Nikos Raptis
Johann
Georg Elser was born in the German Village of Hermaringen in 1903. At the age of
fourteen he was apprenticed as a (lathe) turner in a local iron factory. In 1922
he passed his journeyman’s exam as a cabinet-maker and became a specialist in
carpentry and metal work.. For the next decade Elser lived as a wandering
craftsman, sometimes working in clock factories or repairing furniture. In
1928-9 he joined the militant communist group "Rotfrontkaempferbund"
(Red Front Fighters’ Association). Except for playing in its brass band he did
not engage in Communist party activities. After 1933 he was considered an
ex-Communist.
In
1938 Elser was alarmed by the Munich agreements and terrified by the prospect of
a second World War, having experienced the first W.W. as a teenager. Elser, a
reserved, slow-spoken individual, in the autumn of the same year of 1938,
decided to assassinate Hitler. He planned the assassination attempt
meticulously, accumulating a stock of explosives, designing a special clock
mechanism and hiding his apparatus in a wooden column behind the speaker’s
rostrum in the Munich "Buergerbraeukeller" where Hitler was due to
speak on November 8, 1939, delivering his annual address before the "Old
Fighters" in commemoration of the "Putsch" of 1923, which had
started in the same "Buergerbraeukeller".
(Note;
The "Buergerbraeukeller" is a huge beer hall where the Germans down
enormous quantities of beer in noisy camaraderie, while discharging the
"processed" beer at spacious lavatories on the one side of the hall,
with immediate access from the hall.)`
On
November 8, 1939 Hitler was speaking at the "Buergerbraeukeller". His
speech normally ended about 10 p.m., but that day he left at 9.07 to catch his
special train. The bomb exploded at 9.20 destroying half the hall, killing seven
people and wounding sixty-three. Next day Hitler claimed that an "inner
voice" had told him to get out and on the same day he decided to launch a
western offensive ! Elser was arrested the same evening of the attempt at the
Swiss frontier, brought to Berlin, the Gestapo, etc. Subsequently, he was sent
to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as "Hitler’s special
prisoner," He was given a carpenter’s bench and allowed to make what he
pleased. In 1944 he was moved to Dachau and kept alive, possibly in the hope of
being used in a show trial after the war. On April 9, 1945, only 29 days before
the Germans surrendered, he was murdered by the Gestapo on a secret order from
Himmler. and his death was attributed to an allied bombing raid.
The
Elser case is unknown not only to the general public but there is almost nothing
in the works of scholars, with expertise on Hitler and Nazism. For example, in
the work of Ian Kershaw, Professor at the University of Sheffield in England,
there is no mention of Elser’s name ("The Hitler Myth," Oxford, 1987;
"Popular Opinion & Political Dissent in the Third Reich," Oxford,
1983). However, in a recent interview to the German magazine "Der
Spiegel" Kershaw when asked if Elser is "his hero at that time,"
he answered that Elser is " certainly one of the few (heroes), probably
just because he was an outsider. Elser is no political person, he wanted to kill
Hitler, to put an end to the war, simply that. Compared to the (Nazi) officers,
who hesitate again and again, Elser is a luminous figure." (Der Spiegel,
34/2000, p.58)
The
Germans have repressed the Elser case for more than 60 years. Yet, there are
exceptions. One is that of the 53-year old artist Wolfram Kastner of Munich,
whose work as a painter aims to "make visible, what the people do not want
to see." In order to make "visible" The act of Elser, Kastner, on
November 8, 1999, sprayed in four different sites of the city of Munich, a
sentence taken from the minutes of the Esler trial : "I wanted through my
act to prevent more bloodshed." (Elser’s words). One of the sites was the
monument dedicated to the "Resistance against the Nazis." The monument
consists of a black stone slab on which are engraved the names of those that
resisted Nazism. Elser’s name is not among them! Kastner sprayed Elser’s name on
the monument with white paint. Next day the German Rolf Hochhuth gave a lecture
in the Bavarian Academy for the Fine Arts. The title of the lecture : "Johann
Georg Elser – the most solitary among us Germans."
It
seems that in the Elser case there are still some things that demand to become
"visible’, or should be analyzed at a deeper level. What would have
happened if Elser succeeded in eliminating Hitler? Would the (US supported, in
the 1920s and 1930s,) Nazi institutions have found a Hitler substitute and
continued W.W.II? Can the act of an individual (Elser) have so vast effects as
to stop W.W.II?
PS
Who is going to make a film on the Elser case?