World War II · Film · 2015
13 Minutes
Elser
A quiet carpenter plants a homemade bomb in a Munich beer hall to kill Hitler, and after it misses him by 13 minutes the Gestapo refuses to believe he acted alone.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 5 places.
Stop 1: Königsbronn, Württemberg
In flashbacks, Elser plays music, falls in love and watches his home village fall in line behind the Nazis.
Stop 2: Bürgerbräukeller, Munich
Key location
Night after night Elser hides in the beer hall to hollow out a pillar, and on the anniversary of the 1923 putsch his bomb goes off.
Stop 3: Swiss border at Konstanz
Trying to slip into Switzerland, Elser is stopped by border guards who find suspicious items in his pockets.
Stop 4: Gestapo headquarters, Berlin
Arthur Nebe and Heinrich Müller torture Elser to name the conspirators behind him, but he insists he worked alone.
Stop 5: Dachau concentration camp
After years of isolation as the regime's special prisoner, Elser learns what has become of his interrogators as the war ends.
What really happened
Georg Elser, a carpenter from Königsbronn in Württemberg, decided in 1938 that Hitler was leading Germany into war. Working alone for months, he hollowed out a pillar behind the speaker's platform of the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich and fitted it with a time bomb.
On 8 November 1939 Hitler cut his annual speech short and left 13 minutes before the explosion, which killed eight people. Elser was caught that night at the Swiss border in Konstanz, interrogated by the Gestapo, and held for five years as a special prisoner before being shot at Dachau on 9 April 1945. Long neglected, he is now honored in Germany as a resistance hero.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- Elser
- Directed by
- Oliver Hirschbiegel
- Countries
- Germany
- Languages
- German
- Released
- 2015
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Western Europe
- Themes
- Resistance
- Biography
- True story
