Hitler

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Georg Elser, the Man Who Almost Assassinated Hitler

The date is 8 November 1939, the location – the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich. With their uniforms freshly pressed, their buttons gleaming, their shoes polished, Hitler’s longest-standing comrades filed into the hall, their chests puffed up with pride, their wives at their sides. This event, on this day, had become an annual occasion in the Nazi calendar, a ritual of celebration and remembrance. The climax of the evening, awaited with great anticipation, would be Hitler’s appearance and his speech in which he would praise and pour tribute on these self-satisfied men, his old-timers.

But there was one man who awaited Hitler’s appearance with equal anticipation – but for entirely different reasons. This man was a 36-year-old carpenter, Johann Georg Elser, born 4 January 1903. For Elser, a long-time anti-Nazi, had planted a bomb with the full intention of killing Adolf Hitler. And his bomb was due to explode halfway through the Fuhrer’s speech.

Kill Hitler

Georg Elser had always been quietly defiant in his hatred of the Nazi regime – he’d supported the communists and, once Hitler was in power, refused to give the Nazi salute. He feared Hitler’s aggressive warmongering and foresaw the coming of war and resolved himself, in his own way, to do something to prevent it – and that was to kill Hitler.

Exactly a year earlier before the fateful night, on the 8 November 1938, Elser attended the same annual commemoration in Munich marking the anniversary of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. And it was this annual event, he decided, that would provide the perfect opportunity to implement his audacious plan. The following night, he witnessed first-hand the vicious Kristallnacht, when Nazis throughout the country terrorized Germany’s Jews in a concentrated orgy of killing and violence. Seeing for himself this state-sponsored anarchy merely confirmed for Elser that what he was doing was right.

Elser spent the next year preparing. Each year on 8 November, since 1933, Hitler had come to the same beer hall and delivered a two-hour speech, starting at 8.30, the precise time that, in 1923, he had bulldozed into the hall brandishing a pistol, interrupting a meeting of Bavarian city officials and, firing two shots into the ceiling, declared revolution. The Beer Hall Putsch failed but had become an occasion to honour and remember the Nazis that had fallen that night in Munich.

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Alois Hitler, father to Adolf – brief biography

Alois Schicklgruber’s only claim to fame was that he was the father of Adolf Hitler.

Born 7 June 1837, Alois Schicklgruber was the son of a 42-year-old unmarried farmhand by the name of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. The identity of his father remains uncertain: on Alois’s birth certificate the space for the father’s name was left blank and the word illegitimate was scrolled across the certificate.

When he was five years old, Alois’s mother married Johann Georg Hiedler. Five years later, following his mother’s death, the 10-year-old Alois went to live with his stepfather’s brother, his uncle, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.

Aged 13, Alois found employment as an apprentice cobbler before joining the Austrian Customs Service at the age of eighteen, an organization that was to remain his employer for the rest of his working life.

Schicklgruber becomes Hitler

Alois changed his name to Hitler, a variant of his stepfather’s name, Hiedler, in January 1876. Johann Georg Hiedler had died nineteen years earlier but his name was added to the birth certificate as the father of the 39-year-old Alois. Thus Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hitler.

First wife

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Hitler the Artist

As works of art they are pleasant enough to the eye but, being almost instantly forgettable, don’t linger too long in the memory. Painted almost a century ago in Vienna, they were probably sold to a middle-class family or a local business where, hung on a wall, they were promptly ignored for years to come. But whenever one of these paintings comes up for auction, they usually fetch in the region of about £2,000 each. The price tag reflects not the works’ artistic value but the notoriety of the man who painted them – for they were created by a young Adolf Hitler.

So how did the future dictator start off as an artist?

‘Artist? No, never as long as I live’

Hitler fared poorly at school. One teacher in Hitler’s Austrian hometown of Linz later described the schoolboy as ‘argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered and unable to submit to school discipline.’ Art was the one subject Hitler enjoyed but when, as an 11-year-old, he approached his father and declared his ambition to become an artist, Hitler Snr took it badly. ‘Artist? No, never as long as I live.’

All his working life, Alois Hitler had been an employee of the Austrian customs service, a man who worked hard at a humdrum career and fully expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Problem was, Hitler Jr had no intention of ‘sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty, ceasing to be master of my own time.’ Continue reading →