” In contrast to the military-bourgeois opposition, Elser did not give much thought to the composition of a new government.

Now Elser draws his conclusion—the decision to act: “Once the idea of removing the leadership had come up, I couldn't get it out of my head, and in the fall of 1938—this was before November 1938—I had reached the decision, for all the reasons I've stated, to undertake removing the leadership myself.”

In the interrogation the Gestapo had failed in its effort to portray Elser as an unstable henchman with no thoughts of his own, who was under the control of foreign powers. In spite of the gawking spectators, usually heavily armed chaps whose final argument was war and extermination, Elser managed to maintain his dignity as an independent thinker.

On the previous day, the police officers had tried to shake Elser's basic religious beliefs. They encountered a devout Swabian Protestant who had been raised by a sternly religious mother but whose father did not think much of religion. He had retained a belief in traditional religious values, which bolstered his conviction that by eliminating a mass murderer he was doing good. What could be considered good in this situation was very apparent to him: “I wanted to prevent even greater bloodshed through my act.”

When the commissars asked him whether he understood his act to be a sin in the Protestant sense, he answered decisively, since he had asked himself this question a hundred times: “In a deeper sense, no.” Holding up to him the eight victims of his attack had no impact—Elser felt confident in the moral and religious superiority of his position.

Scarcely anyone could have formulated a more moving tribute to the morality of Elser's position than Arthur Nebe did to Gisevius around Christmas 1939: “You know what Elser's problem was? This man of the people loved ordinary people; he laid out for me passionately and in simple sentences how, for the masses in all countries, war means hunger, misery, and the death of millions. Not a ‘pacifist' in the usual sense, his reasoning was quite simplistic: Hitler is war—and if he goes, there will be peace . . .”

T
HE MATERIALS NEEDED
for an assassination attempt were not all that difficult to come by if one was determined. Elser did not allow himself to get caught up in the widespread fear of the police state, and nowhere did he encounter security checks. This general lack of concern was to some extent justified, because the regime knew it could count on its citizens. For a people for whom obedience to authority was a chief virtue, assassination was unthinkable.

Elser's first thoughts concerning a favorable occasion for an attack tended in the direction of some kind of rally, but he changed his mind when he read a newspaper report announcing that Hitler would speak on November 8, 1938, at the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, as he did every year. All the woodworker had to do was get on a train, travel to Munich, and mingle among the masses of brown-shirted pilgrims. With no difficulty, he made his way right into the inner sanctum of the Nazis; the train ticket cost eleven or twelve marks, his room for the night—1 mark. The initial inspection of the assassination site was just that simple.

Elser's objective of preventing Hitler from unleashing a war took precedence over everything else—his professional pride, his modest savings, his family relations, his friendships, even his love affairs. From now on Elser had only one goal—and he kept it secret from everyone. His feeling of righteousness is well documented; everywhere he went he used his real name. This kind of behavior does not bolster the theories that he was a henchman for the Nazis or for a foreign power.

Starting in the summer of 1937, Elser worked at Waldenmaier in the shipping department of the main division responsible for the materials that were to be of great significance to him. It is not likely that Elser came to work there by chance, as he tried to claim; he must have played a role in gaining this position. When there was something he wanted, he had an irresistible way of pleading, almost like a child, until he got it. His Munich landlady Rosa Lehmann had watched in amazement as Elser cajoled the craftsmen in the neighborhood into letting him use their shops.