Film tells story of loner who tried to kill Hitler

Press, 18 November 1989, Page 20

Film tells story of loner who tried to kill Hitler

NZPA-DPA Heidenheim Few remember an assassination attempt that nearly killed Adolf Hitler in 1939.

A new film, released 50 years on, tells the story of the unsung hero behind it. His bomb exploded seven minutes too late in the Munich beer hall where the Nazi dictator had given a speech on November 8, 1939. Hitler left earlier than scheduled. The blast tore apart a pillar just behind the rostrum at 9.40 pm. The ceiling and a gallery collapsed, leaving rubble piled metres high on the spot where Hitler had just stood to address his Nazi party supporters. Six men and a waitress died instantly, another man died six days later and 63 other persons were injured. The man who planted the bomb was a carpenter, Georg Elser, bom near Heidenheim, in south-west Germany. All by himself, he wanted to stop Germany getting deeper into the three-month-old World

War 11. If he had succeeded, he might have saved npllions of lives. Elser was no sophisticated analyst of international diplomacy. He had only seven years school education. But during 1939 he saw the preparations for war.

There was no need to think it all over. He knew in his bones what Hitler wanted. Elser wanted to stop him. The carpenter spent months building the time bomb and painstakingly hollowing out the pillar in the beer-hall, the Buergerbraeukeller, so he could hide the device there. He drilled, out the pillar at night, little by little, taking away the spoil in a briefcase so as not to arouse suspicion.

He did most of that work on his knees, leaving them scratched and inflamed. That was what made the police suspicious after they stopped him the evening of the attack at Konstanz, trying to cross the border to

He was interrogated and, on November 14, confessed.

Although subjected to “intensified interrogation,” a Gestapo euphemism for torture, he stuck to his story that he alone planned and carried out the attack.

The Nazis did not put Elser to death until more than five years later. He was killed in Dachau concentration camp near Munich just 20 days before American troops liberated it.

The Georg Elser story remained forgotten for many years. He was not lionised like the uppercrust conspirators who tried to blow up Hitler in his bunker on July 20, 1944. Little research was done on Elser. The new film aims to remedy that. Entitled “Georg Elser — Someone from Germany,” it was’ made by a noted Austrian actor and director, Klaus Maria Brandauer, whose acting credits include roles in “Mephisto” and “Out of

Africa.” Brandauer describes

the film as a “hymn to resistance by a little man.” Heidenheim, close to Elser’s birthplace, was chosen for the world premiere. In another step to greater recognition, the Munich City Council a few weeks ago put up a memorial plaque to Elser on the site where the beer-hall used to be. Why do so few remembered Elser? A group of West Germans devoted to bringing him to greater attention say he lacked snob appeal. He was not an officer or aristocratic.

The group also contended that there is a mental block about Elser among older West Germans, who beg off blame by contending that no individual could have resisted Hitler and the Nazis. Elser did. The Brandauer filtn ends with Elser telling his interrogators: “I had to do it.”