New film looks at the life of Georg Elser, a 36-year-old carpenter who nearly killed the dictator in 1939.
Christian Friedel, centre, as Georg Elser
He was a lone operator who built and planted a bomb that, had it exploded just minutes earlier, might have changed world history.
Now a new drama celebrates Georg Elser, the 36-year-old carpenter who had the foresight to try to kill Adolf Hitler in 1939. The film, 13 Minutes – which was the tantalising time gap between Hitler’s earlier than scheduled departure from a Munich beer hall due to heavy fog and the explosion of the bomb – pays homage to a largely unsung hero.
“I wanted to set a cinematic monument to Elser, who deserves to be given the status of a proper hero,” said the director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, who is best known for his 2004 hit film Downfall, about the final days of Hitler, but had a flop with a biopic about Princess Diana.
The film, which has premiered at the Berlin film festival, dramatises Elser’s dogged and elaborate work to install his sophisticated bomb by spending up to 35 nights in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich before Hitler’s appearance there on 8 November. He made a hole in the brickwork behind the speaker’s rostrum, creeping out in the mornings with the rubble in a small case. His last act was to install a twin-clock mechanism to trigger the detonator.
The bomb went off, killing eight people. But Elser’s plan to take Hitler’s life failed, because the Nazi leader, who was attending the beer hall with other prominent Nazis including Goebbels, Heydrich, Hess and Himmler, had to leave early when plans to fly back to Berlin were thwarted because of heavy fog and he had to take the train instead.
Even though there are monuments to Elser in Germany, he has never achieved anything like the same sort of household-name status as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, also 36, the German army officer and aristocrat who was executed for leading the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
“A skewed picture of Elser has been delivered up for years,” said Hirschbiegel, largely due to Nazi propaganda, which suggested everything from Elser having worked with British intelligence to the Nazis deliberately having contracted him to fail, to give the impression that they were protected by providence.
“He was seen as a strange misfit, a rogue and, most particularly, a member of the working class. That made him seem less brilliant and interesting than an aristocrat,” Hirschbiegel said.
Elser, who had communist sympathies but was not a member of the party, was Germany’s “first Nazi resistance fighter, who in 1939 was already clear-sighted enough to plan an assassination,” he added.
Comparing Elser to the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, he said: “Like Snowden, he had no personal vested interest, simply an inner need to act for the greater good for which he risked his own life. I hope this film will now give Elser the honour and the respect that he deserves, so that he’ll be at least on a par with Stauffenberg.”
13 Minutes switches between Elser’s previous idyllic life in the Swabian Alps, including his relationship with his girlfriend, Else, who knew nothing of his plot, and his brutal interrogation by the Gestapo, whose torture methods included beating him and putting metal rods under his finger nails as well as feeding him exceedingly salty herring, drugging him and hypnotising him. But despite Hitler’s refusal to believe he had operated alone, his torturers failed to get Elser to admit that he was part of a wider plot.
He was imprisoned in Dachau, where he was executed five years later, weeks before the end of the second world war.
The film-makers revealed that even now Elser’s descendants, some of whom still live in his native village in Swabia, in south-western Germany, which due to its Nazi affiliations does not come off well in the film, are reluctant to laud his achievements.
“Some of them still remain bitter about the fact that they were ostracised because of their relationship to him, with many of them having been sent to the front to fight,” said the screenplay writer, Fred Breinersdorfer, who contacted the family during his research. “They do not recognise him as the man who had the balls to say ‘we must do something’.”
Christian Friedel, the actor who plays Elser, said he had spoken to the carpenter’s nephew, who had given interesting insight into his uncle’s modus operandi.
“He told me that during the year he spent planning and plotting his bomb, nobody had a clue as to what he was up to – he managed to keep it completely to himself”.
The film-makers justified the detail of the often lengthy torture scenes, saying they thought it was important because similar systematic torture methods are still widespread in many countries.
“There are detailed protocols in which the Nazis wrote down their methods of torture,” said Breinersdorfer. “Those same methods are still used elsewhere in the world today”.
The Bürgerbräukeller no longer stands, but a pavement plaque in Munich marks the spot where Elser hid his bomb.