Hitler Escapes Assassination: Elser's Plot in Munich

Adolf Hitler walked out of the Burgerbraukeller beer hall in Munich on November 8, 1939, thirteen minutes before a bomb hidden in a stone pillar detonated exactly where he had been standing. The explosion killed eight people, wounded 63 others, and collapsed part of the gallery onto the stage. Had Hitler kept to his usual schedule, he and much of the senior Nazi leadership would have been among the dead. Georg Elser, a 36-year-old carpenter and watchmaker from Konigsbronn in Swabia, had spent over a year planning the assassination. Beginning in August 1939, he visited the Burgerbraukeller on more than 30 nights, hiding in the building after closing to secretly hollow out a cavity in the brick pillar directly behind the speaker's podium. He packed the space with explosives and constructed a precise timing mechanism from modified clock movements. The device was set to detonate at 9:20 PM, the time Hitler typically reached the middle of his annual speech commemorating the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler cut his speech short that night, departing at 9:07 PM. Fog had grounded his usual airplane, forcing him to take an overnight train back to Berlin. The schedule change was mundane rather than the result of any intelligence warning. Elser was arrested that same evening at the Swiss border in Konstanz, carrying incriminating evidence including a postcard of the beer hall, wire cutters, and parts of a detonator. Under interrogation and torture by the Gestapo, Elser insisted he had acted entirely alone, motivated by the belief that Hitler was leading Germany toward a war that would destroy the country. The Nazis refused to believe a lone carpenter could have planned such a sophisticated operation and searched fruitlessly for evidence of a broader conspiracy. Elser was held in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for over five years. He was executed at Dachau on April 9, 1945, three weeks before the camp's liberation, on direct orders from Hitler.