Today is the 100th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, when Hitler made his first attempt to get power in Germany — an anniversary he liked to mark each year with a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller, at which in 1939 someone tried but sadly failed to assassinate him.
The attempted coup in 1923 saw him imprisoned for five years — which unfortunately gave him to write (or at least dictate, which is ironic) his unreadable, racist burblings Mein Kampf — and after he got out he revisited the site annually to rant antisemitically for a couple of hours.
By 1939, Georg Elser had decided (not unreasonably) that the man needed to die, so spent weeks hollowing out a cavity in a pillar in the hall and filling it with explosives. Then, he set a timer for 9.30pm on the night of 8 November 1939.
Unfortunately, a heavy fog was forecast, which meant Hitler wouldn’t have been able to fly back from Munich to Berlin the next morning, so he decided to cut the speech short (and only rant for an hour) and go back on the train that night.
He was safely (well, 13 minutes) out of the way when the thing went off, leaving the beer hall looking like this, and killing seven Nazis — and a waitress.
According to historian Hellmut Haasis, in his book Bombing Hitler — the story of the man who almost assassinated the Führer, the incident didn’t exactly dent the man’s self-belief.
(Mind you, people of this kind don’t tend to find that anything does undermine their faith in their own magnificence. Not that there are any contemporary parallels with people who have tried to overthrow democracy, and are facing legal repercussions but still defiant. Obviously.)
Famously, of course, this wasn’t the only time Hitler nearly died. There was the 1944 assassination attempt they made the Tom Cruise movie about, and — perhaps even more unluckily — he got hit by a car in 1931, which was still before he’d had a chance to do too much damage
A 19-year-old English student living in Munich, John Scott-Ellis, was driving his relatively new car through the city one day when he made sadly only slight contact with a man crossing the road. As The Oldie put it: “apologies were made and the two shook hands.”
As he drove away, Scott-Ellis’s passenger told him, ‘Don’t you know you just knocked down Adolf Hitler?’
Three years later, Scott-Ellis even reintroduced himself to Hitler at the opera and
he was quite charming to me.
In rather less verifiable news, even though it supposedly happened on this day only 30 years ago, a man called Salvatore Chirilino may have found a four-leaf clover and… promptly plummeted to his doom off a 150-foot cliff.
The story turns up in Sam Jordison’s not entirely reliable Annus Horribilis — 365 tales of comic misfortune (although to be fair to him, he does put a big caveat at the beginning of the book).
It also made The Fortean Times Book Of Life’s Losers in 1996:
…and this website says it was reported in the Mirror on 20 November 1992, so we can (possibly) say that something like was reported somewhere, at some point, that (maybe) it was 8 November 1992, and (perhaps) had some truth in it.
Oh and also, of course, it’s the 96th anniversary of the birth of Ken Dodd, which means it’s time to remind ourselves of the fibreglass penguin ‘resembling’ him which was once put up in Liverpool:
Yes, this is all rather nasty, isn’t it? Thankfully, it’s also the sixth anniversary of this tweet:
