November 8, 1939: "I wanted to prevent a war" - One Man Against Tyranny

Johann Georg Elser grew up in a working-class family in Württemberg. He started training as an iron turner in 1917, but had to break off his apprenticeship and became a carpenter. He worked in a watch factory in Konstanz from 1925 and a similar company in Meersburg from 1930. In 1932 he returned to Königsbronn and set up a small carpenter’s shop. He made his living doing odd jobs from 1935, working in an instruments factory in Heidenheim/Württemberg from December 1936. He was close to the Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters’ Alliance) for a time, but soon became isolated because he called for decisive resistance against Hitler’s takeover of the government. After the Munich Agreement of fall 1938, Elser decided to engage in militant resistance against the Nazi regime, in the hope of preventing a world war, which he felt was otherwise inevitable. He hid a bomb in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler regularly spoke before “old fighters” from the NSDAP on the anniversary of his putsch attempt of November 9, 1923. By chance, Hitler left the meeting before the explosion on the evening of November 8, 1939. The detonation almost entirely destroyed the Bürgerbräukeller’s gallery and would probably have killed Hitler. A waitress and six members of the audience were killed outright, with another man dying several days later. Elser, who had already left Munich, was arrested on the border to Switzerland at Konstanz an hour before the explosion, and handed over to the Gestapo because of suspicious items in his pockets. He was taken to Berlin in mid-November 1939, and later moved to Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. A planned show trial, constructing non-existent connections between Elser and the British Secret Service, never took place. Shortly before the end of the war, on April 9, 1945, Georg Elser was shot dead in Dachau concentration camp on instructions from "the very top."