Who Was Georg Elser? The Man Who Nearly Killed Hitler

Georg Elser was a Swabian carpenter who on 8 November 1939 set off a homemade bomb on his own in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller. It exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left early, and eight people died. Elser was arrested that same evening and murdered at Dachau on 9 April 1945. His motive: to prevent the war.

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On 8 November 1939 the Nazi leadership gathered in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller to commemorate Hitler's putsch of 1923. At 21:20 a bomb exploded in the hall and brought the ceiling down. Hitler was already gone. The man who had built it, a Swabian carpenter then 36 years old, had been sitting for 35 minutes in a customs post on the Swiss border.

Asked what drove him, Georg Elser said a sentence still quoted at the German Resistance Memorial Center today: "I wanted to prevent the war." In short: a craftsman with no party and no backers planned and built on his own an attack that the Gestapo at first did not think possible. It failed because the weather forced Hitler to leave earlier. What came after is a part of the story less known: five years of solitary confinement, a murder shortly before the end of the war, and decades of silence.

Johann Georg Elser was born on 4 January 1903 in Hermaringen in Württemberg and grew up in Königsbronn on the Swabian Alb. He was a carpenter and tinkerer, a man who mastered clockwork, furniture, and mechanics. He rejected National Socialist policy and wanted to prevent the war. According to eyewitnesses he left the room when Hitler's speeches were broadcast on the radio. More about his motives we know only from the interrogations, and they took place under coercion.

In November 1938 Elser inspected in Munich, after Hitler's speech, the unguarded Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler spoke every year on the anniversary of the putsch. The decision to carry out the attack fell, by his account, in this period. The war had begun on 1 September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. He said later that with the act he wanted to prevent "still greater bloodshed" that an extension of the war in the West would bring. Elser acted alone. The Gestapo long did not believe that, research today considers it established, because Elser's statements match those of many witnesses.

Elser's plan had three parts: the explosives, the timer, and the place. He got the explosives from the quarry of Georg Vollmer in Königsbronn, where he took a job as a laborer and took 105 sticks of dynamite and 125 detonators. From his earlier employer, the Heidenheim fittings factory, he took 250 pieces of pressed powder. To his neighbors he presented himself as an inventor, so that nobody wondered about his tinkering.

The timer consisted of two clockworks. From August 1939 Elser lived in Munich to prepare the attack. Every evening he hid on the gallery of the Bürgerbräukeller and let himself be locked in after closing time. In more than 30 nights between August and November he hollowed out, with simple tools, chisel and brace, by the light of a flashlight and on sore knees, the pillar behind the speaker's podium. In early November he installed the charges and filled the remaining cavity with explosives and powder. He set the clockworks and on 8 November traveled toward the Swiss border.

On the evening of 8 November Hitler spoke in the hall before 1,500 to 2,000 listeners, by other accounts up to 3,000, mostly "old fighters." In his speech Hitler ranted mainly against Britain as the central enemy of the war. He had actually wanted to fly to Berlin, but the weather did not allow it, and so a special train had to be arranged. His speech was therefore shorter than usual. At 21:07 he left the hall with his entourage and went to the main station.

At 21:20 the bomb exploded to the minute. It destroyed the pillar, the ceiling collapsed, and rubble lay meters deep. Some 120 to 200 people were still in the hall, according to the different counts, some of whom had entered the hall only after the speech. Serving had been forbidden during the speech. Eight died: seven Nazi Party members and the waitress Maria Henle. The number of injured is usually given in the literature as 63, of them 16 or 17 seriously. A precise tally from the contemporary reports comes to 57, including 15 seriously injured. Even the press of the time gave contradictory figures.

Elser did not experience this moment. At 20:45, before the explosion, two customs officers arrested him in Konstanz because he wanted to cross illegally into Switzerland. He had been close to his goal.

When news of the attack reached Konstanz, certain objects in Elser's pockets aroused suspicion. The Gestapo took him to Munich, where he was interrogated and also tortured. After several days he confessed to having planned and carried out the act alone, and described it so precisely that his statements are considered credible to this day.

The Nazi leadership did not believe it, or did not want to. Hitler personally suspected the British secret service behind the attack. To support that, propaganda drew attention to two British agents, Best and Stevens, who on 9 November in the Dutch town of Venlo had been lured into a trap by an SD commando and abducted to Germany. The press made a connection to the attack that in reality did not exist. Many Germans took over the interpretation that Elser was only a tool of the British secret service, and even after the war his name was hardly mentioned. His home town too felt the consequences: a few weeks after the attack little Königsbronn had to bear the repercussions, with interrogations and harassment by the Gestapo.

A twist of history: the British agent Sigismund Payne Best, whom propaganda had presented as the mastermind, himself later sat in the same cell block as Elser. In January 1946 he stated that Elser had been an SS Unterscharführer who carried out the attack on Hitler's personal orders. That claim did not prevail: the interrogation records show Elser as a lone attacker and match the statements of many witnesses.

Elser never came before a court. The Nazi regime wanted to convict him after the war in a show trial, so it held him as a "special prisoner" in strict solitary confinement, first in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in early 1945 in Dachau. When exactly the imprisonment in Sachsenhausen began, the sources give differently: the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial gives 1941, other accounts speak of 1940. Five years of imprisonment in all is the usual figure.

When it was foreseeable that a trial would never happen, Hitler ordered the murder. On 9 April 1945 around 11 p.m., SS-Oberscharführer Theodor Bongartz shot Georg Elser with a shot to the neck at the execution site of the crematorium. The order had come by express letter from Berlin, and the regime had several resisters killed the same day, among them Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, whose execution Hitler had ordered together with Elser's. Elser's body was burned, the ashes scattered. There is no grave. Twenty days later, on 29 April 1945, US troops liberated Dachau, to which Elser had been brought only in early 1945.

After 1945 it was difficult to remember Elser. In postwar Germany the craftsman was at first not seen as a resistance fighter, and the propaganda version of a tool of the British secret service lingered. In Königsbronn itself Elser long remained a taboo, because the memory of the Gestapo interrogations and harassment after the attack was still alive.

To this day Elser is remembered less than Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who carried out an attack on Hitler on 20 July 1944: Cicero noted on the 80th anniversary that the simple craftsman had been remembered strikingly less. Only late did that change. According to a chronicle, in 1989 a plaque was placed at the spot where the pillar had stood, in 1995 one in Königsbronn, and in 1997 a Georg Elser memorial was set up there, and in the same year the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin showed an exhibition. In Munich, in the Maxvorstadt, near the place where he had rented a room, the memorial "8 November 1939" by the artist Silke Wagner, made of aluminum and glass, recalls him: it lights up every evening at 21:20, the minute of the detonation, numeral by numeral until the whole lettering glows, and goes out again after a minute. In 2026 the German Resistance Memorial Center showed a special exhibition.

That Elser failed narrowly invites the question of what would have happened. The director of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation, Karl Freller, said on the anniversary that the world would have been spared "suffering of millions." That is an understandable sentence, but historical scholarship cannot document it. Who would have followed Hitler in death, whether the war in the West would have ended, and what that would have meant for the crimes is open.

Something simpler is certain: Hitler left the hall with other senior functionaries earlier than usual because a flight was not possible because of the weather. Thus not only he but also the functionaries who left with him escaped the attack, and Elser himself could not foresee it. The planning was, by all sources, precise: the bomb exploded at the set minute. It was chance that saved Hitler, and it affected millions, how far remains speculation.

First, the number of injured: 63 in the literature, 57 by one tally, among the seriously injured 15 to 17. Second, the start of imprisonment in Sachsenhausen: 1940 or 1941. Third, Elser's exact motives: they are known only from the interrogations, which took place under coercion, and from witness statements. Fourth, the conspiracy theories: that Elser was instigated by the Nazi leadership, as Payne Best claimed in 1946, or worked for the British secret service. There is no evidence for it, the sources speak for a lone attacker.

Fifth, what would have happened without the fog: that is speculation, and scholarship abstains. That these points are open changes nothing about the core: Elser built the bomb alone, it exploded on schedule, and he paid with his life.

To wrap up, everything at a glance, with fact and story kept apart.

Elser's story shows what one person can do and how little chance and weather allow. That's why every season in HistoryBytes is split into five categories, and this story touches all five: Georg Elser as a person, the Bürgerbräukeller as a place, the attack of 8 November 1939 as an event, the question of what resistance means as an idea, the timer of two clockworks as an object. That's how the WW2 season builds the whole picture of a war in which there were also people who wanted to prevent it.

Georg Elser did with simple means what generals and politicians did not, and he failed by thirteen minutes and a foggy evening. That we know his name today is not a given: for decades he was hardly named, his home town stayed silent, there is no grave. Today a memorial lights up in Munich every evening at the minute of the explosion. He was 36 years old when he carried out the attack and 42 when he died. Perhaps that is the fitting remembrance of a man who had no party, no mandate, and no applause, only a conviction: that the war must be prevented.

Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, "Bürgerbräu-Attentat, 8. November 1939"; German Historical Museum, LeMO, "Attentat von Georg Elser"; Bavarian Memorials Foundation, press releases on the 80th anniversary of his death and the 85th anniversary of the attack; Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, "Johann Georg Elser und das Lagergefängnis"; State Agency for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg, "Georg-Elser-Dossier"; German Resistance Memorial Center, special exhibition (2026); Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel, "Georg Elser" (Arbeitskreis Georg Elser); Memorials of Baden-Württemberg, "Georg Elser: Vom Attentat bis zur Ermordung." This page is updated when new research is published.