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Every year,
on November 8, Hitler and the “veteran soldiers” of the National
Socialist Party would gather to commemorate the failed putsch of
November 9,1923. Hitler would usually begin his speech at 8:30 p.m.,
and would continue speaking until 10:00. On November 8, 1939, Hitler
decided to begin his speech approximately half an hour earlier than
usual. He finished at 9:07, and left the site. At 9:20, a bomb
exploded and shook the beer hall. Hitler escaped an assassination
attempt. Nine people were killed.
While
Hitler had been speaking in Munich, a man by the name of Johann
George Elser was arrested in Constance while attempting to illegally
cross the border into Switzerland. A number of suspicious items were
found on his person, and he was sent to be interrogated. When news
of the assassination attempt was made known, the initial
investigation pointed toward Elser, who, after being tortured,
confessed to having planted the bomb in Munich. Elser was sent to
Sachsenhausen, and from there to Dachau. In April 1945, he was
murdered by order of high-ranking government officials.
Officials
of the Nazi regime were convinced that Elser had been operating in
conjunction with British intelligence. Opposition forces, on the
other hand, as well as many outside Germany, were convinced that
Elser had, in fact, been employed by the Gestapo as a provocation.
Later research showed beyond doubt that Elser had actually operated
on his own.
Elser, who
was a carpenter by profession, thought that the Nazis’ rise to
power had greatly damaged the labor conditions of the working class.
He was outraged by the fact that human beings were no longer free
and that the education of children had been taken out of their
parents’ hands and turned over to such institutions as the Hitler
Youth. He had decided to assassinate Hitler in the wake of the
Sudetenland crisis in 1938, in order to avert the war which he was
convinced had become imminent. In August 1939, after the war broke
out, he began to plan the assassination. He spent a month hiding in
the beer hall after it had closed, and dug a tunnel under a row of
floor tiles. Every morning he would cover up the tunnel, and would
leave the beer hall after it had opened. When he had completed the
tunnel, he planted the bomb, which was set on a timer.
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