Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels makes a point. Still from 1930s German film footage.

Amid the collection of thugs, sycophants, stone-eyed killers and over-promoted incompetents who comprised the wartime leadership of Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels stood out. For one thing, he was genuinely intelligent—he had earned a doctorate in Romantic literature before becoming Hitler’s propaganda chief. For another, he understood that his ministry needed to do more than merely hammer home the messages of Hitler’s ideology.

Goebbels knew he needed to engage—with an increasingly war-weary German public, and with the Allied servicemen whose morale he sought to undermine. This clear-eyed determination to deal with reality, not fantasy, led him to some curious accommodations. None, however, were quite so strange as his attempts to harness the dangerous attractions of dance music to Hitler’s cause. It was an effort that led directly to the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: a Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra.

By the late 1930s, swing and jazz were by far the most popular music of the day, for dancing and for listening. But, originating as they did from the United States, with minimal contributions from Aryan musicians, the Nazis loathed them. The official party line was that these forms were entartete musik (“degenerate music”), and that their improvised breaks and pounding rhythms risked undermining German purity and discipline. In public speeches, the Nazis put it more harshly than that. Jazz, Goebbels insisted, was nothing but “jungle music.”

Throughout the war years, it was German policy to suppress the music, or at least tame it. This resulted in some remarkable decrees, among them the clauses of a ban promulgated by a Nazi gauleiter in Bohemia and recalled (faithfully, he assures us—“they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind”) by the Czech dissident Josef Skvorecky in the introduction to his novella The Bass Saxophone. They are worth quoting in full:

1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoire of light orchestras and dance bands.

2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;

3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;

4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);

5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);

6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);

7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;

8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;

9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);

10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

The cover to a 1938 museum guide published to coincide with an exhibition on "degenerate art" organized by Dr. Hans Ziegler. The exhibition was divided into seven sections, each attacking a different artistic form; Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith got sections to themselves.

It is possible to trace the Nazi’s fear of jazz and swing back at least as far as the radical nightclubs of Weimar Germany (setting for the musical Cabaret), which Goebbels described in his diary as “a Babylon of sin.” But the Reichsminister also recognized, Horst Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz note, that “National Socialism set to music was not what most listeners wanted when switching on their radio sets,” and as the war years bit into German morale and bombs rained down on German cities, he began to make compromises that would have been inconceivable before 1939.

There was still reluctance to allow real American swing and jazz to be heard on the home front; Dr. Fritz Pauli of German state radio sketched the criteria for a “model dance band” that would have seemed alien to Glen Miller: twelve violins, four violas, brass, bass, drums–and a zither. Goebbels went further; he ordained that jazz be banned from the airwaves altogether, and all radio dance programs be prefaced by “a neutral march or overture.”

Behind the scenes, though, Hitler’s propaganda chief was hatching a plot: music deemed unsuitable for decent Germans was to be harnessed to help drive the Nazi war effort. Here Goebbels’s catspaw was a jazz fanatic named Lutz “Stumpie” Templin, a fine tenor saxophonist who had led one of the best German swing bands before the war.

Templin was an equivocal character; no Nazi himself, he had nonetheless taken full advantage of the opportunities that opened under Hitler’s regime. As early as 1935, what would become the nucleus of the Lutz Templin Orchestra ousted its Jewish leader, James Kok, in order to secure a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. By the autumn of 1939, Templin’s reputation as a sax player and his links to the Nazis were strong enough for the Propaganda Ministry to turn to him when it took the decision to begin piping musical propaganda to British troops.

Politically flexible jazz saxophonist Lutz Templin provided the musical and organizational muscle for Charlie and His Orchestra.

Lurking in the shadow of the new initiative were William Joyce, the notorious “Lord Haw Haw,” an Irish-American employed by Goebbels to broadcast propaganda to Britain, and Norman Baillie-Stewart, another fascist turncoat whose chief claim to fame was being the last Englishman to be imprisoned in the Tower of London. They provided ideas, and perhaps some lyrics, to a former civil servant named Karl Schwedler, the man hired to front the crack jazz musicians who made up Templin’s band.

Schwedler was a remarkable character, a chancer and a chameleon well suited to thriving in the looking-glass world of Nazi Germany. Born the son of a plumber in Duisberg in 1902, he was a flawless English speaker who revealed an unexpected talent for crooning while working for the American section of the Foreign Ministry’s broadcasting department, Kultur-R. He was good enough at his job to earn exemption from military service on the grounds that he was doing “essential war work”—and to enjoy the protection of Goebbels himself.

Schwedler seems to have developed ideas above his station. According to Baillie-Stewart, “on a finger of his left hand he sported a massive signet ring engraved with a bogus coat-of-arms [and] at times he even sported the Old Etonian tie until I mentioned the fact.” For much of the war, he lived a playboy’s life in Berlin, dressing in SS-monogrammed silk shirts and traveling widely, often to Switzerland, on the pretext of picking up the latest records and some new ideas. This gave him access to contraband (“silk stockings, liquor, soap, chocolates, cigarettes,” Baillie-Stewart recalled) which—combined with an easy charm—made his privileged position almost unassailable in an increasingly corrupt Third Reich.

Karl "Charlie" Schwedler, an employee of the German Foreign Ministry, discovered he had a talent for crooning and spent the war years heading up the Nazis' strangest propaganda initiative: Charlie and His Orchestra. Photographer unknown.

The Templin Orchestra, renamed Charlie and His Orchestra in honor of its new vocalist, began broadcasting in January 1940 as part of a propaganda show known as “Political Cabaret.” Mike Zwerin and Michael H. Kater both report that the inspiration for the band came from the German fighter ace Werner “Vati” Mölders, a keen jazz fan who was reputed to tune in to BBC dance programs as he crossed the Channel to fight in the Battle of Britain. “Hitler had a weak spot for pilots,” Zwerin says, “[and] when Mölders complained about the unswinging music on German radio, Hitler spoke to Goebbels about it.” True or not, Schwedler’s dance stylings became the come-on for audiences who soon found themselves listening to the heavy-handed propaganda skits that broke up the music. But Joyce and Baillie-Stewart were too smart to miss the chance to mix more messages into the music. With “Charlie’s” help, they began rewriting the standards that the jazzmen played.

Musically, Schwedler’s orchestra was superior to anything else on offer in Nazi Germany, though scarcely up to the standard of the best American or British bands. It featured Primo Angeli, a virtuoso pianist, and occasional hot drum breaks supplied by Fritz “Freddie” Brocksieper, who was known to have a Greek mother but who hid the fact that he was also one-quarter Jewish. (Brocksieper, for many years the top jazz drummer in Germany, was a devotee of Gene Krupa—to the extent, Michael Kater says, that “he was known for his inordinate noise.”) The band’s ever-growing repertoire consisted mostly of dance standards, mixed with about 15 percent jazz. But it is untrue, Bermeier and Lotz insist, that it featured much “hot” jazz. Such music was regarded as beyond the pale even for propaganda broadcasts, and in any case—as even the American-born propaganda boss Edward Vieth Sittler admitted—“we cannot possibly perform this decadent ‘hot’ jazz as ‘well’ as Negroes and Jews.”

One of the few surviving 78rpm recordings made by Charlie and His Orchestra. Most were smashed by Allied POWs.

Many of the tracks performed by Charlie and His Orchestra were version of songs from the latest Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals, and despite Schwedler’s efforts in Switzerland it would appear that much of this music came via Nazi listening stations and was roughly transcribed from there. Czech accordionist Kamil Behounek recalled that this practice caused problems. The tracks “were picked up on short or medium wave,” he said, and “a lot of the passages were almost impossible to hear due to atmospherics or fading. So you had to help out with a lot of imagination.”

As the war went on, and more and more Germans were drafted into the armed forces, the composition of “Charlie’s” band changed and it came to include a majority of players from Belgium, France and Italy. The musicians were forced to double up, performing lively propaganda swing arrangements in the mornings and then regrouping in another studio during the afternoons to play Nazi-approved numbers for domestic consumption; by the autumn of 1943, as the bombing of Berlin intensified, they were forced to relocate to Stuttgart and restrict themselves to live broadcasts. “We were on duty five days a week,” bass player Otto “Titte” Tittmann would recall. “We did [shows] for the Anglo-American area, plus South America and South Africa.”

Even so, high standards were somehow maintained. Behounek, drafted in as arranger in May 1943, was pleasantly surprised to discover a fully professional setup:

I wondered what sort of village band I was going to be working for. But orders is orders. I got to Berlin in the evening. In the darkness I could make out the ruined buildings which bore witness to the devastating air raids. Next morning I went to the huge broadcasting centre on the Masurenallee…. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Here was this big dance orchestra with three trumpets, three trombones, four saxes, a full rhythm group. And they were swinging it! And how! They were playing up-to-date hits from America! Lutz Templin had got together the best musicians from all over Europe for his band.

Members of Charlie and His Orchestra practice in 1942. Their base was then a mattress factory. Photographer unknown.

For most of the musicians, Brocksieper admitted after the war, collaboration with the Nazi war machine was simply the lesser of two evils. The alternative was fighting, or in the case of Behounek, working as forced labor in an armaments factory (“My mates were filling shells—I was making music. I don’t see that that is any worse.”) Brocksieper had avoided conscription by swallowing a medicine that induced such severe vomiting that he was diagnosed with a suspected stomach ulcer. Certainly it would have been dangerous for many of the musicians to have shunned the protection offered by Charlie and His Orchestra; the German singer Evelyn Künneke recalled that “there were even half-Jews and gypsies there, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and Communists—not exactly the sort of people the Nazis normally wanted to play cards with.”

As “Charlie,” Schwedler—who at least posed as a convinced Nazi—penned lyrics that generally followed a fixed pattern. The first verse of each song would remain untouched, perhaps in the hope of luring in listeners. But the remainder of the lyrics would veer wildly into Nazi propaganda and boasts of Aryan supremacy. Charlie’s main themes were familiar ones: Germany was winning the war and Churchill was a drunken megalomaniac who hid in cellars at night to avoid German bombs (“The Germans are driving me crazy/I thought I had brains/But they shot down my planes”). Similarly, Roosevelt was a puppet of international banking cartels, and the entire Allied war effort was in the service of “the Jews.” For the most part, Schwedler’s songs interspersed virulent anti-Semitism with attempts to convince his audience that Nazi victory was inevitable. When Cole Porter’s classic “You’re the Top” got Charlie’s treatment, the revised lyrics emerged as “You’re the top/You’re a German flyer/You’re the top/You’re machine gun fire/You’re a U-boat chap/With a lot of pep/You’re grand,” and the lyrics for “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” became “I’m gonna save the world for Wall Street/Gonna fight for Russia, too/I’m fightin’ for democracy/I’m fightin’ for the Jew.”

As for the smash hit “Little Sir Echo,” by the time Schwedler finished with it, it was unrecognisable:

Poor Mr. Churchill, how do you do?


Hello… Hello…

Your famous convoys are not coming through


Hello
…

German U boats are making you sore…

You’re nice little fellow, but by now you should know

That you never can win this war.

For the most part, there seems to be little evidence that Charlie and His Orchestra had anything like the impact on Allied morale that Goebbels hoped for. Schwedler might speak perfect English, but he never grasped British and American irony and understatement, and although his band recorded as many as 270 tracks between 1941 and 1943, and their records were distributed to prisoner of war camps, they were generally smashed by the POWs after an exploratory listen.

Schwedler at the microphone with trumpeter Charly Tabor and an unknown vocalist. Note the use of a banned trumpet mute–hated by the Nazis for its tendency to yield a "Jewish-Freemasonic yowl." Photographer unknown.

Yet so important were Charlie and His Orchestra to Goebbels’ propaganda machine that the band was maintained almost to the end of the war. The last of their broadcasts seems to have been made in early April 1945, just a month before the end of the conflict in Europe and a matter of days before the U.S. Army took the Rhineland and Reichssender Stuttgart went off air, blown up by a retreating detachment of the SS.

Not that the orchestra’s main men were out of action for long. Demand for dance music was just as strong under American occupation, and by the autumn of 1945 Lutz Templin was working for the U.S. Army and touring extensively in southern Germany. He later developed his own music publishing business in Hamburg and worked in A&R for Polydor. Fritz Brocksieper spent the last few weeks of the war hiding on a farm near Tübingen. He soon resumed his stalled career as Germany’s top drummer and continued to record until his death in 1990—ironically from a burst stomach ulcer.

As for Karl Schwedler, the chameleon, he proved himself just as adaptable after 1945 as he had during the war. Old acquaintances found him working as a croupier in the casino at the Europa Pavilion in West Berlin; then, in 1960, and despite his unresolved Nazi past, “Charlie” emigrated with his wife and children to the United States. It is not known whether he ever performed there.

Sources

Adam Cathcart. “Music and politics in Hitler’s Germany.” Madison Historical Review 3 (2006); Tim Crook. International Radio Journalism: History, Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1998;Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era. New York: Palgrave, 2000;  Roger Hillman. Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; John Bush Jones. The Songs That Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945. Lebanon [NH]: Brandeis University Press, 2006; Michael Kater. Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; Horst Heinz Lange. Jazz in Deutschland: die Deutsche Jazz-Chronik bis 1960. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1996; Martin Lücke. Jazz im Totalitarismus: Einer Komparative Analyse des Politisch Motivierten Umgangs mit dem Jazz Während des Zeit des Nationalsocialismus und der Stalinismus. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004; David Snowball. “Controlling degenerate music: jazz in the Third Reich.” In Michael Budds (ed). Jazz and the Germans: Essays on the Influence of “Hot” American Idioms on 20th  Century German Music. Maesteg: Pendragon Press, 2002; Michael Zwerin. La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis. London: Quartet, 1988.

Georg Elser, whose attempt to kill Hitler came within moments of succeeding, commemorated on a stamp. The German phrase means "I wanted to prevent war." Image: Wikicommons

Maria Strobel could not believe it of her Führer. Adolf Hitler and his party—a group of senior Nazis that included Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich—had spent more than an hour in her Munich bierkeller. Hitler had delivered a trademark speech, and, while they listened, Himmler and the others had run up a large beer bill. But the whole group had left in a hurry—leaving the tab unpaid and Strobel untippped.

Much annoyed, the Bavarian waitress set about clearing up the mess. She had made only a small dent in the pile of steins when, at 9:20 p.m. precisely, there was a huge explosion only a few feet behind her. A stone pillar disintegrated in the blast, bringing part of the ceiling crashing down in a rain of wood and masonry. The explosion hurled Strobel the length of the hall and out through the bierkeller’s doors. Though stunned, she survived—the person closest to the blast to do so. Eight others were not so fortunate, and a further 63 were so badly injured that they had to be helped out into the open air. As they staggered toward safety, the dais where Hitler had been standing eight minutes earlier lay crushed beneath six feet of heavy timber, bricks and rubble.

Hitler always said he had “the luck of the devil,” and during his years in power he survived more than 40 plots to kill him. The most famous of these culminated in July 1944, when Claus von Stauffenberg managed to place a bomb inside the conference room in Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. On that occasion, a table support absorbed most of the blast and the Führer survived to hobble out, his eardrums shattered and his trousers torn to ribbons.

Adolf Hitler

That attempt on Hitler’s life is famous—it was the basis for Valkyrie, the 2008 Tom Cruise film—but it can be argued that it was considerably less astounding, and less courageous, than the bierkeller bombing five years earlier. For one thing, Stauffenberg was well-equipped; he really should have done better with the resources at his disposal. For another, he and his fellow plotters were not convinced anti-Nazis; they may have had an aristocratic disdain for their plebian leader, but their primary reason for wanting Hitler dead was not horror at the barbarism of his regime, but simple conviction that he was leading Germany into the abyss.

The Munich bomb, on the other hand, exploded on November 8, 1939, at the height of the Führer’s popularity and less than three months after the outbreak of World War II—before the final order was given for the invasion of France, and when Russia remained a German ally and the United States remained at peace. Not only that; this bomb was the work of just one man, an unassuming carpenter who was far more principled than Stauffenberg and whose skill, patience and determination make him altogether much more interesting. Yet the Munich incident has been almost forgotten; as late as 1998 there was no memorial, in Germany or anywhere else, to the attempt or to the man who made it.

His name was Georg Elser, and this is his story.

Born in 1903, Elser was just below average height and just above average intelligence. He was not much of a thinker, but clever with his hands: an expert cabinetmaker who never read books, rarely touched newspapers and had little interest in politics. He had voted Communist, and briefly joined the Red Front Fighters’ League—streetfighters who took on their Nazi counterparts, the Brownshirts. But Elser was no Marxist, just a typical member of the German working class in the 1930s. He certainly wasn’t a brawler; for him, the attraction of the Fighters’ League was the chance to play in its brass band. In 1939, the only organization that he belonged to was the Woodworkers’ Union.

Beneath this unremarkable exterior, however, Elser did care—mostly about the way the Nazis and their policies were reducing ordinary Germans’ standard of living. The “economic miracle” that Hitler often boasted of had been achieved at considerable cost. Working hours were long and holidays few. Trade unions and political parties were dissolved or banned; wages were frozen. Meanwhile, members of the Nazi party enjoyed privileges not available to those who refused to join. Elser, who was noted as a perfectionist who took infinite care over his work, found it increasingly hard to make ends meet as real wages declined. Asked later to explain his decision to take on Hitler, he was blunt: “I considered that the situation in Germany could only be changed by the elimination of the current leadership.”

There were only a few signs that Elser might be prepared to take his opposition to Nazi regime beyond the crude jokes and grumbles that his handful of friends indulged in. He refused to listen to the Führer when he came on the radio; he would not give the Nazi salute. When a pro-Hitler parade passed though his home town of Königsbronn, in southwestern Germany, he ostentatiously turned his back on it and started whistling.

Yet Elser never confided to anyone that his views were hardening. He remained almost entirely solitary: unmarried and estranged from his father. And it was typical of the man that when, early in 1938, he finally concluded that something needed to be done about the Führer, he didn’t look for help.

It was then that Elser displayed his hidden qualities. Other anti-Nazis had wavered for years over where, when and how they might get close enough to Hitler to kill him. Elser took a purely practical approach. The Führer was renowned for his security consciousness; he tended to cancel arrangements or change plans abruptly. To have a chance of getting to him, Elser recognized, he needed to know that Hitler would be in a specific place at a particular time. And there was only one annual certainty in the Nazi leader’s program: each November, he traveled to Munich to speak at an elaborate commemoration of the Beer Hall Putsch, the risible 1923 attempted coup that had set his party on the road to power. Surrounded by thousands of Old Fighters—Nazis whose party membership dated to 1922 or earlier—Hitler would swap stories and reminisce before delivering the sort of lengthy speech calculated to rouse his loyalists to a frenzy.

Hitler speaking to his Old Fighters in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich

So it was that in November 1938—10 months before the Germans invaded Poland—Elser took a train to Munich and scouted out the Nazis’ celebrations. He visited the beer hall where the putsch had started. Known as the Bürgerbräukeller in 1923 but as the Löwenbräu by 1939, it was a cavernous underground hall, capable of holding more than 3,000 revelers and selected by Hitler as the perfect site for a centerpiece speech. Elser attended the festivities, took note of the cellar’s layout, and was surprised to realize that security was lax. In a typical piece of Nazi fudge, two groups were at loggerheads over which was responsible for the Führer’s safety; Hitler opted for his National Socialist German Workers’ Party over the Munich police, which put Christian Weber in charge of security. But Weber, a fat and corrupt former nightclub bouncer, was not much minded to take the sort of strenuous precautions that might actually have safeguarded his leader. A convinced Nazi, it simply did not occur to him that others might hate Hitler enough to take drastic action of their own.

While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.

Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.

In April 1939, Elser returned to Munich to carry out a detailed reconnaissance. He made sketches of the beer cellar and took more precise measurements. He also visited the Swiss frontier to work out an escape route, finding a stretch of the border that was not patrolled.

That August, as Hitler stoked up tension with Poland and Europe slipped toward war, Elser moved to Munich and began the final preparations for planting his device. The work involved huge risks and revealed an imaginative side to the bomber’s personality that few who knew him realized he possessed. Taking advantage of the Löwenbräu’s lax security, Elser became a regular customer. Each evening he would take his dinner there, order a beer and wait until closing time. Then he would slip upstairs, hide in a storeroom and emerge after 11:30 to get down to the crucial job of hollowing the pillar.

The bierkeller, showing the extensive damage done by Elser's bomb. Photo: Wikicommons

The work was astonishingly painstaking and slow. Working by flashlight, Elser first neatly cut a hole in some wood cladding; this job alone took him three nights. Next he attacked the pillar itself. The noise of a chisel striking stone echoed so loudly through the empty bierkeller that Elser restricted himself to single blows every few minutes, timing the descent of his hammer to coincide with the passing of a streetcar or the automatic flushing of the urinals. Every fleck of stone and piece of dust had to be swept up to leave no evidence of his work; then the panel he had cut out of the wood had to be seamlessly replaced before Elser made his escape through a side exit early the next morning. The carpenter returned to the bierkeller evening after evening, working on his plan for 35 nights in all. On one occasion he was nearly caught; a waiter found him inside the building as the place was opening and ran to tell the manager. Questioned, Elser  insisted he was simply an early customer. He ordered a coffee, drank it in the garden and left unmolested.

It was typical of Elser that he labored to produce the most efficient bomb he could. By modifying a clock, he created a timer that would run for up to 144 hours before activating a lever; that would trigger a system of springs and weights that would launch a steel shuttle into a live rifle round embedded in explosive. Next, Elser added a second timer to act as a fail-safe, then enclosed the whole bomb in a beautifully built box designed to fit precisely into the cavity he had excavated. He  minimized the risk of discovery by lining the cavity with cork, which muffled the noise from the bomb’s clock, and then placing a sheet of tinplate inside the wood panel to prevent any bierkeller worker putting up decorations from unknowingly driving a nail into his delicate mechanism. When he was finished, he returned to the bierkeller with the box he’d made and discovered that it was fractionally too big. He took it home, planed it down and went back again to make sure it fit.

Elser’s research had revealed that Hitler always began his speech in the Löwenbräu at about 8:30 p.m., spoke for about 90 minutes, then stayed to mingle with the crowd. On that basis, he set his bomb to explode at 9:20 p.m.—midway, he calculated, through Hitler’s customary tirade.

Finally, having planted the bomb three days before Hitler was due, sealed it in and removed the last traces of his work, Elser returned to Munich two nights later— just 24 hours before Hitler was due to speak. Then, at a time when it was entirely reasonable to suppose that even the inefficient Weber might have stepped up his security a little, he broke back into the bierkeller and pressed his ear against the pillar to check that his device was still ticking.

Had Elser paid closer attention to the newspapers, he might have felt that all his work had been wasted—shortly before Hitler was due to deliver his bierkeller speech, he canceled the arrangement, only to reinstate it the day before he was due to travel. But then, had Elser read the newspapers, he would also have realized that, as a concession to Hitler’s urgent need to be in Berlin, his speech had been rescheduled. It would now begin at 8 p.m. and last for little more than an hour.

In the event, Hitler stopped speaking at 9:07 p.m. precisely. He declined the efforts of the Old Fighters to have him stay for the usual drink, and at 9:12 hurried out of the Löwenbräu and back to the Munich railroad station. Eight minutes later—when Elser’s bomb exploded in a blinding flash, right on time—the Führer was boarding his train with all his retinue and most of the bierkeller crowd had left the building. It was not until the Berlin express halted briefly at Nuremburg that an incredulous Hitler learned how close he had come to death.

By 9:20 Elser, too, was far from the Löwenbräu. That morning he had taken a train for Konstanz, close to the Swiss border, and when darkness fell he set out to walk into Switzerland. But if Hitler’s luck held that night, his would-be assassin’s ran out. Elser’s April reconnaissance had taken place in peacetime; now, with Germany at war, the border had been closed. He was arrested by a patrol as he sought a way through wire entanglements. Told to turn out his pockets, he quickly found himself in trouble. Perhaps hoping to persuade the Swiss authorities of his anti-Nazi credentials, he was carrying with him sketches of his bomb design, a fuse, his Communist party membership card, and a picture postcard of the Löwenbräu—an incriminating collection of possessions at the best of times, and worse when, minutes later, an urgent telegram arrived with news from the bierkeller.

Elser was taken back to Munich for interrogation. Hitler himself took a close interest in the bomber, asking to see his file and commenting favorably on his “intelligent eyes, high forehead and determined expression.” But for Hitler, the sophistication of the plot was evidence that the British Secret Service was behind it. “What idiot conducted this investigation?” he demanded when told that Elser claimed to have worked alone.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler personally interrogated Elser. Photo: Wikicommons

The bomber was subjected to beatings, hypnosis and torture in an attempt to get at Hitler’s truth; he stuck to his story, and even reproduced a version of his bomb to show the Gestapo he had built it. Eventually, the historian Roger Moorhouse relates, Himmler himself arrived in Munich to continue the interrogation:

“With wild curses, [he] drove his boots hard into the body of the handcuffed Elser. He then had him … taken to a lavatory … where he was beaten with a whip or some similar instrument until he howled with pain. He was then brought back at the double to Himmler, who once more kicked and cursed him.”

Through all this, the carpenter stuck to his story, and eventually the Gestapo gave up and packed him off to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp. Strange to say, Elser was not executed or even badly treated there; although held in solitary confinement, he was allowed a bench and his tools, and kept alive until the last month of the war. It is generally supposed that Hitler wanted him alive to star in a war crimes trial in which he would have implicated the British in the Munich plot.

There are those who say that the Nazis were too efficient to allow a lone bomber to hurt them in this way, and that the whole affair had been stage-managed to provide Hitler with an excuse to clamp down further on the left. Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor held at the same camp as Elser, would later testify that he had heard this story on the prisoners’ grapevine; Elser himself is supposed to have confessed to it. But now that we have the transcripts of the interrogation, and better understand the inefficient and chaotic way that Hitler ran the Nazi state, this theory no longer rings true. The Nazis, in wartime, needed no reason or excuse to stamp out resistance. Today, historians accept that the attempt on the Führer’s life was serious, and that Elser acted alone.

There remains the vexing question of how, or whether, Elser’s life should be celebrated. Can an act of terrorism ever be justified, even when its purpose is to kill a murderous dictator? Might the innocent lives the bomber took in the Löwenbräu have been balanced by those that could have been saved had Hitler died before the war was fully underway?

Himmler, for one, had no desire to wait for those questions to be answered. In April 1945, as the Americans, British and Russians closed in, he had Elser taken from his cell and shot. A week later, the death was reported in the German press, blamed on an Allied air raid.

In the frantic last days of the Thousand Year Reich, few would have noticed the announcement. And six years and more than 60 million deaths later, fewer still would have recalled the name of Georg Elser.

Sources

Michael Balfour. Withstanding Hitler in Germany 1933-45. London: Routledge, 1988; Martyn Housden. Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich. London: Routledge, 1997; Ian Kershaw. Hitler: Nemesis, 1936-1945. London: Penguin, 2000; Roger Moorhouse. Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots Against the Führer. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.