Welcome Victoria King-Voreadi to History Undressed! She's written a fascinating and mysterious piece for us today. Enjoy!
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
Most people don’t. He looks mild mannered and, from all
available information about him, apparently he was. He made cuckoo clocks and he played the
zither (a mutant musical instrument resembling something between a harp and a
piano’s insides). He loved animals, was
a momma’s boy and sexually irresponsible.
Yet this chap single-handedly conceived of, planned and executed the
only assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that worked – but was still a
failure. Now, how is that possible?
Georg Elser sincerely wanted to halt
the onset of WWII, though why it was so important to him to do so is anybody’s
guess. In order to endure endless nights
on his knees chiseling away at a 1m thick pillar, then meticulously concealing
his work and slipping out of the building undetected, he must have had a strong
motive! His determination was so blindly
resolute that he was totally unaware of the fact that Hitler had cancelled the
speaking engagement; it was only reconfirmed at the last minute. So, despite the fact that our boy wasn’t
actually paying attention, he succeeded in planting a bomb in the venue where
the Führer would be speaking the evening of November 8th 1939.
He had the knowledge
to build an effective time bomb, and the skills required to make the device undetectable
even to Hitler’s most loyal hounds. He
had the self discipline essential to carry the plan out and, last but not
least, the Führer showed up – so what went wrong?
I would venture to say
that Georg Johann Elser may well have been the most competent yet unluckiest
assassin of all time:
Strike One
He had no way of
knowing what the weather in Berlin would be that night. As it happened there was heavy fog which
meant that Hitler and his entourage would not be able to fly back from Munich,
they would have to take the train to Berlin.
Strike Two
Who could possibly
imagine a megalomaniac cutting a speech short!?
Hitler however was forced to do so that night – there wasn’t time to
change the train schedules so he spoke for less than an hour in order to catch
the last scheduled train for Berlin.
Strike Three
Georg was governed by
fixed ideas. His plan was absolute and
he executed it to the letter. As such he
was absolutely certain of its success.
He set the device, and then blithely set off for the Swiss border. Everything had been perfectly planned except
his escape. He had crossed the border
into Switzerland so many times during his adult life it never occurred to him
that it might pose a problem. He hadn’t
counted on the political changes during Hitler’s surge for power affecting even
sleepy hollows like Konstanz. His papers
were not in order so, he was detained.
Pay attention now because this is the point in our tale where
things become really ridiculous.
Initial accounts of
the Burger Braü Keller bombing stated that more than 100 people were killed and
even more wounded. The “official” party
reports that followed however claimed that it was not a bomb but a freak
accident due to a gas leak and that only 8 people were killed.
The Munich police had
collared a suspect within 36 hours and not long thereafter acquired a full
detailed confession without torture: that should have meant cigars and
promotions. The only problem was that
their suspect’s confession was totally unacceptable. Hitler’s popularity base was supposed to be
the German working class – if an Aryan Lutheran German worker wanted him dead,
and had very nearly succeeded in offing him, then things would not look rosy
for the future of the Reich! Goebbels’
team may have gotten a great opportunity to declare divine intervention, but
for the overall good of the “Kampf” it was essential the entire incident be
relegated to the ‘insignificant and thus easily forgotten’ pile.
The GESTAPO, lovely
individuals, were in a real pickle; simply unable to accept that one civilian
could have executed such an act unassisted.
For their own peace of mind (not to mention for the perpetuity of their
own job security) it was tantamount they unearth a foreign conspiracy. Our boy Georg was interrogated by a seemingly
endless stream of well meaning and appropriately terrified officers – but the
result was always the same – it was the only story he knew how to tell. He even politely offered to sign off on
whatever would make their position easier, he was screwed one way or the other,
but that only served to make his captors more paranoid. Were an actual conspiracy ever substantiated
it would have looked like an intentional cover up.
An expeditious
execution would have been hugely convenient but would have required a trial and
lots of documentation that might be cross referenced some day (putting careers
and kudos at risk). The only course of
action was to hold on to him until sufficient time had passed for him to simply
fade away.
My long-time friend
and co-author Donald Schwarz was obsessed with Elser for
decades. In essence Interrogation Tango, this attempt to flesh out an historical ghost, is the way
Don would have liked the story to turn out if he were the protagonist.
Interrogation Tango
is an anti-detective story, based on real events and people, about an assassin
who drove the Gestapo crazy because they could not explain him away.
A non-descript clock maker named Georg Elser thought it
would be a good idea to stop the onset of WWII. He thought he might be able to
do that if he could kill Hitler and all of his entourage and, because he was
sincerely looking for an opportunity, he found one. He placed a bomb in a beer
hall where the Fuhrer was scheduled to give a speech.
It was a good honest try and it went wrong only by minutes.
Elser was caught by a series of accidents and, when his family was threatened,
he immediately confessed. There was only one problem: his confession was
unacceptable. The police had assassin profiles then as they do now and he fit
none of them. In fact, it was obvious to the police that he was not a criminal.
Besides which, politics demanded that the attempt could not be perpetrated by
one of Hitler’s faithful, adoring citizens; it had to be a British conspiracy.
However, there was no conspiracy and the cops were afraid to invent one, since
in the event that there was a real conspiracy, an invented one would look like
a cover-up.
Interrogation Tango
is the policemen’s story: the detectives Elser destroyed and the Gestapo men he
drove crazy, followed by chaos and a body count.
Purchase
Interrogation
Tango at Iguana Books as
Print,
ePub,
or
Kindle
editions.
Victoria lives in the city of Herákleionon the island of
Crete, Greece with her husband and two beautiful daughters. A freelance writer
and translator in Greece since 1992 she has received two screenwriting grants
from the EEU Media Programme for both original and commissioned feature
scripts, has worked on local and foreign productions. Victoria met her
co-author Donald E. Schwarz in 1994 while visiting New York and the two
instantly struck up a creative partnership.
Connect with Victoria:
Twitter - @VAKingVoreadi
