The First Assassination Attempt
The first resolute attempt to remove Hitler during this period was led by Oster from the Abwehr, but no shot was fired. In November 1939, however, Georg Elser, a carpenter from Württemberg, acting completely on his own, developed a plan to assassinate Hitler. Elser had been peripherally involved with the KPD before 1933, but his exact motives for acting as he did remain a mystery. He read in the newspapers that Hitler would be addressing a Nazi Party meeting on 8 November, in the Bürgerbräukeller, a beer hall in Munich where Hitler had launched the Beer Hall Putsch on the same date in 1923. Stealing explosives from his workplace, Elser built a powerful time-bomb. For over a month, he managed to stay inside the Bürgerbräukeller after closing hours each night, during which time he hollowed out the pillar behind the speaker's rostrum to place the bomb inside.
On the night of 7 November, Elser set the timer and left for the Swiss border. Unexpectedly, because of the pressure of wartime business, Hitler made a much shorter speech than usual and left the hall 13 minutes before the bomb went off, killing eight people. Had Hitler still been speaking, the bomb almost certainly would have killed him, with consequences which can only be guessed. Elser was arrested at the border, sent to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and then in 1945 moved to the Dachau concentration camp. Elser was executed two weeks before the liberation of Dachau KZ. This attempt on Hitler’s life set off a witch-hunt for potential conspirators which intimidated the opposition and made further action more difficult.
Read more about this topic: German Resistance
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