Hitler

big-wigs, he left immediately for the station to take the 9.31 p.m. train back to Berlin.
    At twenty past nine the pillar immediately behind the dais where Hitler had stood minutes earlier, and part of the roof directly above, were ripped apart by Elser’s bomb. Eight persons were killed in the blast, a further sixty-three injured, sixteen of them seriously. Hitler had been gone no more than ten minutes when the bomb went off.
    He attributed his salvation to the work of ‘Providence’ – a sign that he was to fulfil the task destiny had laid out for him. In its headline on 10 November, the
Völkischer Beobachter
called it ‘the miraculous salvation of the Führer’. There was, in fact, nothing providential or miraculous about it. It was pure luck. Hitler’s reasons for returning without delay to Berlin were genuine enough. The decision to attack the West had been temporarily postponed on 7 November, with a final decision set for the 9th. Hitler had to be back in the Reich Chancellery by then. It was more important than reminiscing about old times with party stalwarts in the Bürgerbräukeller. Elser could have known nothing about the reasons for the curtailment of Hitler’s quick trip to Munich. It was mere chance that the Swabian joiner did not succeed where the generals had failed even to mount an attempt.
    Elser himself was already under arrest at the customs post near Konstanz when the bomb went off. He had been picked up trying to cross the Swiss border illegally. It seemed a routine arrest. Only some hours after the explosion did the border officials begin to realize thatthe contents of Georg Elser’s pockets, including a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, linked him with the assassination attempt on Hitler. On 14 November, Elser confessed. A few days later he gave a full account of his actions, and the motives behind them. He was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and treated, remarkably, as a privileged prisoner. Probably Hitler, who continued to believe that Elser was the front-man of an international conspiracy, intended a post-war show-trial to incriminate the British Secret Service. At the end of 1944 or in early 1945 Elser was brought to Dachau. There was to be no show-trial. With the war as good as lost, Elser had no more value to the regime. Shortly before the Americans liberated Dachau, he was taken out and killed.
    In his anxieties about the war, Elser spoke for many. He was on far less sure ground with his attribution of blame for the war to the Nazi leadership. The signs are that propaganda had been successful in persuading most ordinary Germans that the western powers were to blame for the prolongation of a war which Hitler had done all he could to avoid. Whatever criticisms – and they were many and bitter – that people had of the party and the regime, Hitler still retained his massive popularity. Few would have applauded a successful assassination attempt. Vast numbers would have been appalled. The chances of a backlash, and a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, would have been great. People were saying that if the attempt had been successful it would have resulted in internal confusion, benefit to Germany’s enemies, loss of the war, worse misery than was caused by Versailles, and the upturning of everything achieved since 1933.
    Hitler’s hold over Germany was as strong as ever. The failure of those in positions of power to move against him and the repercussions of Elser’s bomb-attack demonstrated that his authority was unchallengeable from within the regime’s élites and that he was still immensely popular with the masses. He played on this latter point when he addressed a gathering of around 200 commanding generals and other senior Wehrmacht officers in the Reich Chancellery at noon on 23 November.
    Hitler’s speech was remarkable for its frankness. In the light of the conflict with the army leadership in the previous weeks, its aim was to convince the generals of the need to attack the West without delay. After his usual
tour d’horizon
he reached the characteristic conclusion: ‘Everything is determined by the fact that the moment is favourable now; in six months it might not be so any more.’ He turned to his ownrole. ‘As the last factor I must in all modesty describe my own person: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a civilian could replace me … I shall strike and not capitulate. The fate of the Reich depends only on me.’ Internal conditions