This is the story of Georg Elser, told in full for the first time in English from the Gestapo's own interrogation files.

In the autumn of 1938, Elser, a carpenter, decided to kill Hitler on his own. For a year he worked in secret, night after night, to build a bomb and plant it in a Munich beer hall where the Führer was due to speak on November 8, 1939. The device went off exactly on schedule, killing around ten people and wounding dozens more. Hitler had left the building minutes earlier.

Elser was already on his way to the Swiss border, 200 kilometers away, taking no particular care to hide his tracks. He was stopped and searched, and he broke almost at once. His interrogators then tried, largely without success, to understand how one man had planned and nearly carried out, entirely alone, what history's more famous plotters could not.

For decades Elser was pushed to the margins, as the officers' conspiracy of July 1944 came to stand for German resistance to Nazism. This book puts him back at the center. A lone carpenter, acting on his own conviction, came closer to killing Hitler than any other single person, years before the generals tried and failed.

Georg Elser: The Man Who Tried to Blow Up Hitler

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