The photographer includes a different picture of the two in his book, captioned: "Hitler's Sweetheart - it delighted him to see her at the Berghof until some busybody found she was not of pure Aryan descent. The year after Bormann cut off contact, World War Two began.
By the time it ended, six years later, six million Jews would be dead. Rosa did not survive the war, either. She died of polio, aged 17, in a hospital in Munich in , a decade after her first meeting with Hitler.
The Holocaust: Who are the missing million? The tip-off from a Nazi that saved my grandparents. Man who halted Nazi nuclear plan dies at French Resistance fighter dies aged Image source, Alexander Historical Auctions. Image source, Getty Images. The Gestapo tried to find this out when he was captured, shortly after the bomb went off, trying to cross the border into Switzerland with incriminating material in his pockets. The transcript of his prolonged interrogation was discovered in the s, and shows how he demonstrated to astonished Gestapo officials what he had done.
He had begun experimenting with explosives while working for an armaments firm near his home town in Swabia. Then he began to work at the beer hall, the Buergerbraeuhaus, in Munich, where Hitler made his annual November speech. This is where his carpentry and joinery skills became invaluable. For more than 30 nights he arrived late in the hall for a meal, then hid himself as it closed, and set to work overnight when everyone had left, hollowing out the pillar by the stage to make space for a bomb.
Elser told the Gestapo that, "as the smallest noise rang loudly in the empty hall at night", he carried out his loudest work timing it to coincide with "every 10 minutes when the hall toilets flushed automatically". There was a constant risk of discovery. The Gestapo assumed he must have been linked to a larger group, such as the British secret service, and so did many others.
For many decades, it was assumed that Elser must have been part of a larger plot. But in fact, as Hitler's biographer, Ian Kershaw puts it, "the truth was less elaborate - but all the more stunning". Elser was "a single person, an ordinary German, a man from the working class, acting without the help or knowledge of anyone else". Despite a brief association with a communist group, he was not overtly political.
Rather, as Moorhouse puts it, he had a "profound sense of justice" - and he was concerned about the problems faced by ordinary workers under the Third Reich. When the Nazis came to power, he began - as the new film depicts - to make small gestures of defiance, such as refusing to listen deferentially to broadcast speeches by Hitler. By the late s, following the Nazi annexations of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, he was also concerned about Hitler's drive towards war.
He knew his bomb might kill many people. Elser remained a mysterious and controversial figure for decades. Instead of being killed immediately, he was kept alive in a concentration camp during the war and only finally executed in This prompted speculation about who he might have been working for, and whether he might in fact have been a Nazi stooge, his failed plot designed to boost Hitler's popularity. That attempting to kill Hitler has become such a common sci-fi plot device speaks volumes.
What about Stalin? He was arguably worse , killing 20 million of his own people to fuel his ideology. But no, Stalin went about his business unmolested by time travellers, all of whom are busy targeting Hitler. But as noble as it seems, killing the Fuhrer via time travel is a terrible idea, for real-world reasons, not just those in fiction.
Could you actually kill another human being? And of course, some people are just evil. It seems challenging to reconcile these motivations with the mentality that plans to kill Hitler as an altruistic act. All of history to visit, and your first port of call involves killing. When do you kill Hitler? Minority Report struggled with this issue , and that was on a much smaller scale.
But would this be too late? Once everything has been set up, would eliminating Hitler change anything? This brings us onto another reason not to do it.
0コメント