Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

That evening, as always on 8 November, the ‘Old Guard’ of the Party assembled. Hitler had announced the previous day that he would, after all, give his annual address.²⁴⁵ Usually, this lasted from about 8.30p.m. until about ten o’clock. It had already been announced that, in the circumstances of the war, this year’s meeting would begin earlier and that the two-day commemoration of the Putsch would be shortened.²⁴⁶ Hitler began his speech soon after his arrival in the Bürgerbräukeller, at 8.10p.m., and finished at 9.07p.m. The speech itself was one long tirade against Britain, highly sarcastic in tone, well tailored to his raucous audience of Party fanatics.²⁴⁷ Hitler normally spent some time after his speech chatting to the Movement’s ‘Old Fighters’. This time, escorted by a good number of Party bigwigs, he left immediately for the station to take the 9.31p.m. train back to Berlin.²⁴⁸

At twenty past nine the pillar immediately behind the dais where Hitler had stood minutes earlier, and part of the roof directly above, were ripped apart by Elser’s bomb. Eight persons were killed in the blast, a further sixty-three injured, sixteen of them seriously.²⁴⁹ Hitler had been gone no more than ten minutes when the bomb went off.

He attributed his salvation to the work of ‘Providence’ — a sign that he was to fulfil the task destiny had laid out for him.²⁵⁰ In its headline on 10 November, the Völkischer Beobachter called it ‘the miraculous salvation of the Führer’.²⁵¹ There was, in fact, nothing providential or miraculous about it. It was pure luck. Hitler’s reasons for returning without delay to Berlin were genuine enough. The decision to attack the West had been temporarily postponed on 7 November, with a final decision set for the 9th. Hitler had to be back in the Reich Chancellery by then. It was more important than reminiscing about old times with Party stalwarts in the Bürgerbräukeller.²⁵² Elser could have known nothing about the reasons for the curtailment of Hitler’s quick trip to Munich. It was mere chance that the Swabian joiner did not succeed where the generals had failed even to mount an attempt. Whether the generals would then have acted, had Elser’s attempt been successful, and once the main object of their putsch plans had been removed, is open to question. But with Elser’s failure, the possibility of more ‘moderate’ forces taking over and pulling back from the brink of all-out war with the West had gone.

Elser himself was already under arrest at the customs post near Konstanz when the bomb went off. He had been picked up trying to cross the Swiss border illegally. It seemed a routine arrest. Only some hours after the explosion did the border officials begin to realize that the contents of Georg Elser’s pockets, including a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, linked him with the assassination attempt on Hitler. On 14 November, Elser confessed. A few days later he gave a full account of his actions, and the motives behind them. He was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and treated, remarkably, as a privileged prisoner. Probably Hitler, who continued to believe that Elser was the front-man of an international conspiracy, intended a post-war show-trial to incriminate the British Secret Service. At the end of 1944 or in early 1945 Elser was brought to Dachau. There was to be no show-trial. With the war as good as lost, Elser had no more value to the regime. Shortly before the Americans liberated Dachau, he was taken out and killed.²⁵³

Elser had acted alone. But the concerns which had motivated him — worries about living-standards, anxieties about extending the war — were widespread in the autumn of 1939. Reports abounded of unrest in the working class around that time. The War Economy Decree of 4 September had brought an instant worsening of living standards, higher taxes, abolition of higher rates for overtime and weekend work, and other restrictions. A wage-freeze had followed.²⁵⁴ Industrial indiscipline, including absenteeism and refusal of overtime, eventually forced the regime to back down.²⁵⁵ But longer hours, rises in food prices, and an acute coal shortage affected the poorer in society most of all that autumn. And for those stepping out of line, increased police presence in factories was a constant reminder of the threat of the labour camp.²⁵⁶