Background
Johann Georg Elser was born in the village of Hermaringen, Württemberg, on 4 January 1903. He was a son of a timber merchant.
Johann Georg Elser was born in the village of Hermaringen, Württemberg, on 4 January 1903. He was a son of a timber merchant.
Attended elementary school in Königsbronn.
At the age of fourteen was apprenticed as a 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, the Rotfrontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters’ Asso¬ciation), but although he had regularly voted communist before 1933, Elser was not politically minded, nor did he have any contacts with underground or Resistance organizations. A reserved, slow-spoken individual who carried out his assassination plan single-handed, Elser had been perturbed by the Munich agreements and the danger of war. He took his decision in the autumn of 1938 and planned the assassination attempt meticulously, accumulating a stock of explosives, designing a special clock mechanism and hiding his machine in a wooden column behind the speakers' rostrum in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller where Adolf Hitler was due to speak on 8 November 1939, before the ‘Old Fighters’.
Elser s explosive device went off at twenty minutes past nine, destroying half the hall, killing seven people and wounding sixty-three. Hitler had unfortunately left the building ten minutes earlier, immediately after concluding his anniversary speech. Elser was arrested the same evening at the Swiss frontier and brought to Berlin, where he was interrogated at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Eventually he confessed to the Gestapo, but the Nazis preferred to blame the British Secret Service and Otto Strasser's Black Front for the assassination attempt. Elser was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp as Hitler's special prisoner', where he was kept along with other prominent prisoners' such as Léon Blum, Paster Niemöller and the former Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg. 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 w ar. On 9 April 1945 he was murdered by the Gestapo on a secret order from Himmler and his death attributed to an Allied bombing raid. There appears to be no evidence for the assertion that Elser was himself a Nazi agent. His motives were those of a lone resister who became convinced that Hitler's elimination would prevent more bloodshed and ameliorate the condition of the working man.