The Lone Assassin Read online

  I no longer remember the name of the prison. I was put in a cell where there were another five women, while the rest of my family was in individual cells.

  In Stuttgart, we remained in custody for about seven days, and I was not permitted to see my family during that time. I was questioned every day, often twice in one day. It was here that I first learned that my son was the assassin in the Bürgerbräu Beer Hall, and that this was the reason we had been locked up for seven days….

  The men also asked me about the course of my son Georg’s life and wanted to know whether I knew anything about the attack, whether Georg had told us anything at home, with whom he was in contact, and similar things. During the interrogations, I stated that I had no idea about the attack, for it is in fact the case that my family and I knew nothing about this attack. Georg had never told us that he had such an intention. He never made such statements. I could not believe that Georg was supposed to be that assassin, for my heart had not thought he would do such a thing….

  After about seven days in the prison in Stuttgart, I was told that I was leaving that evening. A woman came to get me and accompanied me on the train to Berlin. I did not see my family then, either, and at the time, I did not know that they were brought to Berlin, too.

  Leonhard Elser, Georg’s younger brother by ten years, had heard about the Bürgerbräu attack over the radio. Among his colleagues in the Königsbronn ironworks, where he worked as a carpenter’s assistant, it had been discussed only briefly. Even in Königsbronn, the remote village in the Swabian Alps, the National Socialists had rapidly gained popularity after coming to power in 1933; the local party group could not complain about a lack of members. The village cultural life, from the gymnastics club to the dance school, had long been “coordinated” under the Gleichschaltung policy. On holidays, swastika flags fluttered in the village streets. The prevailing conditions of Germany reigned in Königsbronn as well.

  The ironworkers were rather reserved in their reactions to the report on the Munich assassination attempt on the Führer, particularly those who were not members of the party and who had retreated into silent inner emigration. One such worker was Leonhard Elser, a quiet young man of twenty-six who bore a striking resemblance to his brother Georg, was not especially interested in politics, and was happy to have a job. Fourteen months ago, he had married Erna, a pretty girl from the neighboring village of Itzelberg. She had just given birth to their first child, whom they named Erna. Now they lived in Leonhard’s parents’ house, upstairs in a small attic apartment. They had plans, wishes, longings—like all young couples.

  On November 13, their tranquil everyday life was shaken. The director of the ironworks came to Leonhard’s work area, which was unusual, and instructed the young man to come with him, telling him that two men from the Gestapo were in the office. Leonhard was taken aback. “Gestapo? What do they want from me?” In the office the two men showed their badges. Later Leonhard Elser stated:

  They told me to come with them. I wanted to change, but they did not allow it. In what I was wearing, blue overalls and a carpenter’s apron, I was loaded into a car and brought to Stuttgart. I asked what was actually going on, but they didn’t answer me. In Stuttgart, I was put in a prison, a sort of detention center in which there was nothing but political prisoners.

  I was locked in a cell with three other men. They then interrogated me several times. That was when I first found out that Georg was suspected of having planted the bomb against Hitler in Munich. Again and again, the Gestapo officers asked me whether I knew anything about it, whether Georg had told me anything about it. But I didn’t know anything. I was completely surprised.

  When Erna learned that her husband had been picked up by the Gestapo at work, she was extremely worried. Gestapo? What could they have wanted with Leonhard? She became even more distraught when she was told that Leonhard’s parents, his sisters, and their husbands had been arrested, too. “For God’s sake, what happened?” Erna asked. No one could give her an answer.

  The following nights, Erna couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts revolved anxiously around her husband Leonhard and his parents. What had they done? Why were they in prison in Stuttgart?

  A few days later, when Erna was about to do the laundry, a car stopped in front of the house. Two men got out and approached the door to the laundry room, which was in an extension next to the house. “Are you Frau Elser?” one of the two officers asked tersely.

  “Yes,” she answered fearfully. The two men showed their badges. “Gestapo—pack your things and come with us. You’re under arrest,” one of them told her sharply.

  She just barely found time to leave her little daughter in a neighbor’s care with the request to inform her mother. Minutes later, she was sitting in the backseat of the car. The officers didn’t say a word. Erna Elser felt her heart racing. She was afraid.

  They drove to Stuttgart. The car stopped in the yard of the Gestapo prison on Büchsenstrasse. She was brought to the second floor. Hours of interrogation ensued. Only now did Leonhard’s wife learn why she had been brought there.

  “Did your brother-in-law Georg ever tell you of his intentions?” asked a stocky Gestapo officer in plainclothes.

  “No,” she answered, confused.

  That evening, she was brought under guard to the main train station. On the platform, she was handed over to another plainclothes officer. The two of them boarded a train, the destination of which was unknown to her, and entered a compartment that had been reserved.

  Behind drawn curtains waited an officer and a man she knew fleetingly by sight: Hermann Heller, a carpenter from Königsbronn. Her brother-in-law Georg had lived for a period of time as a tenant in Heller’s house. After he had discovered that Georg was having an affair with his wife, he had kicked him out. Later, he and his wife had gotten a divorce. Whether that was only because of the episode with Georg, Erna didn’t know. Now they were sitting silently opposite each other. The officers had forbidden them to converse.

  Erna thought of her little daughter and of Leonhard, whom she had not seen for days. She could not know that he was sitting under guard not many yards from her in another compartment, nor could she know that her parents-in-law, her sisters-in-law, and their husbands—indeed, the whole Elser family—had been brought together on this train by the Gestapo. The destination was Berlin, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

  Each of them felt isolated; none of them knew about the presence of the others. In the rearmost compartment of the special car sat a young woman who was not a member of the Elser family, but from whom the Gestapo officers in Berlin were nonetheless hoping for valuable testimony. Her name was Elsa, and she had formerly been the wife of Hermann Heller and, for a long time, the lover of Georg Elser.

  The last time they had seen each other had been in January 1939 in Stuttgart, where Georg had stayed with his sister for a few days. They had gone for a stroll together. He told me that he wanted to move to Munich to look for work, she later testified. Earlier we had always talked about getting married, but after we did not come to an agreement at this meeting, and I noticed that the thought of marriage was far from his mind, I explained to him that I would not go along with this uncertainty much longer and would get married as soon as I found an honest man.

  The end of her hopes was also the end of her love for Georg. That summer, she met Karl, who worked in the same Esslingen factory as she did—a decent, humble, and faithful man, with firm marriage intentions. During that time, she received only two brief letters from Georg, in which he informed her that he had found a nice room and a small workshop where he could do carpentry work in Munich.

  She wrote back to him and asked where he was working, what he was doing, and how much he was earning, but she did not receive an answer. After that, she came to a final decision: He would remain a fond memory, but nothing more. She wanted to get married again. The date for her wedding to Karl had already been set.

  Then came that Wednesday. In the office, she had spok
en to colleagues about the attack, and Irmgard, her colleague and friend, mentioned that an assassin had been arrested—a certain Elster or something like that. For a moment she was taken aback by the name, intuitively, a reflex. Georg was living in Munich … but an assassin? No, he could not be the perpetrator.

  Later, she stated:

  When I arrived in Jebenhausen, on Wednesday, my mother told me that Georg had committed the attack and his whole family had been arrested. There I saw his picture in the newspaper for the first time. I had been home for barely half an hour when I was arrested by a detective from Göppingen in my mother’s apartment and immediately brought to the Stuttgart police headquarters. He treated me like a criminal and did not even give me the chance to take along a handkerchief, much less toiletries. In Stuttgart, I was not interrogated, but only held in custody on Büchsenstrasse until evening. That same evening, I was brought to the main train station.

  Now she thought back to the time with Georg. He was a quiet man—someone who knew nothing but carpentry and his passion for music, someone who always said exactly what he meant. He did not like chatter or debates. He was opposed to the Nazis, about whom he had nothing positive to say. Once, when they were sitting in a restaurant, a man in SA uniform had come in and had passed around a collecting box. She could not recall what it was for, but she remembered well that Georg was annoyed when she inserted a small donation. “Either you are for them, and you give something, or you are against them, and you give nothing,” he said reprovingly.

  The train moved through the night. Early the next morning, she would be in Berlin. She imagined traveling without the two Gestapo officers—with Karl … on their honeymoon. To Berlin, the city of which she had so often dreamed. The large boulevards, the fancy shops, the beautiful cafés … now she was on the way to this colorful dream world, but she wanted nothing more than to turn back. Now she was afraid of the city. Would she be confronted with Georg? What did they actually want from her?

  * * *

  Georg Elser waited for morning. Freezing, he went to the cell window, which was ajar, and closed it. Dank, stuffy air remained in the cell. Later he rolled from side to side, unable to sleep. He could not get used to the hard, wooden bed and the worn-out mattress. He stood up and paced the narrow cell. He saw through the window the beam of the large searchlight, which cast a long shadow of the window bars on the bare gray wall. If only the nights were not so long, he thought. What to do with the loneliness, the fear?

  Guilt, despair, and powerlessness deprived him of sleep. He imagined how unhappy his mother must be, his siblings and their families. Undoubtedly, the Gestapo had made things difficult for them and interrogated them. He thought of his friend Eugen. Elser had once hinted to him that the Hitler regime should be abolished. He hoped that he had kept that to himself and had not put himself in danger. Eugen, his friend, with whom he had played as a child, who had sat next to him in school, had roamed with him through the fields in the afternoon, and later, in the traditional costume society, had looked for young women with him. Eugen, who had recently gotten married and still lived in Königsbronn—how might he be doing?

  More and more often, images from the past had been creeping up on Elser during the past several nights—from his childhood and youth in Königsbronn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Königsbronn Years

  High up in the mountains of eastern Württemberg, where the people’s lives are marked by frugality and modesty, Georg Elser was born on January 4, 1903, in the small village of Hermaringen.

  His mother, Maria Müller, a twenty-four-year-old woman, lived in her parents’ house. They ran a wagon-making and repair shop. Not until a year after Georg’s birth did she marry his father, Ludwig Elser, a farmer’s son who was seven years older than she was. He came from nearby Ochsenberg, where he had grown up with eighteen siblings. From an early age, Ludwig had been required to lend a hand on his parents’ farm. After school, he and his older siblings began the actual daily work, consisting of arduous tasks in the barn and fields that often lasted until late in the evening. Despite a hard, deprived childhood and youth, Ludwig had been spared illnesses and had grown to independence as a tough, somewhat taciturn-seeming young man—a farm boy who had found the right woman in Maria.

  In November 1904, shortly after the wedding, the young couple moved with little Georg to Königsbronn, not many miles from Hermaringen. There Ludwig bought his own land with an inheritance and started a lumber trade. On the side, the couple ran a modest farm. Maria bore the brunt of the farming work, and that did not change when a second child, their daughter Friederike, was born on October 19, 1904. Maria was a mother, housewife, and farmer from early in the morning to the late evening hours, day after day. She fulfilled her duties as she had always done in her parents’ house: humbly and meekly. Two years later, she had a third child, another girl. She was named Maria.

  Georg, by then three and a half years old, was a rather quiet, small child. For hours, he would sit in the garden next to the house and keep himself occupied or play with his younger sister Friederike in the sandbox. Quarrels were rare. He especially enjoyed family visits with his grandparents in Hermaringen. There was soda and cake, sometimes even a piece of fried sausage, and—best of all—his parents forgot for a few hours their hard everyday life and played with him and Friederike. His mother in particular savored the few free Sundays.

  Shortly before Georg was to start school, a fourth child was born on May 21, 1909. His brother Ludwig was granted only a short life, though, as less than six years later, on January 4, 1915, he died of lung disease. On October 10, 1910, Anna came into the world, and three years later, on June 1, 1913, another boy was born, who was given the name Leonhard.

  The Elsers were now a large family. Though this was not out of the ordinary in those days, there were nonetheless many mouths to feed. The father’s lumber trade was not doing especially well, and the small farm, which still rested on the mother’s shoulders, brought in only modest sums. From a very early age, Georg had to help in the barn, in the fields, and in the house. And, as the oldest, he always had to look after his younger siblings.

  But it was not only the family’s financial situation that was precarious; there were also repeated marital disputes, which frequently led to physical confrontations. The father began to drown his problems in alcohol, which made him violent and aggressive.

  Later Georg remembered this oppressive period of his childhood.

  Not every day, but often, my father came home very late. As far as I know, he was often in the tavern. My mother told us children that my father often hit her, though I didn’t see this happen. Whether my father hit my mother only with his hand or with a chair, a lamp, or with something else, I don’t know. Sometimes when he came home at night, our father got us out of bed for some reason—for example, to take off his boots—but I can’t remember him ever hitting us at night when he was drunk, and I don’t think that happened. From my father, I often got beatings when I had done something wrong. From my mother, too, I occasionally—not often—got beatings. We always woke up at night when my father came home drunk. When he entered the house, he was always ranting. It was not the case that my father was drunk, say, only on Saturdays, but it also occurred on weekdays, at all different times. As far as I know, he drank only beer and wine. Not much liquor, I think. I don’t remember ever hearing my father promise my mother to stop drinking.

  For a long time, Maria Elser put up with her husband’s outbursts. But once, in the summer of 1910, after her husband had once again hit her during a quarrel, she left the house with the children for a week. During that week she stayed with us children at her parents’ house in Hermaringen, Georg later recalled. One of my father’s sisters persuaded my mother to return to Königsbronn.

  That same year, Georg started school in Königsbronn. He was an average student; only in the subjects that particularly interested him—such as drawing, arithmetic, and penmanship—did he receive good grades. In drawin
g class, he got attention for making funny little pictures, in which he gave his teachers and schoolmates humorous speech balloons. During one class, the teacher caught him coloring one of his funny pictures alongside the actual drawing assignment. “Georg,” he called sternly, “come here and bring your drawing with you …” With his head lowered, little Georg stood up amid the smirks of his classmates and slunk to the desk at the front of the room. Everyone was expecting a scolding. The teacher, a round man with a narrow mustache, cast a glance at the paper. Then his face lit up. “You have imagination—and a good hand …” He confiscated the little pictures and sent Georg back to his seat. The boy was as pleased with the lack of punishment as he was with the public praise. In the fourth grade, his talents were recognized once again. The teacher gave him a sketchbook for his achievements in drawing. Georg was very proud of that. For a long time, he hesitated to draw in the book he had received as a gift.

  His parents, however, were only moderately interested in their child’s schoolwork. Later Georg commented on that in an interrogation transcript: As far as I can remember, my parents were not very concerned with the report cards I brought home from school. I can’t remember them ever asking me whether I got good or bad grades, though both of them always helped me a bit with homework. Because I had to assist with the farming work at home, studying was difficult for me.

  It was not that important to his father for Georg to be a good student. It was enough for him to know that he was not one of the bad ones. He just didn’t want Georg to have to repeat a year. Georg was slated to work for his father and one day take over the lumber trade. For that, he didn’t need model grades, his father thought. Georg should learn how to work with his hands—and the earlier, the better.

  In the spring of 1917, having just turned fourteen, Georg finished primary school. His final report card was average. Only in his favorite subjects, drawing and arithmetic, were his grades good. Until autumn, he somewhat reluctantly helped his father transport lumber, which was strenuous work, ten hours a day, rain or shine. On the weekend, he supported his mother on the farm, where he mainly worked in the fields and fed the livestock in the barn.