To the hero of the anti-fascist resistance, Georg Elser, a 17-meter monument will be erected in Berlin.
Adolf Hitler was distinguished by consistency in habits. Every year on November 8, he came to Munich and visited a pub called Brgerbrukeller, from where in 1923 the famous "beer coup" splashed out in brown foam. Since the Nazis came to power, this habit of Hitler has become a party-state tradition. There, in a relatively narrow circle, supporters of the Fuhrer gathered to listen to another charismatic speech.
But not only fans of the "savior of the nation" were aware of the details of his business calendar. The lone anti-fascist Georg Elser decided to take advantage of Hitler's persistence with deadly goals. Elser, at his own peril and risk, mounted a powerful bomb with a time mechanism, through complex manipulations he managed to mount a hellish machine into a column behind the tribune in the beer hall. He calculated everything exactly. The bomb exploded on November 8, 1939 at exactly 21.20.
A total of 71 people became victims of the explosion: 8 died on the spot, 16 were seriously injured, 47 were injured of varying severity. Among those killed, seven were members of the NSDAP. However, the leader of the Nazis himself escaped without the slightest damage due to a fluke. Due to bad weather, it was decided to replace the flight to Berlin with a train ride. Hitler finished his speech and left the pub 13 minutes before the explosion.
Lone bomber
Georg Elser was born on January 4, 1903 in the village of Germaringen, today it is the federal state of Baden-Württemberg. He was a professional carpenter, also trained as a locksmith and watchmaker. A highly skilled worker with a wide range of interests settled in Konstanz in the 1920s, where he joined the Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature) society and became a member of the club of fans of playing the zither, a plucked musical instrument popular in the South German lands.
Elser was an inquisitive guy, interested in politics, gravitating towards the left spectrum. For a short time he even was a member of the militant wing of the German Communist Party, but he did not make a career with the Communists, moreover, he left their ranks and went to work in Switzerland, returning to Germany in 1932 on the eve of the Nazis' coming to power - non-partisan, independently thinking, full of energy.
Elser was a staunch anti-fascist. He remained immune to Goebbels' propaganda and believed that the new order brought the working class a real deterioration in life: people began to earn less and lost the ability to freely change jobs. Elser early recognized the militaristic aspirations of the regime and was confident that the top leadership of the National Socialists was preparing Germany for a disastrous war.
In 1938, after the so-called Munich Agreement, Elser made a decision: Hitler and his comrades must be stopped at any cost. For a whole year he was preparing for an assassination attempt. He worked in quarries, got explosives there. In the summer he rented a workshop in Munich, presenting himself to his neighbors and the owner as an inventor. So he got the opportunity to make a bomb without attracting any attention.
He became a regular visitor to the notorious pub, studied the premises and the habits of the servants, and then began to hide in the office in the evenings. For thirty nights in a row, purposefully and at the risk of being caught, Elser gouged a niche for the bomb in the column. And he succeeded in everything, except for the most important thing.
Leaving the place of the intended assassination attempt, Georg Elser tried to cross the Swiss border, but somehow attracted the attention of customs officers and was detained even before his "invention" exploded in Munich. Soon he was convoyed to Berlin, where, after long interrogations with partiality, he confessed to the attempted murder. Hitler demanded that testimony against the "true organizers" be knocked out of the prisoner at any cost.
But Elser had no one to betray. A lone bomber changed several prisons and concentration camps. As planned by the Fuhrer, a show trial awaited him, but he did not wait for the trial. On April 9, 1945, Georg Elser was executed at Dachau. At the same time, the Nazis spread a rumor that he was their agent. For 15 post-war years, everyone thought that the Munich assassination attempt was just a successful propaganda staging, like the arson of the Reichstag.
Resistance hero
In 1959, journalist Gnter Reis published a large material about Georg Elser, where, based on conversations with witnesses and contemporaries of those events, he for the first time reconstructed the portrait of a lonely anti-fascist fighter. Five years later, historian Lothar Gruchmann discovered in the archives the 203-page original of Elser's interrogation records at the Gestapo. From that moment on, it was considered absolutely certain that he was neither a double agent nor a provocateur.
In fact, this is an absolutely incredible story of private resistance to a totalitarian regime. A young, conscientious worker, who himself organized an attempt on the life of the criminal leader of a militarized state - this story just begs to be seen on movie screens and in novels. Brave, decisive, and judging by the photographs - handsome, Georg Elser is an almost ideal hero or even, God forgive me, a sex symbol.
Nevertheless, up to the 1990s, the name of Elser, if it was inscribed in the official martyrology of the anti-fascist resistance in Germany, was in small print, in contrast to the heroes-conspirators of July 20, 1944, around whom a well-developed mass media cult developed. Only one documentary film was shot about Elser in 1969, detailing the whole story and receiving a prestigious television award. In 1972, a memorial stone was installed in the city of Heidenheim. And that's pretty much it.
But when Gorbachev's "new thinking" began to move state borders and destroy stereotypes, a place in the rebuilding world was found for Georg Elser. In 1989, Klaus Maria Brandauer's film Georg Elser - a loner from Germany broke through the dam of silence. Ten years later, the official biography of Elser, written by Hellmut G. Haasis (Hellmut G. Haasis), finally confirmed the heroic status of "loner". Schools and streets were named after Elzer.
The project for a monument to Elser in Berlin has been around for a long time. Actually, one bronze bust of Elser already stands in Moabit, behind the Ministry of the Interior on the so-called Street of Memories (Strasse der Erinnerung). This is a small pedestrian stretch of the embankment, where the Ernst-Freiberger-Stiftung (Ernst-Freiberger-Stiftung) in 2008 erected monuments to those Germans who, each in their own way, single-handedly opposed the state machine (and suffered differently for this).
In early 2010, the Berlin Senate announced an official international art competition for a large monument to Elser. On October 12 this year, by unanimous decision of the jury, the sculptor and designer Ulrich Klages was declared the winner of the competition. He was instructed to create a seventeen-meter monument to Georg Elser, which, according to the plan, will be erected on the 72nd anniversary of the failed assassination attempt, November 8, 2011, on Wilhelmstrasse, near the place where Hitler's bunker was located.
A justification for terror?
This could end the story about Georg Elser with a trivial-final morality about the reward that found the hero posthumously. However, there is one aspect that has become the reason for a heated debate that has been going on for more than a decade. Political scientist Lothar Fritze, Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt (HAIT), published a controversial article in 1999, where he asked the question: how justified is Elser's act from a moral point of view? We are talking about the most painful problem of modern history - terrorism.
Looking from our time at the attempt on Elser's life, one has to admit: the method he chose to fight Nazism is purely terrorist. And if we take into account the post-Soviet experience, then willy-nilly there is an association with the resonant terrorist attack on May 9, 2004 at the Dynamo stadium in Grozny. The separatists then detonated a bomb hidden in a building under the government rostrum. As a result, the President of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov, and the Chairman of the State Council, Khusein Isaev, were killed.
The schemes of both detonations are similar: both Elzer and Chechen terrorists place a bomb in advance in the immediate vicinity of the political leaders they hate. Elzer's act was unsuccessful, the Chechens succeeded in their case. But in the first case, we consider the performer a hero, because his alleged victim was a generally recognized (ex post) war criminal. In the second case, only participants and supporters of the armed Islamist underground in the Caucasus are considered the heroes of those who killed Kadyrov.
Lothar Fritze noted the ambiguity of Elser's undermining as a role model. Those who decide on a terrorist attack against a representative of the "dark forces" (and how to accurately determine in advance who is dark and who is light?), According to some unwritten code of the "warrior of light", try to exclude random people from the number of victims. In the case of Elzer, as mentioned above, there were many victims, that is, he did not even think about minimizing casualties.
West German terrorists from the Red Army Faction (RAF) began their city guerrilla with the symbolic arson of two supermarkets in Frankfurt am Main in 1968. People did not suffer then, but as a result of the actions of the RAF during the years of terror, 34 people died, many were wounded, and 27 people died among the terrorists themselves and those who supported them. It is not known for certain, but it is possible that Elser's image inspired the RAF participants. Where is the line between heroic resistance and terror?
Pros and cons
“I wanted to prevent a war,” Elser explained the motives for the act during interrogation by the Gestapo. And everything that we know about him creates a completely kind image - except for the desire to kill Hitler. There is a well-known logical paradox: to stop the murders, you must kill all the murderers. This is a vicious circle of violence, from which one cannot escape.
The controversy that unfolded in Germany after Fritze's publication became a battle of intellectuals. Many were hostile to the very idea of questioning the moral qualities of a lone bomber. The Israeli-American historian Saul Friedlnder, whose parents died in Auschwitz, left the scientific council of the Hannah Arendt Institute in protest.
The famous Russian terrorist Boris Savinkov was also a talented writer. In his "Memoirs of a Terrorist" (1909), he very subtly noted that the members of the fighting group of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party saw in terror "not only the best form of political struggle, but also a moral, perhaps religious sacrifice." Thanks to the halo of martyrs, terrorists at different times and in different countries often became heroes of popular rumor, sometimes they were officially awarded state awards.
One of the leaders of the Jewish resistance organization in Palestine "Irgun" Menachem Begin, who used terrorist methods against the British until 1948, when the State of Israel was proclaimed, became Prime Minister in this state in 1977. Today, few people would think to reproach Begin with a terrorist past.
Today's Islamist terrorists are viewed by many as martyrs in a holy war with the satanic West. Suppose for a moment that separatists come to power in the Caucasus. It is clear that Shamil Basayev - the organizer of that very attempt on Akhmat Kadyrov's life - will be immediately recognized as a hero.
It is difficult to say who was the first to invent terror as a means of political struggle. Undoubtedly, Russian ultra-left revolutionaries made a great contribution to this matter at the end of the 19th century, in many ways they formed role models for the whole international of underground fighters for this or that "just cause" for decades to come.
But the monument to Georg Elser in Berlin will primarily remind of how one man almost killed Hitler. All other considerations "for" and "against" in this regard will have to be expressed for a long time in the framework of an open public discussion. Terror for our century, alas, is enough.
