The son of a haulage worker and timber merchant, Georg Elser and his four siblings experienced hunger and poverty during the First World War after his father was drafted into the fortress of Ulm as a coachman. In 1917, he started an apprenticeship as an iron turner in his hometown of Königsbronn, yet had to discontinue it for health reasons in 1919. Over the 1919-1922 period, he completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter in the same place, managing to be the best student in his class at his vocational school in Heidenheim. He then worked as a carpenter for various workshops, including aircraft manufacturer Dornier in Friedrichshafen, and as a clockmaker in Constance and Meersburg. He joined the woodworkers' union and then, in 1928/29, the Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters' League) and voted for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
Even before 1933, Georg Elser feared that the National Socialists' coming to power would mean another war. As early as 1933, he was engaged in minor resistance activities with his communist friend Joseph Schurr. He met his long-term partner Elsa Härlen that same year. He refused to give the Hitler salute and listened to foreign radio stations. The intervention of the Nazi regime in the Spanish Civil War against democratic Spain in 1936 reinforced his belief that Hitler would start a new world war and that this needed to be prevented. In 1936, Elser took up a new post at the Waldenmaier valve factory in Heidenheim, which, as he soon discovered, also produced armaments. During the so-called Sudetenland Crisis in 1938, when the German attack on Czechoslovakia was looming, Elser's resolve to assassinate Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels grew. On November 8, 1938, on the occasion of the annual Beer Hall Putsch commemorations, Elser scouted out possible locations in Munich for an attack that he wished to carry out the following year.
In the spring of 1939, he took a job working in a quarry in Königsbronn in order to obtain explosives. Elser conducted experiments with explosives in his parents' orchard. Between May and July 1939, he made a timer and what he dubbed his 'Hell Machine.' In August, Elser moved to Munich. From September to the beginning of November 1939, after the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland, he shut himself away in the Bürgerbräukeller for 30 to 40 nights to install the explosives and the detonator in a column in the vicinity of the lectern. On November 5, Elser programmed the timer for November 8 at 9:20 p.m. Two days later, he checked the detonator again before heading to Constance, from where he planned to escape to Switzerland.
The bomb exploded as planned, but Hitler had already left the Bürgerbräukeller at 9:07 p.m. on November 8, earlier than expected, because he had to be in Berlin the next day and would not be able to fly due to fog. On the evening of November 8, before the bomb went off, Elser was arrested while attempting to illegally cross the border near Constance. The fact that Elser was carrying coil springs, bolts, and screws as well as a postcard of the Bürgerbräu function room made him one of the main suspects just hours after the assassination became known. Elser was taken to the Wittelsbacher Palais, the headquarters of the Upper Bavarian Gestapo. During the interrogations, Elser initially remained silent and tried to deny everything. On the night of November 14, 1939, when employees of the Bürgerbräukeller and a supplier of his bomb-making equipment recognized him and he was pretty much incriminated by the fact that his knees were so sore from kneeling the whole night, Elser confessed to the assassination attempt, in which eight people died. The record of this interrogation is no longer extant, though there is another one, which was made between November 19 and November 23 in the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, where Elser was transferred not long after. Elser was subjected to severe torture several times because the Nazis did not believe that he was the sole perpetrator and tried to extract from him the names of the people pulling the strings, especially any from England. Even the arrest of Elsa's mother, siblings, and friend did not yield any further information: Georg Elser had acted on his own initiative and alone.
During the interrogation to which he was subjected by the Gestapo, he stated the following motives for the crime: firstly, the deterioration in workers' living conditions (wages had fallen since the Nazis had come to power, and yet there had been a sharp rise in deductions for taxes and social security contributions), and secondly, the suppression of fundamental rights in the Nazi state: "Also, as I see it, the working class has been under a quite some pressure since the national revolution. For example, a worker can no longer change job if he wants to, is no longer the boss of his children because of the Hitler Youth, and has less freedom in terms of religious matters too. Here, I have in mind the activities of German Christians in particular" (quoted in Ziller/Renz/Gruchmann, p. 55). Elser had also stated to the Gestapo officers for the record that, as a Protestant Christian, he had frequently visited churches and prayed in the lead-up to the assassination attempt, but had ultimately come to the firm conviction that his action was not sinful: "My aim was to prevent even greater bloodshed through my actions" (ibid., p. 51). As a third motive, Elser cited the looming threat of war posed by the Nazi regime: "I was already convinced this time last year that the Munich Agreement would not be the end of it, that Germany would make further demands on other countries and would annex other countries and that war was inevitable for that reason, which is to say that I suspected it would turn out this way" (ibid., p. 55).
From November 1939 until the end of 1944/start of 1945, Georg Elser was held as a special prisoner in solitary confinement under constant guard in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the winter of 1944/45, he was taken from there to Dachau Concentration Camp , where he again had special status due to the so-called Kommandatur-Arrest (command station arrest). Shortly before the collapse of the Nazi regime, head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller asked Hitler, through Himmler, for a decision on Elser's fate. On April 5, 1945, Dachau's camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Weiter, received the order to murder Elser discreetly and to cover up the murder as an air war death. On the evening of April 9, 1945, SS officer Theodor Bongartz shot Georg Elser close to the crematorium in Dachau Concentration Camp. Elser's body was burned immediately.
It took decades before Georg Elser received the recognition that he deserved, due to the extent of the refusal to believe that the alleged communist and lone perpetrator could be capable of such an act, despite him having shown society that even a simple tradesman, bound only by his conscience, was indeed capable.
