Interrogations
The head of the perpetrator commission Franz Josef Huber first interrogated Georg Elser on November 12, 1939, after he had been held in Munich for several days, beaten, and mistreated on multiple occasions. The Gestapo now knew that the perpetrator had worked on his knees. Huber discovered that Elser’s knee had been inflamed since October 1939. When he confronted him with this fact, Elser made a detailed confession during the night of November 13, 1939. The investigating officers were soon convinced that Elser had acted on his own. Georg Elser was taken to Berlin shortly after his confession, and again interrogated at length there between November 19 and 23, 1939.
The Nazi leadership appeared not to trust the results of the investigation, and new criminal investigators took over the interrogations, which lasted up to 15 hours. The historian Lothar Gruchmann found the records of these sessions in the Reich Justice Ministry files in the 1960s. To this day, these are the most important source on Georg Elser’s thoughts and actions. In his Berlin interrogations, Elser not only explains the circumstances of his assassination attempt in detail. The records also show Elser’s motives and the reasons for his responsible decision.
The Gestapo photo showing Elser clean-shaven was not published in the press but attached to a Gestapo investigation request sent to the Swiss police force to identify him. Nor were the Gestapo photos of Georg Elser with obvious signs of torture around his left eye published by the press, but forwarded to the Swiss police force for investigative purposes.
