The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945

by Richard J. Evans

The truth only began to emerge when, in a remote part of south Germany, the border police arrested a thirty-eight-year-old cabinet-maker called Georg Elser, who was trying to cross the Swiss frontier without proper papers. On searching his clothes and effects, they found a postcard of the beer-cellar where the explosion occurred, a fuse and sketches of a bomb. Elser was quickly handed over to the local Gestapo. When news of the explosion reached the Gestapo office, the policemen put two and two together and sent Elser to Munich for interrogation. At first, nobody could believe that the cabinet-maker had worked on his own. Suspects of all kinds were arrested, the process fuelled by a wave of denunciations of characters seen acting suspiciously near the scene of the assassination attempt. Heinrich Himmler arrived at the interrogation centre, kicked Elser repeatedly with his jackboots and had him beaten. But Elser continued to insist that he had acted entirely on his own initiative. The Gestapo even made him build an exact replica of the bomb, which, to their astonishment, he did successfully. In the end, they were forced to admit privately that he had acted alone.2