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One man acting alone very nearly curtailed World War II. No, I’m not talking about Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, or even Ludwig Beck. I’m talking about Georg Elser.

Who?

Georg Elser was a German who hated what Hitler was doing to his country, and especially what he was doing to workers. Further, he understood that the Nazis were driving his country to war, and thought that by murdering Hitler he would be doing something both great and good.370 In other words, he was a good German, if we just this once use that term sincerely.

He knew that every year on November 8 Hitler gave a speech at the Löwenbräu restaurant371 in Munich in honor of his failed 1924 putsch against the Weimar Republic. In 1938 Elser attended the speech to reconnoiter the hall. Realizing almost immediately there was no way he could get close enough to shoot Hitler with a pistol, he determined to build a bomb.

He got a job at a quarry for the express purpose of stealing 120 pounds of explosives. (“The entrance to the explosives storage bunker was sealed by a door, to which Vollmer [the quarry’s director, who later was sentenced to two years in prison merely for having hired Elser] held the key. Elser secured three different keys of the approximate size and returned to the quarry late one night to try them all. Two would not penetrate the keyhole; the third went in easily enough, but would not turn. Elser patiently filed down the key until it turned and the tumblers in the lock slipped out of place. The door swung open to reveal a treasure trove of explosives. It was as easy as that.”372 Four or five times each night Elser snuck into the bunker to steal very small amounts of explosives, until he had as much as he needed.) He was also able to obtain a 75 mm military artillery shell,373 as well as other necessary tools: planes, hammers, squares, tin shears, saws, rulers, pliers, clocks, a battery, and so on.

Late the next summer, Elser entered phase two of his plan. He moved to Munich, rented a room, and told his landlady he would be gone each night working at a laboratory on a super-secret invention. His invention was the bomb.

Each night he went to the Löwenbräu for dinner and stayed till near closing. He then moved to a deserted gallery and waited unmoving till the place closed and everyone left. After that came his real work. Here’s how one historian described it: “Working by the weak beam of a flashlight shrouded with a blue handkerchief, Elser carefully prised away the molding that surrounded a rectangular section of the column [just behind where Hitler would speak]. Then he carefully drilled a small hole in one upper corner of the veneer panel and inserted the tip of a special cabinetmaker’s saw. With exquisite care, Elser began cutting away the panel. He worked three or four hours, then cleaned up evidence of his work before falling asleep in a chair. The painstaking sawing a few millimeters at a time, the replacing of the molding, the picking up of each grain of sawdust after each stint of work—none of this tried the craftsman’s patience. He spent three nights just removing the panel. No trace of his tampering could be detected. . . . He chipped out a cavity, bits and pieces at a time, using hammers and steel hand drills of various diameters. Each tap reverberated through the empty hall, sounding to Elser like pistol shots. When some obstruction required heavier blows than usual, he waited for noises from the street to cover the sounds. Since he worked during the pre-dawn hours, he often had to wait a long time between hammer blows.”374

When finally he completed carving out the cavity he attached a sheet of steel beneath the wood so a security guard’s tapping would reveal no hollow space. He inserted the explosives and a five-day timer he’d made from alarm clocks.

Because he knew that each year Hitler’s speech ran from 8:30 to 10:00 PM, Elser set the timer for 9:20.375 Unfortunately for Elser, and for the world, Hitler’s plans changed at the last moment,