On this day, 9 April 1945, Georg Elser, a factory worker and folk musician who tried single-handedly to kill Hitler, was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp.
Working in a weapons factory and then a quarry, he gradually built up an arsenal of stolen explosives, which in 1939 he planted in a pub in Munich, which he knew Hitler visited every year on 8 and 9 November to celebrate the Nazi putsch of 1923. Unfortunately that year Hitler left early and the bomb missed him by minutes, instead killed six senior Nazis and tragically a waitress.
Elser was later arrested and tortured, but insisted he acted alone and refused to give up any other names, other than one of a communist who had already died. He was sent to the concentration camps, where he was killed on the orders of Himmler just a few days before their liberation.
Learn more about German resistance to Nazism in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/04/04/wch4-anti-nazi-youth-movements-in-world-war-ii/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1395960647255748/?type=3