One Man Against Tyranny

You may be familiar with Claus von Stauffenberg, who conspired to kill Hitler with a bomb and who’s plot was the basis for the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. But do you know about the many other attempts on Hitler’s life? One involved Georg Elser, who worked alone for a year on a plan to destroy the Fuhrer, with a bomb planted in a beer hall.

While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.
Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.

When the bomb finally went off, it killed eight people and injured 64 others -but Hitler was not one of them . Read the whole story at Past Imperfect.