Beware the 8th of November
Beware the 8th of November might have been a sentiment to be heeded by one of history’s most evil men. As it turns out, the date was one of particular bad luck–or perhaps good–for none other than Adolph Hitler.
By November 1923, the Nazi Party, fueled by German unrest heightened by post World War-I reparations, had already begun making in-roads to power across the country. But for Adolph Hitler, the party’s ambitious leader, it wasn’t moving fast enough.
On November 8, 1923, inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful March on Rome, Hitler attempted a coup (or putsch, in German), seeking to oust the weak, democratically elected government of the Weimar Republic and put himself and his fellow Nazis in charge. Using a small detachment of his SA troops, Hitler stormed into a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, where Gustav Ritter von Kahr, Staatskomissar (“state commissioner”) of the Republic, was making a speech in front of 3,000 people. He fired a shot into the ceiling and announced the national revolution had begun.
It was a night marked by chaos and confusion, as people struggled to figure out who was in charge and where their loyalties should lie. Clashes broke out throughout the city, leading to the deaths of both government and Nazi party adherents. Eventually, Hitler conceded defeat and fled the city. He was arrested only two days later and charged with high treason, a sentence that could have carried death. Several attending judges, however, were fiercely pro-Nazi, and Hitler escaped with a five -year sentence, of which he ultimately ended up serving only eight months.
Fast foward to 1939. Hitler is out of jail and now Chancellor of Germany, the Nazis are firmly in power, and the world is well on its way to becoming embroiled in a war, with Poland having been invaded in September of that year. The failed putsch of 1923 was not forgotten but was, instead, now an anniversary of somber commemoration to those fallen heroes who had sought, from the beginning, to materialize Hitler’s vision of a new Germany. As he did every year, Hitler marked the occasion with a speech to his followers. On this particular anniversary, Hitler was at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, once again regaling his most ardent supporters with his vision of the Fatherland.
What he didn’t know, however, was that not all were loyal to his cause.
Thirty-six year-old George Elser was a German carpenter who had become increasingly alarmed over the reckless violence propagated by Hitler and the Nazis. As early as 1938, he had begun plans to kill, not only Hitler, but also other leading members of the National Socialists, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. He hoped this act would prevent the impending war and save countless lives. Remembering Hitler’s yearly trek to Munich to give a speech at the site of the failed putsch, he realized November 8 would be an opportune time to put his plan into action.
Finding the beer hall unguarded, Elser spent most of 1939 constructing an explosive device and detonator, as well as preparing a supporting pillar in the hall to conceal it. The mechanism was flawless. The timing was spot on.
But Hitler was unpredictable.
Just minutes before the bomb was to explode, the Chancellor, along with the party leaders who had accompanied him, unexpectedly left the beer hall. Seven people were killed and 63 were wounded when the bomb went off.
But none of them were Adolf Hitler.
The next day, the Nazi Party official paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, placed the blame squarely on British secret agents, even implicating Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself. This work of propaganda was an attempt to stir up hatred for the British and whip the German people into a frenzy for war.
The only problem? Customs officers had already arrested Elser for carrying suspicious items as he was attempting to escape to Switzerland. After several days of interrogations in Munich, Elser confessed. He had done it, he said, on his own, without any assistance from any foreign government.
This was bad news for the Nazis. Here at the start of an attempted world takeover, it was absolutely imperative that they tamp down on any whiff of unrest or subterfuge within their own country. Therefore, the Nazis began propagating that Elser was a tool of British intelligence and planted the bomb on their behalf.
After years in solitary confinement, Georg Elser was murdered in Dachau concentration camp on April 9, 1945, only weeks before the end of the war. Even in defeat, the Nazis wanted to make sure the man’s true story would never be told.
Adolf Hitler ended up surviving six separate assassination attempts, ultimately taking his own life as the Allies approached Berlin.
